I can fool you anywhere!

Evidently, I need a reality check and get updated on civilization, as it turns out I've missed out on a famous magician and psychological illusionist, Derren Brown (thanks Jonas for the tip!). I knew nothing of the guy so I did what anyone would do, I browsed YouTube and yes, j'ai trouvé. In this clip, he raises an interesting point regarding the individuality that we praise today, regarding how our mind works and how we subconsciously register messages that affect us without our knowing it. Interesting, I must say.

Gendered Simpsons?

Sweet, thanks to Mr Santa Claus, I am now the proud owner of two more DVD boxsets of my favorite TV show, The Simpsons. The fact that this show, probably along with The X-files and Seinfeld, is on my all time top 3 list on TV shows came up at a party a couple of weeks ago and to my big surprise, people were astonished to hear this. Apparently, the typical Simpsons fan is considered to be male. To be honest, this is nothing I've thought about, and spontaneously, I'm a bit doubtful as to if this is true. There's no doubt plenty of women enjoying watching the bad manners of Homer, the many pranks à la Bart and admiring the sharp wit of young Lisa, right? Well, perhaps therefore, this gender "prejudice" intrigued me to such an extent that I did a bit of ad hoc-research. It turns out, not many women at the party watch the show, whereas many men do, and when asked about it, most felt that the show appeals to men in the 20s-30s. And now, when I google it to see if there's audience research or sociological studies available to shed some light on the matter, I find nothing. I did find that gamers seem to include the show in their TV consumption, but I still don't know whether there are more men than women in the fan club.

Interestingly, while browsing for information on the demographics of the audience, I found out via Wikipedia that The Simpsons turned out to be a viewer success in Japan, only after the marketing spotlight was put on Lisa. I'm having a Japanese friend of a friend coming over to stay with us tomorrow, I'll have to ask her about the audience of the best animated series there is in her country.

Cuisine and games

Sweet. The home made Carrot Casserole is ripening in the oven, the beetroot casserole is already cooling down and... there's snow on the ground! Yey! So far though, the holiday has been revolving around cuisine and games (and that can't go wrong...). I've downloaded the classic arcade game Bubble Bobble to my Wii. It's good fun, although not as challenging as my all time favorite Boulder dash. And I realized that one of my favorite stand up comedians at the moment, Björn Gustavsson, appears to be a true WOW gamer ("du, du är precis som en priest som inte healar". Muahaha!). And interestingly, as for the board game Draughts, it seems to be game over.

Christmas party video

One of our visual contributions on last night's Christmas Party at MediaCity is out on YouTube now. It's in Swedish, but the visual language is, should I say, rather alive and present. The 10 minute masterpiece is here.

AC going on

The current spirit of this blog is perhaps best illustrated by the poor fate my cactus out on the balcony faced this winter: drained of energy and struggling. Remains to be seen if this post is just a First aid care performed just once, on the compulsory “tying up the ends” day at the end of the year, or will it instigate more posts in the future. In the documentation of the blog’s medical history, the reason for the low activity is found in the author, naturally. Lately, I’ve been focusing more on identifying and posing the right questions, on the nature of the battery of yet un-uttered questions there simply must be out there still, concerning everything really, mundane things as well as metaphysical ones. I haven’t been too much concerned with trying to find answers, to write papers or outlining views on the world and therefore, the need to write has not been all too prevalent.

This is not a new turn of event though. I’ve always thought that life in general is much more about the whys and the hows than about the ergos. That is, I’m not so much interested in one big truth or a definite recipe on how things are but rather on challenging these views by asking how they could be, according to a number of perspectives. Consider a funnel; my way of working is moving my way from the narrow spout upwards towards a much greater space. I’m probably like a child stuck in a “why” phase that never tapered off :)

Well, anyways, at the Christmas Party of MediaCity last night, a journalist and my former colleague, currently on leave of absence for completing a PhD, asked me whether I miss journalism and writing news features for a news paper. I confessed that I do. That’s a profession that suits me, apart from the evil deadlines. And the reason for that is exactly that I talked of above. Along the lines of classic journalism, you get to explore and shed some light on an event or a phenomenon, and typically, you need to do so out of multiple perspectives, in order to explain it and tell it to your audience in an intelligible and engaging way. In short, you get paid for asking loads of whys and hows, to put bits and pieces together in a simple manner, and then move on without ever becoming an expert on the issue.

But as we were talking, I realized that the focus of people’s mind is like an alternating current, whose direction vary in a cyclic way, as opposed to DC (yes, I did ask the band to play AC/DC but I really can’t remember if they ever did…). And the wave of my focus is presently changing, it’s just that I hadn’t realized it until last night. I’m actually leaving the phase of why and how now, in favor for the ergo. The signs are there, like we’re hiring a research manager at iDTV Lab, which will kick start the getting below the surface-phase pretty seriously and I’m really looking forward to that. Also, I fell in love with a book on how to get answers to all your unthinkable questions, of which I have a bundle. I found it at Designtorget down town Stockholm last Monday, it’s called Can cows walk down stairs? I do recommend it!

Well, first aid treatments are by default simple and provides only limited care, therefore, over and out.