NO MORE

This is now a closed blog and from now on I'll only update NEW LASER IDEA. There will be no more dual posting.
That is all.

Summer in the city

I'm currently on vacation in my apartment in Stockholm. Drop by if you want anything. I'll be back in the blogosphere by the end of the month.

Intellectual property and graffiti in video games

I've recently seen steal this film and the better sequel steal this film II, the first one manly discuss the raid against The Pirate Bay in 2006 while the later, better one concerns information and the spreading of information. Their idea is that new media and new distribution lines of information is above all an unstoppable force and that sharing is a basic human need; talking, physical touch and all kinds of human interaction are by the filmmakers considered as a form of sharing. For me this is a bit of a dual edged sword. I and all other people working with creativity sell our ideas for a living. Artists, AD's, writers and gardeners alike all make their bread money from the theory that an idea put into reality has worth, at least to someone else that holds money. If we someday make a technology that reads minds and share thoughts the way we share files today the creative industry will be the bad guys in the debate, taking the seat inherited form the church, the rules who were against free speech, the telegraph companies, the live musicians guild, and now record companies and MPAA.
We will of course lose the battle and have to go looking for new careers. I'll be a trucker, or if the future comes to fast a space-trucker.

Now on to my other subject for the day: I’ve been thinking a bit about the quite old and quite bad video game Getting Up lately. For those of you who don’t know the game is presented as Marc Ecco's Getting up: contents under pressure and feature loads of graffiti. The player act as Trane who starts out as a toy in the scene and struggles to get respect and reputation, eventually it all turns in to the regular power to the people-state bad, individual good story that we're all familiar with and at least I like. The game is both quite good and really crappy at the same time and that is what gets to me. While the camera sucks, the fighting is too hard and the sneaking is totally impossible there are a lot of things that make up for it.
Firstly a whole bunch of graffiti legends show up to teach Trane a trick or two, the only one I knew about beforehand (not being particularly in to graffiti) is Obey but I’m sure all who know the scene know Futura, Seen, T-Kid and the others.
What’s really, really good about the game is its way to show and tell about personal development. As Trane starts out he's tags and throw-ups look like the shaky 80-style graffiti with a clear look of someone wanting a lot but not really knowing how to accomplish it, as we move on trough the game Trane develops a more personal style while he travels in graffiti history being more and more modern for every new level. Eventually Trane learns that words influence others and that there is something worth telling, he gets political and into wheat-paste posters. The final is simply beautiful, when Trane grabs climbing gear, a big roller and writes "STILL FREE" at an entire bridge pillar, while the cops fire at him from a helicopter.
It's a nod to the end of the movie Bomb the System that all should watch at least once, since it deals with people trying to do what they feel is right in a controlled world.

My feedreader makes me think i live in the future

Ever since I saw Back to the Future part 2 as a kid I've wanted to live in the future.
And I think i speak for all of us when i say that a pink hover-board made by Mattel is a must buy on the release day in the not so distant future.
I'd say the society we live in are all struggling towards a future and a whole lot of futrure-thingies have come to exist in the public market during the last two decades.

The most important one of these are of course the feeds and the feed reader.
Ugly orange screens with white letters, slowly scrolling upwards in public spaces, displaying news and propaganda are an essential item of the technoir dystopian cyberpunk future.
The basic text feeds are the last secure mass communication lines in Transmetropolitan.
In the far future mental logs from exploring spaceships are displayed as feeds on the civilized planets, millions of light-years away.
Text is basic; text takes almost no storage space.

Yes, this is a bit more nerdy then my unusual entries.
And now what I wanted to say all along: my shared objects from google reader
This is what I like recently and might be fun for someone else to see. And the important thing to do is to share the one you think are interesting, on and on in an endless loop. Entries are now free from their websites and their creators.

Somehow it’s just like piracy, but legal.

Mimicking work

We are in the first week of The Industry Project, our weary last module before summer-holidays and internship. It’s quite good; we act as three separate agencies with real life clients and make believe budgets. I got appointed the CEO position of my agency and have spent the last days counting man-hours, costs and profit. Right now we’re getting into routines and have assigned smaller groups to each client. I’d like to say we are on top of it, but this being Hyper Island I’m sure we’ll get hit by the storm quite soon. Actually looking forward to it.

Back from the thing with the thing.

Amsterdam is over and I'm back in Duckburg once again. It took me about 20 minutes to get restless and wanting to head over to Häktet for some regular Hyper Islanding.
Anyway.
It was great to be away.
I remembered what life actually used to be like before... Before what? before 2006 I’d say... before I started my the worst few of my really worthless jobs. I'm never gonna have a worthless job again. That is probably the key thing for me going to Hyper at all.

Epitaph said that they want to do something with the strategy we gave them, and that feels so good. Firstly as a confirmation that we did do the right thing, put our focus the right way and actually pulled off all that work in a swedish-summer-weathery town full of bars, clubs, drugs and hookers. Secondly because I actually didn't think that they would dare to do anything with it.

So now all that’s left is to find an agency internship, in Stockholm or Amsterdam, and just keep the good spirit up for little more than a month and then I'm off for a real job in a real world (well, it'll start as a real internship but... you know..).

Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives

In our task to shake the foundations of the music industry my research let me to illegally download a record by a band named as stated above. Honest Bob are somewhat famed by having songs son Guitar Hero I & II, but nothing gave away how they actually sound and behave in album form.
First of all, I have a hidden side that loves silly-but-witty lyrics from artist like Tom Lehrer, Doktor Kosmos and of course Bellman. Honest Bob delivers all this with lyrics about the time cube, Chomsky’s language theories and occasional references to aliens and Swedish artists.
The sound is a easy listen kind of lounge rock, speaking to my fascination of artist like Mike Flowers and Hugo Montenegro (not that I listen to them, but none the less they fascinate me).
But still they might be crap, it’s too early to say.
Did i mention they made a heal like a hole cover?

In other news Skynet is coming. Read all about it on Wierd.

Nya laser ideer

Something is happening to my creativity; since spring came to town about a week ago I can't stop to think of new projects and new things for existing projects. I've written an article for our old closed down role-playing site Boningen, story outlined the second series of The Hitman Comic, dreamt together a few videogame concepts and storyline ideas for various media, decided to look into computer software for handicapped and other alternative ways of communicating with digital devices and finally mapped out a revamp series for a superhero team I liked as a kid: Cloak & Dagger.
And this is only the things that don’t concerns the Epitaph project…

Ladri di biciclette

The bike I bought from the bicycle pirate is not working so well, Other bicycle stores say that i need a new part for roughly 10-15 euro, the pirate claim that these guys are only out to fool me and that the part just needs to be adjusted. He adjusts it and my bike work for almost 2 days before the same problem returns.

music, branding, magic(k)

So for the last week or whenever we been researching music, online stuff and our target groups attitude towards the same and this is what I've gathered so far:

Internet is more important factor then friends for finding new music.

More people claim to buy CD’s than to download music (but the difference is so small it can be disregarded)

Millencollin sounds a tiny bit more punkish in concert then they do on record.

And that’s it.

I’ve been reading a lot of advertisement books lately ("the branding gap" and "hey whipple, squeeze this!" are two I can recommend) and the theories about brand value, good communication and cause/effect are similar to the theories about magic(k) that the authors I read fiction of (not Bret Easton Ellis included since he is a odd person in completely different ways) all seem to believe in (Grant Morrison, RAW and so on). The Idea that man and words shape reality, and that men who control words (and other arts) shape realty. The authors seem to think that we, the ad people, aren’t aware of this power. Id' rather say that we are fully aware.

Men in this context refer to the human race, not gender.

Quit harassing me already!

Jamsterclam

Day three in Amsterdam is almost over, me and Tove are home, quietly interneting the night away while the Johanna's stayed out until later exploring Dutch nighttime even more then we did before 02:30...
The town is great and Kong are a nice bunch. Epitaph was also nice ppl. We have met up with a few of IAD08 and apparently left their regular after work bar without paying. On the other hand we bought bicycles for all our money, so some free drinks are only fair, considering all that karma.
Tomorrow we're going for more free stuff; hopefully since whatever that big ad-school is named (ANT?) opens their Amsterdamish facility. Considering my fortune-chocolate everything should go well.
And: Kids, remember to never blog intoxicated.

Clever pop-cultural title

The Project Lifecycle ended in flames, terror and all the other things that show how close to disaster you've been walking.

If you only look to results, however it was a success. The Grönsaker Dirket farmers loved our stuff and so on while Ottoboni and Vin & Sprit was curious and wanted to know more, but not all out declaring us heroes of the biz.

But back to the bad stuff:
I don't think I've been so out of control about anything else before in my life and so clueless about how to solve it.
I seriously hope that all of the internal chaos and discomfort is not my fault cause then I don’t know how to handle the Industry Project module in a month.

Until then I'm off to Amsterdam to do some kind of work with Epitaph, the record company that once upon a time had cool bands like Agnostic Front and New Bomb Turks but now are left with Millencollin and that whole thing. It will be great!

The Project Lifecycle

So, Friday was a deadline in our current module, the project lifecycle, where I act as Project Manager for two of the groups. The difference on our projects makes it hard to sum up what the module was about. One of my groups made a complete redesign of a local business, the other have been creating what is meant to be a strategy for Vin & Sprits digital magazine.
Let’s see how it works out on the client presentations.

Read this on New Laser Idea instead!

Since I'm having this blog on both this url and newlaseridea.com updating takes me about two minutes longer than it used to, that is bothersome. In the future I'll try to shut down this page and only update the newlaseridea blog. However since almost no one reads neither right now I don't expect a riot at my house for doing so.

We have just started up the new module The Project Lifecycle and I’m Project Manager for two of the groups, we have real authentic live clients paying us nothing but IF they like what we do they pay the school a small symbolic fee. So, that’s realism down the drain if you ask me.

On the other hand not to be so grumpy (I had enough of that during the Creatives Unlimited development)the contact with real clients with real client feedback is probably a great experience, more on that after lunch when one of my groups actually meet the client for the first time. It's a redesign of a website that we try to turn into a whole graphic profile. Lets see how that plays out...

Friday night firefight

The time has just flown by on Deasign. We got to attend a lot of internal meetings including (but not limited to) a top-secret preparation for a pitch. We also spoke to a graphic designer and had lunch with my old friend Anders at a Japanese place named Nagano that I have passed by at least once a week before I left Stockholm but never eaten at.
In the ever ongoing facebook to be or not to be discussion a few conclusions where reached yesterday. Elias had removed his account and felt free like a bird. I met up with Isak, an old friend from my childhood that I haven’t met for a bunch of years, and if that’s what i get for giving my reading habits and the right to publish pictures of me when drunk then it's a price I can afford.
Simon helped me out with my portfolio; New Laser Idea, yesterday and now you can almost visit it. I still have a few hours work to do on the layout and some more time to spend on the content but we're clearly moving forward.

And OH: don't miss www.creativesunlimited.com, to be released shortly!

Deasign

So, I’m at Deasign with Filip Redelius for a few days. People call it Sweden’s best agency and give them awards for it so I guess they're good. After two weeks of short interviews we finally got to stay at Deasign for two whole days, a great opportunity to se what its like, not what they say it’s like, compared to Ottoboni or Svensson where w just had interviews and then had to look at what they said and our few impressions of the actual work.
There seem to be a lot of old hyperkids (some so old they would call themselves hypernauts) around Deasign, including a girl from crew 12 internshiping (sorry I can't remember her name but I was just introduced to 25-something persons and all the names are a big mess right now), If that’s not a good sign for upcoming internship possibilities then what is?

A short reflection: after visiting a few agencies: Is there possible to do a career in this biz without being named Anna or if you’re male having a mother, sibling or girlfriend named Anna? It seems to be impossible

Live from Telefonplan

I’m working from Hyperisland's Stockholm location today. So far the project management spec is going well. We were at Ottoboni Group yesterday and spoke with them for a few hours. They were a working bunch; it feels like an agency you go to work at after playing for a few years at hipster-webaward agencies, when you feel like separating your work from your social life, not like they are stiff and boring but you don’t juggle apples and scream things in the reception while brainstorming. A place to work while you’re children is growing up. They where polite and professional and I'd like to go back again before we leave, mainly to see their project managers meet on Fridays and plan out the next week, structure is not something you can interview someone about and learn from, you got to see it in action.

So far so good. Still trying to find an agency to swing by late Friday afternoon for one of the institutional Fredagsöl.

STHLM united

So, in a few hours I’m going up to Stockholm again. Workshadowing they say. I don't know yet how it’s meant to be done, but I'm getting there. I felt confident that everything would just work out itself with this module, since so much of it isn't depending on us for once. I'm not conceptualizing, making 50 new business ideas in eight minutes or blindly messing up a perfectly good piece of php. This is just humans, we just watch them. Not to talk about the "live" projects for next module, it feels like we could just send out six or seven random emails and then have fifty projects. Sure it’s not that simple, but just dealing with the logistical and human parts of stress and not the sit-in-front-of-your-computer-and-be-creative stress is so nice. Today I love this module.

My Stockholmian friends called and asked if I was going with them to Gothenburg this Easter, we have gone there every year since the dawn of time to lock ourselves in a school and tell stories, like I sort of maybe wasn't. It made me once again realise how worthless my communication skill is, I haven’t spoken to them since I saw them around new-year.

Sleep now.

Saturday at Häktet

Yet another Saturday at Häktet, this perfect weekend night I'm actually not working with our class site, www.creativesunlimited.com, I'm sorting out my portfolio. I've finally registered a domain for it and now the wordpress is bugging me.

I’m actually considering redoing it all in html, but I'm so out of the loop on coding. I used to have a neat little app that did all tricky things called PageSpinner, and still my websites came out like crap. It was the days before css and all the other miracles that make browsing delightful. I was so much more of a pioneer those days, finding people who shared your opinions and taste in literature, music etc. was so new and exiting, you joined a group on a crappy coded and bad designed community and BAM! five new friends, and that was back when all still used dial-up modems... My posse those days talked about tattooing our ICQ uin:s on us since they where such a large part of our identity, changing the email you use for msn today isn't even hard. I don’t talk to anyone online on an daily basis anymore, If some random person would contact me because we both claim Yeah Yeah Yeahs as a great band I'd think he’s retarded. My facebook is only about bragging rights, a way to display pictures from great times, namedropping that series no-one else has picked up yet and spying on people’s lives, trough this weird filter.
Is this road really worth traveling down?

Boring day

School was empty as a tomb today so I made a Jochmetropolitan poster based on the cover of Transmetropolitan #44.

New semester

So, the portfolio is still somewhere in development hell... All the text is done and i have made some wordpress experiments. However I don’t feel like its moving forward and that is not so good.

Christmas and New Year and all that was a blast but now the cold, harsh, Karlskronian reality have me in a tight grip.

I and Filip Redelius spent an evening working on a short motion sequence; the idea was that the project should take no longer then three hours from start to finish. It became a DVD-menu for the movie White Zombie (since it was public domain and we wanted to include footage from the film itself). The result can be found at this link

There is just so much to do, it never seem to end. Me and Carl are the copy’s for our class-site and have spent sever hours trying to develop a nice but firm tone of voice for all the stuff we need to write.

In other news, AdLibris billed me for a book they haven’t sent me, and that is a bit bothersome.