Wednesday 17 May 2006

Pic of the day: Yes we love Cyrodiil, the nation in which Oblivion takes place. Norway is OK too, I guess. Actually they look suspiciously similar in places.

Fast forward

Once again I did nothing to celebrate Norway's national day (Constitution Day). You know by now how I feel about nations and nationalism. I think it is just plain crazy. I don't mind there being some layers of government, for the time being, until we can do without it. But the nation layer has disqualified itself by going overboard and playing god with its citizens. This holds true for pretty much all of the world. Consequently I'd like to see more power devolve from the nations to more local levels which have less of a tradition for sending people off to kill each other.

Yeah, I can see the appeal of killing evil people. After all, I do it in computer games. But in real life, you end up killing other teenagers who are also sent to war without quite knowing why. (Or, increasingly, killing civilians who happen to stand between you and where you think your enemies are hiding.) When it comes to rushing in to stop another Holocaust, I can see the point in having a military. But usually that's not how it is used. I don't really think I need to give recent examples.

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I'm happy to say, however, that the most serious to happen right here right now was the power coming and going for much of the afternoon. No permanent damage to my computers, it seems. Then again I turned off the power when it started to flicker.

I do have a laptop that can run on batteries for a while. It is the one I converted to Ubuntu Linux, so it can't run my games (not that the more recent ones would work on it anyway). But it does have OpenOffice so I could, theoretically, write a journal entry on it. I didn't do that though. (I played Animal Crossing on my Nintendo DS instead.) So I'm still a bit behind here.

It was a cold, wet day too. Not very festive from the hand of nature.