Having Fun
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention took place in Helsinki and seems to have had the second-highest attendance ever: more than 7000 people in the Messukeskus convention centre, 2000 of whom had (like myself) never attended a WorldCon before. There were 250 programme items only on the Friday between 10 am and 10 pm, so there is no way that I'll be able to tell you everything that went on. (Check out the programme here.) Instead I'll tell you the bits I enjoyed the most, plus some observations.
The WorldCon crowd was incredibly diverse even if you disregarded the cosplayers. Men and women…
Abisko national park is in the mountains of extreme northern Sweden, Sámi country, reindeer country, where half of the year is lit by constant sun and the other half is frigid darkness and aurorae.
Getting there takes 17½ hours by train from Stockholm Central. There's a sleeper train with no changes, so if you only count time when you're conscious, the trip takes 10 hours. You can fly to Arlanda airport and get right onto this train without making the detour into Stockholm. And the trail head is next to the platform when you get off.
Some friends and I went up hiking over the Mid-summer…
Edmund de Waal at Artipelag
It's been a fun weekend! Here's what I did.
Watched Jrette's dance show, snappy and lively!
Inspired by Kate Feluś's fine recent book Secret Life of the Georgian Garden, I made syllabub (whipped cream with lemon juice & rind, wine, sugar and a dash of grand marnier), and ate it while checking on the (encouraging) progress of our three tiny rose bushes.
Logged nine geocaches and failed to find two. One hadn't been visited in the past nine months and contained no less than three travel bugs that had been languishing there. I brought them along and placed each…
Space Whale
The past two weekends were a lot of fun.
The Royal Technical College's orchestra and several combined student choirs from Sweden and Finland performed Giuseppe Verdi's 1874 Requiem, an intricate and operatic farewell to fellow composer Gioachino Rossini and poet Alessandro Manzoni.
Hallwyl House: carving in the doorway between the ladies' drawing room and the Golden Salon.
Gig with King Khan and the Shrines. Imagine a tall, psychedelic, semi-nude, portly, Canadian Wilson Pickett of Indian extraction belting out soul rock with a band consisting of extremely enthusiastic…
One of four grotesque male faces on a 17th century object in the Tre Kronor castle museum. The piece looks like a little baptismal font, but the label says "possibly a kitchen mortar". Neither function seems likely.
Had some quality fun this past weekend.
Dinner at Tbilisis Hörna, a Georgian + Greek + Italian restaurant. Service was slow and unsynched but the food was great. The deep green tarragon soda in a bottle with almost exclusively Georgian script on the labels added to the sense of not being anywhere near Stockholm.
Gig at the Globe Arena's annexe with psychedelic Australian…
New Thing -- great Stockholm funk band!
Here's what I did for fun this weekend.
Went to local bands night at Göta Källare (where I saw the Super Furry Animals and the Soundtrack Of Our Lives back in the day), saw two excellent acts: Slow Fat play soul and New Thing play funk.
Went for a long bike ride with my wife, had ice cream, logged three geocaches.
Played Glory to Rome with friends in the Octagonal Sauna because of the endless kitchen renovation at my place.
Started Iain Banks's 1986 novel The Bridge.
What did you do, Dear Reader?
Here's what I wrote in 2009 about weekend fun.
The way I like to lead my life is basically Epicurean: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as absence of bodily pain through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires." I live for fun. But I try to emphasise the social side of my modest pleasures: I like to have fun together with people I love, not at the expense of others. Call it the Golden Rule.
Now, my work is largely fun, but still I distinguish between work-…
The other day somebody hid a geocache a short bike ride from my house at a spot where, I now know, an orienteering-themed fraternal order was founded in 1930. Today I rode out and became the second person to log the cache. And coming home I realised it was my 800th find since I started 8 years ago!
My geocaching stats reveal a hobby that starts as an obsession and mellows out into an on-and-off thing.
Finds no 1-100 took 2 months.
101-200 took 8 months (because of winter).
201-300 took 3 months.
301-400 took 4 months.
401-500 took 7 months.
501-600 took 1 year.
601-700 took c. 2½ years.
701-…
Spent Friday though Sunday in London with Junior and his buddy, both 14. My original plan had been to find a gaming convention with both a video game track and a boardgame track. But failing that, I got tickets for the Eurogamer Expo at the Earls Court Convention Centre in London, which is all video games. My once substantial interest in such has long evaporated, but I kept the Saturday free for other activities.
In order to be sure to get the boys into the fair I had to buy a ticket for myself as well, and I checked out the place without finding anything that caught my interest. It was all…
My dad's a member of a yacht club in order to have sheltered jetty space for his motorboat. It's not a fancy affair, most of the boats being small and decades old. But many of them are sailboats, and for the past ten years the club has been organising family-oriented mini races in the evenings. A few weeks ago they were a guy short on a boat where my dad is a sometime crew member, so he asked me if I wanted to come along. I sailed dinghies as a kid, so I know the basics.
My first race was on a rainy evening. I got wet and I got cold and I still enjoyed it. The second race was on a lovely…
Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom's glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I read:
Invented Knowledge. False history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Ronald H. Fritze 2009. One amazing essay covers the scifi con-man religion Nation of Islam. Did you know that Louis Farrakhan started out as a calypso singer, and that George Clinton's Mothership was a concept borrowed from NoI mythology?
Falling Free. Lois McMaster Bujold 1988. Charming fast-paced scifi. Four-armed…
Played the zombie movie boardgame Last Night On Earth and Airlines Europe, both very enjoyable.
Had a party where I couldn't understand what anybody said since they spoke Mandarin, but I was happy being Grillmeister, waitor and dishwasher.
Logged five geocaches, which involved cycling around, climbing a tree and faffing about in the woods north of Älta. Saw the traces of a recent forest fire and found an abandoned camp used by homeless substance abusers (note the toothpaste and beer cans).
And you, Dear Reader?
I had some bad news about two Boomer dudes that I know and like(d): one died of lung cancer the other day, and the other was diagnosed with leukemia. But apart from that I had a pretty good weekend:
Played Eclipse again, got royally whipped.
Gave a talk and did some debating at a skeptics' event in Eskilstuna, met loads of friendly people, all while wearing a suit and tie because I was heading directly to the following do afterwards.
Celebrated my oldest friend's 40th birthday. Met lots of surprising greying 40-y-o versions of his friends that I haven't seen much since leaving the Tolkien…
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently ranked #7 on Boardgame Geek. It's about interstellar colonialism: good fun, very neatly designed, and has a lot of inherent replayability. I look forward to future games. Guess which player ended up way ahead of the cluster of three stubble-chinned losers at the end...
Cycled in brisk & sunny weather for a second attempt at two recalcitrant geocaches. Found nada. How the great have fallen.
Had…
Been a while since I wrote one of these. Here's what I did for fun this past weekend.
Attended an afternoon scifi mini-convention at the Tech Museum, organised by my dear old Tolkien Society buddy and gaming group regular Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf. I heard good talks by journalist Jörgen Städje, scifi scholar Dr. Jerry Määttä, and gaming giants cum fantasy novelists Erik Granström and Anders Blixt. And I gave a talk of my own on the prevalence of time-travel evidence in the archaeological record.
Played Settlers of Catan and Qwirkle. I rarely get Settlers to the table because unlike me…
Sweden is shaped like a ski, and people live mainly in the southern quarter, but in the other three-quarters there are many skiing resorts. I've been going there every few years since I was three. I'm not a competitive or particularly elegant down-hill skier, but I enjoy it and I can get down all kinds of slopes and I rarely fall.
In recent years my wife and I have taken the kids to one of the country's southernmost skiing resorts, simply because if one of you is going to spend most of their time on the kiddy slope with a neophyte, then there is little reason to drive for seven hours one way…
Celebrated 100th birthday of my mom's aunt, a sprightly and clear-minded lady who likes conversation and hugs and has no problem recognising her niece's kids who rarely visit.
Attended concert with six kids' choirs (including Juniorette's). One of the choirs had five boys, the others <=1.
House-warming party at my buddy Moomin's new place. Very happy to see the guy get a real home where he can entertain his friends instead of the dusty broom closet he slept in for so many years.
Watched the hit musical version of Kipling's Jungle Book at the Stockholm City Theatre. Lots of references to…
Watched most of the 1984 animated Miyazaki feature film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on DVD. Like others of his I've seen before, it's visually stunning and has a pretty pointless story.
Sat outdoors and read, probably for the last time this year barring trips south.
Went to a friend's birthday party, helped cook.
Watched Inception on the big screen. Good movie!
Played my twelfth game of Agricola and managed to win for the first time.
And you, Dear Reader?
September unexpectedly turned warm and sunny. I'm a little under the weather and so can't do anything very energetic. But reading a review copy of a new geology book for the blog in my yard, in the sun, with my dressing gown down around my midriff isn't too bad.
Photo by Junior.
Had breakfast guests: a beautifully pregnant old friend and our old boss/buddy came at ten and I cooked us all a full English. Everybody who's into the Gustavian / Georgian era and reads Scandy, read Kristina Ekero Eriksson's new popular biography of Märta Helena Reenstierna, the Lady of Ãrsta! I read it in manuscript, and I loved it.
Played Lost Cities against my wife who is getting worrisomely good at it, and Puerto Rico and Space Alert against gamer buddies. The latter game is highly unusual. It's a cooperation game played against the clock, with a twist I've never seen before: it…