I went through my X: drive today in search of old screenshots of Might and Magic games (don’t ask), and I found these hilarious newspaper clippings. Thoughtful as I am I thought I’d share them with you:

Ironically, if line six is to be disregarded then the instructions for how to read the notice should be disregarded too. I smell a paradox.

Sooty is a legend. He’s become part of my standard repertoire of drunken anecdotes. “He slept for two days” is just the icing on the cake. But no matter how funny Sooty is, I found something even better:

Sweet mother of the f-word, I can’t stop laughing at that. It has to be a fake…but if it isn’t, it’s the best captioned picture ever.

I saw this thread on Indiegamer.com about Antair Games’ most prestigious Indie Bake Off 2008 competition, and I simply had to post a picture of my delicious Pac-Man saffron buns I baked a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t planning on entering the competition per se, but Gavin from Antair Games just told me that the pic was added anyway…despite its blatant disregard for competition rules! (He didn’t say the last part explicitly, but I can tell!)

It’s been a semi-annual tradition for me to make these every year around December 13. It’s my own particular way of celebrating Saint Lucy’s Day. Normally the traditional saffron buns look like this, but I prefer my geeky buns:

As you can see, my Pac-Men are a little darker and maybe not quite as yellow. I blame that on two things: my covering the buns just a tad excessively in eggs…and the fact that I used some strange unlabeled saffron that I bought in Tunisia. I think it was saffron at least…

Now go check out the other entries!

2008 has been a stagnant year for Internet browsing. I’ve pretty much kept to my old favorites, never straying far from the well-trodden path of news sites, Tom’s hardware, Kotaku, xkcd, etc etc. But amidst the stagnation there have been a few golden nuggets; a few new websites that I have discovered. Not many, mind you – I had to struggle to come up with a top 5 list that anyone would find interesting. Some of the sites I have discovered in 2008 have been sites that everyone else has used and forgotten all about already, such as Facebook and StumbleUpon. I won’t even bother mentioning those; I don’t want to appear a totally inbred and pathetic loser.

Well then… Without further ado, here is the Cynical Stuff list of:

Top 5 New Sites of 2008
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5: The Minus World

This humor site is filled with irreverent parodies and references to video games. I’m not a rabid fan but there are some brilliant pieces like the Grand Theft Auto IV Activity Book For Kids. Absolutely hilarious at its best; pretty meh at its worst. Definitely worth checking out regularily, though.

4: GameProducer.net

Juuso is an indie game developer/entrepreneur with an interesting blog and forums that I – unfortunately – haven’t spent much time in lately. I used to check both the blog and the forums regularly before my recent minor hiatus from the online world; I think it’s time to re-discover this newly discovered site soon.

3: Passive Aggressive Notes

What can I say? I’m a sucker for ridiculous humor pages filled with short, quick and funny things to check out. Notes with passive aggressive messages are funny – and a whole collection of them is even more so.

I’m not so good at writing these kinds of subtle notes, myself; the only time I’ve left a note in the laundry room, it was a death threat.

2: The Official King’s Bounty Forums

King’s Bounty is the best game of 2008, and there’s nothing you can say that can make me change my mind! Play the game, read the forums! Do it, now!

Finally… It’s time for number one… What could it be?! What could it be?!?!!

1: LOLCats

I don’t think there’s a single site I’ve spent so much time at in 2008 as LOLCats. I can’t help it – I adore the kitties, and I love the captions. Yes, still! This is a fad that’ll never grow old for me. I squeal like a little puppy when I see those adorable pics, and every day I hope and wish that there’ll be a new hedgehog or squirrel picture along with the normal kittens.

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Note that this is a list of sites that are new to me in 2008. I don’t care if you knew the webmaster when his site was still indie and hardcore back in 2005, before he got corrupted by fame. The term new is a pluralistic and highly relative concept after all, wouldn’t you agree?

Christmas time is here, by golly! (Disapproval would be folly / Deck the halls with hunks of holly / etc etc.) This means that lists are starting to pop up everywhere. “Best games of 2008,” “Most ridiculous hairdo of 2008,” “Top STDs of 2008″ and so on. Cynical Stuff can’t be any worse, so here’s my own incredibly well-researched and non-biased list. I couldn’t find any suitable 2008 theme, though, so I went for:

Top 10 Songs Under One Minute

My criteria are as follows:

• Only reasonably well-known songs.
• No jingles or theme songs. This means that I had to remove the Dethklok theme from my list, unfortunately.
• The length of the track as it appears in an album absolutely must be under 1:00. This excludes a lot of good material at e.g. 1:05 and 1:15, but c’est la vie.
• No interviews/sketches/speeches/thematic intros.

Enough already; let’s get to it! Click the links for YouTube links to the different songs.

10 – Dead Kennedys – A Child And His Lawnmower

This is a good ol’ punk song. I’ve never been a big fan of DK but the humor is excellent and the style is interesting. Not worth more than a 10th place here, though.

9 – The Misfits – Demonomania

If I were a cynic I’d say that this song is a good example of The Misfits’ music since many songs sound pretty similar. Good thing I’m not, eh?

8 – Bad Religion – 52 Seconds

Bad Religion rocks! Too bad that this song is rather dull; it only gets as high as an 8th place because it’s a Bad Religion song.

7 – Stormtroopers of Death – What’s That Noise

Okay, okay! This song is pretty much only speech with some jingle-like riffs. But I can’t leave it out!

6 – Stormtroopers of Death – Fuck The Middle-East

Well, I can’t agree with the message of the song. But it’s damn catchy and a good song despite its length of less than half a minute!

5 – Flogging Molly – The Wrong Company

A capella songs count. And that’s a good thing – otherwise this funny and pleasant song wouldn’t have made the list. To tell the truth I had never bothered listening much to it before I compiled this list.

4 – Stormtroopers of Death – Ballad of Jimi Hendrix

There are dozens of S.O.D “Ballad of” songs I could have chosen, but I selected this one because it’s the first one I heard. Awesomeness!

3 – NOFX – Murder The Government

This video misses the first couple of words. If you’re wondering, the complete first line is “I wanna see the constitution burn.” Ah, nostalgia!

2 – NOFX – Monosyllabic Girl

This is an extremely cute and catchy song by NOFX, the masters of short melodic punk songs. Sure, a lot of metal bands do the whole “growl growl grind grind” song-in-ten-seconds thing but that’s not a proper song in my view.

Now onto number one…

1 – Blink 182 – Happy Holidays You Bastard

Good band! Good song! I’m not sure if it’s truly better than the NOFX songs but given the end-of-year theme in this post I couldn’t let it slip any lower.

There are other top 10 short songs lists around (such as this one featuring not a single song I’ve ever heard of) but I can guarantee that my list is the best! Or at least very good! Or pretty nice, at the very least! Or possibly decent. Maybe just a little bit crap. It might be rather horrible, come to think of it…

For those of you who haven’t kept up with the important events of the world lately, a game called King’s Bounty: The Legend has been released. It’s not only the best game of 2008 according to my very scientific measure – it’s the best game I’ve played for years! I’m currenty on my second play-through; normally I spend an hour or two trying out a game, but this incredibly addictive game has kept me occupied for ~30 + ~35 hours! Yes, that’s an immense amount of time. It could explain my lack of blogging of late, and the slow progress on Wildhollow.

The reason I’m playing the game through twice is twofold:

1. I played it on normal difficulty first, so I have to play it on hard as well – to see how much harder the tactical battles are.
2. It’s a bloody brilliant game!

King’s Bounty: The Legend is the spiritual successor to the old 1990 game King’s Bounty. I’m saying spiritual since it quite obviously has nothing to do with the original aside from some superficial details. Like the name. And the fact that it’s a tactical strategy RPG. As much as I love the original I must say that it never captivated me to the same degree that KB:TL has stolen my spare time, my free will and my soul.

Why is KB:TL so good, then? Read this Rock, Paper, Shotgun article and tell me that you don’t want to play the game! But, aside from all the general weirdness and strange Russian humor, it’s simply an amazingly good game. You have to play just another battle. You have to see just where the next quest will lead you. You have to collect just another magic rune. The first time I played the game I think I played for 16 hours straight! I haven’t done that since I was a wee whippersnapper!

If you decide to play the game (and you should) I have some sage advice:

• Start playing as a paladin.  Paladins are cool: they have good leadership (which enables you to have large armies) and good magic as well. They also start with the resurrection spell which will help you conserve armies. Later you may want to play mage or warrior too; the playing styles are pretty different and offers varied experiences. (After I’ve finished the game on hard with a mage I’m going for an impossible game with a warrior.)
• Don’t worry too much about money if you start at a lower (below hard) difficulty level. You will have more than a cool million gold pieces to spare toward the end of the game either way. Unless you plain suck.
• People say that you shouldn’t travel too much between continents because it costs game time. They say that you should learn how to play with the armies available on each continent instead. I say screw that: if you find a good army setup that works, play with it until something better comes along! If it means riding the boat a few times too many – so what! It’s just affecting your end game score.
• But on the other hand, if you’re interested in getting a good score you should not only follow the advice above – you should also learn how to not lose any armies in battles. (It’s entirely possible to complete the entire game without losing a single army, but it’s ludicrously time demanding.)
• Complete the king’s quests quickly! And when you acquire the rage box, get the first two rage spirits quickly! You’ll thank me later.
• You can sneak around! You don’t have to fight everything, and it’s often quite worthwhile to grab all goodies before you start slaughtering polar bears and dwarves.
• Read the official forums. There are some great hints there, and also inspiration for different ways to play the game. Not to mention some good ol’ fashioned Internet drama now and then.

Order King’s Bounty: The Legend now and thank me later! Or, as it may be, curse me for stealing your precious time. See if you can match my best accomplishment so far: defeating Karador at level 20 on hard. (It’s nothing special, but it wasn’t easy.)

Now sod off. I have to gain a few levels before I can tackle Haas’ Labyrinth and finally get to the last area of the game. Again.

In all of Linköping there is just one tea store that sells cactus tea. There used to be at least three stores where I could get nicely flavoured cactus tea, but there’s just one decent place left. And I’m talking about the tea shop downtown; I know that there’s a store in Tornby that sells something they call cactus tea, but that’s just perfumed rubbish.

After I stocked up on the good kind the other day I browsed the teapots in the store, and found something really curious:

This picture doesn’t really convey the full extent of the pot’s strangeness. I really don’t see the point of this design – it looks like the shunned lovechild of a hash pipe and a teapot. In fact, I have a nagging suspicion that it would be possible to use this to smoke various things if one did some minor modifications. I’m sure there are more knowledgeable people than me who have tried it already.

I saw another funny thing yesterday when I went to the bathroom at work:

My useless cell cam couldn’t take a sharp enough picture, and it’s in Swedish anyway, so I’ll provide a loose translation:

Toilet Quiz

Q: How many engineers does it take to change an empty toilet paper roll?
A: Apparently many since it never happens here.

Q: What IQ is required to know the difference between a urinal and a toilet?
A: (Can’t remember exactly; something to the effect of “must be pretty high ’cause you people pee on the seat”.)

Tie breaker: What’s the brush in the corner used for?

Yes yes, typical dull humour that nagging bitches find amusing. (Okay, I did smile a little as well.) The really funny part is that someone wrote a reply to the last question:

When there’s no toilet paper left.

Ka-ching!

As a wee kiddo I used to play a lot of adventure games. First text adventures like Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure, and old Infocom classics. Then I got hold of Maniac Mansion for the C64, and I was completely hooked on graphical adventure games. Prior to playing that game I had only stayed up all night reading books (ah, Dumas, how your stories caused me to lose my well-needed beauty sleep!), but I vividly recall being physically unable to quit playing Maniac Mansion. The clock struck midnight, and I desperately tried to escape the prison. The clock struck 2 AM and found me finally figuring out that the rusty key opened the car’s trunk. And so on.

After that point, having to write text in an adventure game seemed like a giant step backwards to me. That’s probably why I never was a big fan of the Sierra adventure games. I’ve played my fair share of King’s, Police and Space Quest, but they never captivated me the same way that Lucasarts did with their magnificent opii. (Did you know that I’m trying to be ironic with my misuse of the word opii, and that the plural of opus is actually opuses or opera? And did you know that opii is the genitive form of opium in singular? Sweet mother of crap, I’m pretentious today!)

Still, I tried to enjoy Quest for Glory (or Hero’s Quest as I knew it) because I loved the idea of mixing an RPG with an adventure game. I never got very far, though; it was too cumbersome to type everything. So my fascination with the QfG series died in its cradle.

Boy, did I miss out.

Check this out. One guy is attempting to play all Quest for Glory games completely through, and is documenting it all on YouTube. (This is the very first one; he has over a hundred more clips.)

This has to be one of the coolest things ever. Evah! It’s thanks to his efforts that I’m rediscovering the QfG games, and its wonderfully witty punny humour. I don’t really do puns myself but I thoroughly appreciate reading the plethora of witticisms in the Quest games. “I forgot my Visa in the desert.” “We don’t take Dinar’s Club here.” …Just awful. In an awesome way.

So, I’ve been away for two weeks on a trip to Taiwan and Singapore, and it was pretty awesome. Nothing spectacular happened, but on the other hand I think I’m pretty happy that I didn’t get lost in the mountains or robbed or anything like that; a nice relaxed trip can also be fun. I won’t bore you with transcripts of the days upon days of meetings (the small fact that I’d be breaking all kinds of NDAs has nothing to do with it at all, of course), so I’ll jump right into the photos.

Oh, and just so you know: these were taken with my awful cell phone cam since my proper digital camera was supposed to be used at another occasion. (But of course it never did get used, so I had to make do with a crappy camera while the nice little Exilim thingie was lying unused and unloved at home! Boo-hoo!)

The proper way to start every trip… Beer at Arlanda airport.

I absolutely hate seafood, so I had a hard time keeping things in my stomach while a couple of colleagues ate things like this in Taiwan. This is where the “fear and loathing” part comes in.

Here’s where I’d place some nice images of Taipei 101, the totally sweet and amazingly high skyscraper located in Taipei. But – of course – I got no good images at all. I’ll just tell you that it was an amazing experience to look out over the city from the ~90th floor. I got the strongest urge to go “I crush your head, tiny humans! I crush your whole car! Crush crush! I crush your building, puny ground-dweller!”

Let’s go on to Singapore instead, since I’ve already reported on a trip to Taiwan last year.

No trip to Singapore is complete without a visit to the Long Bar, home of the Singapore Sling. I hadn’t heard the stories about the peanuts on the floor, so my initial reaction upon sitting down was “oh man! we got a really dirty table!” …Don’t know what I mean about the peanuts? Use the almighty Google!

After a meeting with a company I won’t name (but oh dang, there’s most of the logo present in the pic), we got to try their F1 simulator. Apparently they’re sponsoring a Grand Prix that will be held in Singapore in September. Let me tell you, I am not a good race car driver. This was way harder than Gran Turismo 3!

We got some nice sightseeing done a couple of the days. Singapore really has some amazing sights. To the left you have the parliament, and to the right you have a spacey building close to Sim Lim Square – the place where you can literally drown in electronics.

Speaking of drowning, I wouldn’t want to swim in this… Such a clean city, but that water…

I just had to have a picture of the “no durians” sign. Awesome. I still haven’t seen one of those fruits, but I smelled it now and then. Pretty potent stench, that!

What? That word you keep using, I don’t think it means what you think it means. Or did they really have the guts to shut down a street in order to have some kids with laptops hack a bank or something? Or am I only biased about the use of the word “hacking”?

Spontaneous comments about the trip:

• I wish I had gone when there wasn’t a rainy season.
• Frog tastes like tiny tiny chicken.
• Taiwan is a wonderous mix of high tech and down-to-earth Chinese.
• Taipei 101 is a must-see for all visitors.
• Night market means lots of food stands and even more stands filled with cheap copies of known brands.
• I have never seen such a clean city as Singapore.
• Clarke Quay is awesome, but it’s nigh on impossible to find a table at that microbrewery place on a Friday night.
• I will never ever break the law in Singapore. Oh, darn – I already did! I smuggled chewing gum into the country.
• Alcohol is ridiculously expensive in Singapore.
• And speaking of alcohol: when you order a White Russian in Singapore, it will be layered with the Kahlua at the bottom. Barbarians!

Once upon a time I tried to make extensive travel posts every time I travelled abroad, but lately I’ve been rather…lazy. I went on vacation to Greece and didn’t bother to post about it. I went on a business trip to Germany and didn’t bother to post about it. Now I’ll be going on a business trip to Taiwan and Singapore in the coming weeks, and I’ll do my darnest best to post some pictures from that one at least!

Lovely picture that’s definitely not mine.

Does anyone have hints about what to do while abroad? I’ll have at least a couple of days to spare in both places; I’ve received a few suggestions concerning shopping and party areas in Singapore, but I have no idea what I can do in Taiwan. My last (and only) visit to Taipei was filled with work and more work, so I didn’t have time to look for anything fun. If you have any suggestions for either Taiwan or Singapore – leave a comment!

And speaking of shopping… What should I buy aside from the obvious things like a cheap MP3 player or two? Does anyone know of cool and/or weird things available in either place? Things that one simply cannot miss?

For a long time at work I’ve been moaning about getting to travel more. Apparently it paid off – I get to go on a two-week trip to Asia now, and my new assignment after a re-organization is going to be Field Applications Engineer. I have high hopes for adding more countries to my “been-there-done-that” list during the next year.

These last years I have been lamenting the fact that I’m getting too old for behaving like an uncouth youth. Slowly but inexorably I’ve cut down on my drinking, partying and general weird behaviour…but something inside me misses the good old days. I miss hitch-hiking to festivals to watch strange punk bands no one else cares about, meeting strange people and experiencing random everyday adventures. But lo and behold! Now it seems like I might get a chance to indulge myself in some good ol’ misbehaviour again: West Coast Riot is an upcoming festival in Gothenburg, and it features the best lineup I’ve seen so far in 2008!

Just look at the bands…

• NOFX
• Bad Religion
• Flogging Molly
• Lagwagon
• Moderat likvidation
• De lyckliga kompisarna
• No Fun At All
• Randy
• And so on…

I am aware that you might be culturally handicapped and unaware of the greatness of the latter four Swedish bands, but I trust that everyone has heard of NOFX, Bad Religion and Flogging Molly at least. Those three are enough to make me feel hot and bothered; the rest is a great bonus.

Feel like tagging along? The problem right now is that it’s been half a decade since I last knew people I could convince to come with me on events like this. I don’t fancy the idea of being the old bastard in a crowd of pretentious little 16-year-old punks, but trust me: even if I have to go alone, I am definitely attending this festival!

I think…