Vampirates is about a bunch of pretty boys who are vampires, pirates and probably fancying each other in one way or another. It's set in the modern world - Canada, to be more precise - and the story sets off on a ferry in Newfoundland.

Needless to say, I like comics that begin with a ferry trip (for certain personal reasons). And Vampirates is very, very well made. The one thing I could possibly complain about is that Hassan Qasim, one of the main characters, doesn't seem to have much body hair, despite his Middle Eastern genes. (Oh well, I'll just have to tell myself that the drawings are so stylized that the body hair doesn't show, although it's certainly there ...)

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The only manga-inspired online comic with pretty boys, that I know of, where they actually have body hair (though not enough ... it's never enough!) and even a bit of muscles is Jesse Hajicek's Metanoia.

Today I watched the film "Audition" by Takashi Miike. It is a story about a middle-aged man, Aoyama, who some time after his wife's death from illness decides to remarry. In order to find a suitable wife, his friend arranges a fake audition for a film.

Aoyama instantly falls in love with one of the women, Asami. They start dating, and Asami seems to be a wonderful girl. But Aoyama is ridden by guilt - for planning to remarry after his wife's death, for arranging a fake audition, for being so much older than Asami.

*Spoiler warning!!!* Click and drag your mouse over the following paragraph ONLY if you don't mind a major spoiler ...

His subconscious starts playing tricks on him, and his guilt, his friend's hunches that something is wrong with Asami, her hints about some sort of trauma in her past, and the fact that none of the contacts she mentioned during the audition can be reached warp into a powerful nightmare that seems all too real, where Asami is a serial killer slowly torturing her victims to death in order to deal with the trauma caused by a childhood of endless abuse ... softly whispering "kiri kiri kiri kiri" ("kiri" = 'deeper') as she drives needles into Aoyama's body.

*End spoiler warning.*

This film kicks a lot of ass. It's not a horror movie as such, but more of a psychological drama with a bad, *very* bad, twist. It doesn't say much about Asami or any of the other side chracters, but it's a deep exploration of Aoyama's character.

The little doggie's mistress went into the Chinese restaurant under my apartment, and he cried all the time until she came back ... He looks like a mix between border collie and German shepherd (or something).

Mihai nicely matches the pictures with scenes from alpinism and skiing that he bought at the flea market as a present for Gusti.

Yesterday, me and Mihai ate some of the Swedish traditional food surströmming - fermented Baltic herring. I had never tried it before, only felt the terrible smell once when some people thought it would be funny to open a can of surströmming in the hallway in school. Mihai wanted to try it, and the more I told him about how bad it smelled, the more determined he became.


Mihai has just pierced a hole in the can, and has experienced the smell, which already has contaminated his fingers beyond immediate repair.

We went to the park and sat down on a bench by the brook. The wind was luckily somewhat strong, but the smell was still quite ... interesting.





The fish looked quite harmless compared to its smell.



It tasted weird. Very strong, salty and sour. It made the tongue weirdly numb. We ate it with polarkaka, though you're actually "supposed to" eat it with either potatoes and onion or tunnbröd and butter. Well, close enough.



While we were eating, an older man walked by, and as the smell hit him, he just had to ask if it really was surströmming we were eating. He was very happy that young people today still do that - it's "real culture"! For him, it had taken a while before he had learned to love it, but once convinced, he had converted all his family to the delight of surströmming.



Well, after finishing as much as we could (me 1, Mihai 4 herrings), we went back home, still smelling.

Last weekend, I helped Mihai pick some new (okay, second-hand) shirts at Erikshjälpen (he forced me to do it). It then struck me how easy it is to dress nicely for (some) men (excluding those nasty metrosexuals): a shirt and a pair of pants, with a sweater over the shirt in the winter. Somewhat loose pants accentuate nicely shaped private parts while being comfortable to wear. The same goes for loose shirts that drape themselves nicely over your torso.

As for me, loose pants tend to look pretty nasty on me. In the rare cases where that's not the case, I still can never seem to find fitting shoes to wear with them. (All shoes I own are either meant for tight pants, skirts or the summer.) As for shirts and pullovers, I have to think much more about what I wear with what. Loose clothes are out of the question, unless they are loose in such a way that they still accentuate my boobs ...

Alas, when I was young, I used to cross-dress as a man. I always wore pants (well, *tight* pants), a shirt, and a sweater over the shirt in colder seasons. The pants were tight, but I never had to think much about what to wear to school. It was so much easier also because all of my wardrobe was black, with the occasional red and military green addition.

Yes, I never bothered much about stupid little things like clothes. I'm sure I would never have written a blog entry about clothes back then ...

So why am I doing it now?!?! Dammit, I've let myself slip! More colours have snuck into my wardrobe! I'm spending five seconds instead of just one fussing about what to wear when I'm going out!!! What an immense waste of time and resources!!

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Anyway, I'm quite happy about moving back to my own apartment in Kävlinge this Friday. Yay, Internet at home! Yay, all my books! Yay, my kitchen! Yay, washing machines that actually work! Yay, floor heating! (I.e. badly isolated heating pipes that run under my floor.)

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I recently discovered that it's actually possible to borrow magazines at the city library. You get to keep a whole year's worth of Bang or ETC for two weeks. Two excellent magazines. (I'm even starting to wish secretly that I could work for them ...)

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Tack vare Bang har jag upptäckt Kristina Sandbergs roman "Insekternas sång", som mot bakgrund av ett ridläger beskriver existentiella teman och uppväxtproblematik.

Jag har inte kommit så värst långt än, men den väcker hur som helst obehagligt igenkännande av den extrema gruppförnedring det kan innebära att gå på ridskola. Jag har själv upplevt det, och det var först när jag var medryttare på en av min grannes hästar och kunde spränga omkring ensam i skogarna som jag blev av med den krypande tudelade känsla som jag så länge hade förknippat med ridning: ömsom glädje och stolthet över att vara i samspel med dessa gigantiska muskelberg, och ömsom självförakt och förnedring, för vad man än gjorde var det så klart för det mesta helt fel (enligt ridläraren och alla andra). Och om de berömde en någon gång eller i en sällsynt svag stund försvarade en mot nån annan ragata var man så tacksam att man ville kyssa marken de gick på.

Varför skrivs det inte mer böcker om ridskole-erfarenheter? De kan ju blotta så mycket spännande saker i mänsklig psykologi. Och de flesta tjejer iallafall har ju ändå gått något år på ridskola, så det är en erfarenhet som ganska många delar.

And the same street from a slightly different angle, with a flock of birds flying across the sky:

I got the idea from Brian Hiltz.

My face is extremely asymmetrical (for instance - why does only half of my mouth smile when I smile?!), so this had to be interesting. The camera was a bit too close to my face, so it was a bit distorted in a slightly fish eye way, but you can still see how the two halves of my face seem to have whole different personalities ...



Mihai always teases me about my lopsided nose and claims he has a very nice and symmetrical face. Turns out he really does, so I had to choose a picture where his face is lighted from the side to make it interesting. Now it looks like he has one good and one evil twin! He he.

When I left Orust, the cool sea was steaming in the warm morning sun, spreading fog over parts of the island.