Monthly Archives: March 2009

Watched Watchmen last Wednesday with some friends. I liked the movie, it had an interesting story, which was quite a bit different from “normal” superhero movies. The superheroes aren’t just goody-good people, but also have their dark sides. Even more so than “emo Spiderman” and Wolverine. By the way, besides Dr. Manhattan (the blue guy who is nude for most of the movie), none of the superheroes have any actual superpowers. They’re all Batman, so to say.

For those of you who doesn’t know: Watchmen is a movie based on a comic book written by Alan Moore. Some other comics that Alan Moore wrote and that became movies, are V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Not that I’ve read any of those comics, I just looked this all up on the internet… But anyhows, I’ve read that the Watchmen movie is a reasonably faithful adaption of the comic book, which is part of the reason why it’s quite a good movie. Rather than some Hollywoodified movie (like the mentioned LXG movie). Do however note that this movie contains some sex scenes and strong violence scenes. If you can stomach that, and can stand almost 3 hours of movie watching, you might want to have a look at this movie. Although I guess it’s still mostly a guys’ movie.

On Friday I went to watch (well, more like listen) to the Play! Video Game Symphony at Ekeberghallen in Oslo. I ended up going by myself, but it was still a great experience! Just the Chrono Chross/Chrono Trigger medley and the One-Winged Angel grand finale was worth the whole trip, even though there were still a few songs from games that I haven’t played (and thus haven’t heard the songs much before). They also had someone dressed up as Mario, Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot. Didn’t feel up to taking photos with them, but it was fun seeing other people take photos with them.

The embedded video is of the Opening Fanfare that Nobuo Uematsu composed specially for the Play! Video Game Symphony. The video was apparently recorded in Stockholm, where they were playing the day before they played in Oslo. The music they played this time was, from memory (I’m sure I forgot some songs, but these are the ones I remember, in roughly the correct order. Youtube playlist):

1. Opening/Intro fanfare
2. Mario medley
3. Battlefield
4. Sonic medley
5. Chronicles of Riddick
6. Oblivion
7. Chrono Chross/Chrono Trigger medley
8. Kingdom Hearts medley
9. Commodore 64 medley
10. Zelda medley
11. Castlevania suite
12. Guild Wars
13. One-Winged Angel

(Edit: Forgot the Kingdom Hearts medley! Added it to the YouTube playlist too.)

One not so great thing about this was that the organization of the concert was pretty horrible. For one thing there was supposed to be buses from centrum to the concert. But nobody had given any information about the buses beforehand, so most people ended up taking the public bus, which got pretty full. (I was lucky enough to get a seat.) Also the concert hall didn’t open an hour before it started, as the ticket stated. It ended up becoming a huge queue outside Ekeberghallen, which didn’t start moving before 8 o’clock, well after the concert was supposed to start. It hadn’t started yet of course, it was apparently delayed. Also, even though there were two different ticket prices, everybody could just sit anywhere, so those who paid for the more expensive ticket must’ve felt ripped off… (I bought the cheaper ticket though.) We did get to go with the organized buses back to Oslo centrum though, although I wasn’t quick enough to get on any of the three buses on their first trip, so I had to wait outside untill one of the buses got back. I managed to get in on the first bus on the second trip it took. Since there were no public buses going from Ekeberghallen, I’m grateful that they at least had buses going back, in any case…

Also, I’ve been looking at apartments lately. Might buy one. Eventually.

I was in Stavanger last weekend to attend to the ceremony for Stavanger to become an official church (not sure if it’s the exact correct wording, but, uh, something.) Also visited a few friends there. It was nice! I posted a few photos of the ceremony at http://blog.sccc.no, but I actually never took any photos when I was with my friends… ah well. Elisa’s (and John’s and Janey’s and Cecilie’s and their parents’) house in Stavanger has gotten quite nice now, I believe the first and second floor is finished now? Most of the work left is in the basement, which we didn’t visit this time. John was apparently in London when we were there. Oh, also I met Henrik and Thomas.

Ah, I recently started using Feedly, which is a Firefox addon which works as a frontend for Google Reader. I’ve been using Google Reader for a while to keep an eye on various news sites, without actually having to visit each site. But while Google Reader just lists the articles with their titles and eventually a short summary, the interface in Feedly greatly improves on the usability by showing the news feeds in various ways. You can just list the news articles like Google Reader, but you can also show them magazine style with the title, summary and a photo from the article (if any), and you can also show a grid of just the photos, then move the mouse over articles to read the title, and clicking on them to show the full summary.

The drawback is that many Norwegian newspapers don’t have photos in their RSS feeds, but I found that NRK and TV2 have it, I’m using those now instead, as you can see in the screenshot. I’ve also recently added my friends’ blogs in Google Reader, so it’s easier to see when they post new blogposts. Works great! But not many of my friends actually have blogs, or not that I know of, or that is updated in the last, say, year or so.

I’ve played a new board game called Agricola two times now. I think I really liked this game, although it’s quite tiresome to plan so much ahead! Basically you play a family in some farm, and there are lots of things you need to acquire before the end of the game, in order not to get minus points and also to get higher score at all. Some examples are grain, vegetables, sheep and cattle, but also resources like stone, wood and others in order to build upgrades to your farm. But the number of turns you can take is actually quite limited, and also each action can only be done by one player each turn, so if you want to do something specific, like sowing grain and vegetables in your field, you’ll have to make sure you do it before someone else does it. We plan to play it at the church with the youth group this Sunday. It’ll be fun. I hope.

Now for something completely random: The many visions of Johan!

Okita Sougo vision	Disney Digital 3D vision	Disneyland HK 3D vision	Sunglasses vision	Dantat vision	Owlovision