Weekend Fun

Enjoying Pølser & soft-ice in the sunny harbour of Stavern near Larvik, Norway, while listening to myself on the radio.

I presented a paper at a conference in Oxford, which was at least partly among friends and some future colleagues and went well; then over the next 24 hours or so found two excellent pubs, one excellent bed-and-breakfast place and perhaps a place to live; waiting on landlady's decision now... Useful trip!

Immo, always good to listen to one's inner voice.

Jon, congrats! Good start in your new town.

We got introduced to a variant on D&D 4e. It was okay; but it wasn't D&D. If we think of it as being some completely other RPG, with no continuity or identity with D&D, I guess we can deal with it.

Still, any module that requires us to go into a manifestly evil temple, with its suspiciously-large attendant cemetary, and with zombies known to be travelling in swarms, at night.... I've never run a character dumb enough to do that before!

I cooked us all a full English.

Yeah, properly prepared, English long pig is rather tasty. Tends towards being fatty/greasy. They also tend to be self-marinating in a variety of alcoholic mixes (there's a wide selection, albeit I recommend avoiding the lagered variety).

I spent the weekend at a conference in Kobe, the last weekend on the tail-end of a conference in Paris and on the 12-hour flight back home. The weekend before that was spent flying _to_ Paris and preparing my presentation. The weekend before that I did some long-running simulations and analysis so I'd have some actual data to show for the Kobe conference this weekend.

I have heard of the concept of free weekends; it seems intriguing and some day I may be able to try it out.

Got hold of Stieg Larsson's Milennium trilogy and have plowed through it - am about 20% through the third one. Do you have an opinion on this guy and his writings? Politics seems to be the point of it all. It is an intriguing read, though I feel that Swedes would probably object if they thought about the fact that most people (like me, unfortunately) are getting their only knowledge of Sweden from books like this.

I've neither read the books nor seen the movies, but my wife loved the books. As for the world's ideas about Sweden, I guess we're just happy if you guys don't confuse us with the Swiss. (-;

Went to the 50-year birthday party of an old friend; he had booked a whole hostel on an island in the archipelago of Stockholm. Great food and drink, and dance music to keep us all going to early morning. (The DJ said something about "most 50-year parties I play at, people tend to leave at 1 am...")

dveej: I would say that the Millenium books reflect Sweden to about the same degree as, say, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" reflects Savannah. That is, the author has taken phenomena which exist but are not dominant in the respective society, and then builds characters around those to create a good read.

There is no attempt to be complete ("fair and balanced", anyone?), since the purpose of the books is not to be a comprehensive primer on Sweden, but rather an intriguing story, albeit with a serious background.

Although the books, with their somewhat black-and-white worldview, may give a different impression, there actually are other kinds of men in Sweden than sadistic misogynists and leftie idealists!

Amen to that. I, for one, am a sadistic misogynistic leftie idealist, none of whom are portrayed in those novels.

I took my girlfriend, from Dalarna, to a trip around the Bjäre peninsula to prove that Scania is not flat. We had lunch at Hovs Hallar where the famous scene in Ingmar Bergmans movie, The Seventh Seal, with the knight playing chess with death, was filmed.