INSIDE.

“I love my job” is what I would have written if reviewing video games was something I did for a living, and INSIDE was my current assignment.

Danish developer Playdead entered the indie scene with their puzzle-based side scroller LIMBO on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010. I reviewed it the year after, giving it my very exclusive two thumbs up. Since the release of LIMBO, Playdead has porting the game to no less than 9 other platforms, firmly squeezing every last potential out of that poor kid.

Last year, the company returned with a brand new game: INSIDE. Not only does the game confirm Playdead’s love for ALL CAPS titles, and young, male protagonists. It also shows that they are still very, very good at making puzzle-based games.

INSIDE somehow managed to fly completely below my radar. It wasn’t until Steam’s algorithms decided that it was time for me to buy something new that I realized it existed. And for once, Steam hit a home run with their recommendation.

Continue reading "INSIDE." →

Death by Energy Drink!

There’s a killer in your grocery store. It’s colorful, tempting, and refreshing. But if you let your guard down, it’ll strangle you with its sweet, sweet fists. It’s death by energy drink!

Lanna Hamann was an apparently healthy 16-year-old. In 2014, she went to Rocky Point, Mexico, with her friends. There, she tragically died of a heart attack. After a day of drinking energy drinks at the beach, Lanna complained that she was not feeling well. Shortly after, she went into cardiac arrest, and died. According to her friends, Lanna was not drinking any water. In a well-organized social media campaign launched after Lanna’s death, her friends and family blamed Red Bull as a contributing factor to her heart attack.

Every now and then, this and similar news stories will surface, most notably as click-bait (in Norwegian) in your Facebook feed. As a warning to young irresponsible people with no concept of actions and their possible consequences, they serve a purpose. But every time one of these “guy drinks 10 cans of caffeine and mysteriously croaks”-stories is published, the someone-think-of-the-children-mob appears with their torches and pitchforks.

Why isn’t there any click-bait articles being written about the deaths from alcohol consumption? According to the CDC, excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths each year in the United States from 2006 to 2010. If there’s something in your grocery store you should start a crusade against, then perhaps alcohol is a better choice than energy drinks?

Continue reading "Death by Energy Drink!" →

BEARD KING Beard Bib.

With the BEARD KING Beard Bib hair clippings catcher, you can focus on your beard, and stop worrying about the mess.

My Van Dyke has been with me for 21 years now. Ever since I did my stint of mandatory military service back in ’97 and ’98, it has tried it’s best to toughen up my cursed baby face. It hasn’t helped much, though, but at least I’m no longer mistaken for a girl1. The only time I’ve shaved off the beard was for a very brief month during Movember 2012.

Never again. Never. Again.

Another reason I got the beard, is that I think shaving is unbelievably boring. With the beard, it’s not strictly necessary to shave every day. Even though it takes a little time to get the right trim, it’s worth it since I only have to shave every week – or every second week if I really stretch it.

Shaving is still a dread, though, especially the cleanup afterwards. Those hairs get everywhere, and the bathroom, in particular the area around the sink, looks like a bombed-out whorehouse.

But I’m not the only one with a beard and a serious debris problem. There are probably a million hipsters in San Francisco trying to clean their sinks as you read this. And where there’s a problem, there’s always a solution. The great minds at BEARD KING have conjured a product that every man with facial hair should own: The Beard Bib.

Continue reading "BEARD KING Beard Bib." →

I’m a Coward.

What do you do when you have a lot to say, but don’t dare to say it?

Right now I have 32 unfinished blog posts laying around – including this one. 32 incomplete gems in the making, screaming for my attention. Some of them are properly aged, with the most ancient draft being a long post I wrote late 2011 about how I reverse engineered the Tidal Android app. Back then, it was called WiMP, and annoyingly it lacked proper head phone audio control support. But that wasn’t something a little hacking couldn’t fix, right? On my way through the code, I discovered clear text API passwords, and other funky stuff that probably shouldn’t be made public. So the post was never left the drawing board. There are also a bunch of incomplete reviews in the sea of unfinished posts, seasoned with drafts that aren’t much more than quick notes I’ve made whenever an idea has tried to form in my head.

In the collection of neglected treasure, there are also about 10 opinion pieces. They are written on a variety of topics, from my thoughts on a proposed ban on porn sites, to science fiction-esque gene manipulation with CRISPR. Among the many drafts, these opinion posts are the ones I’d like to spend some time and energy to finish.

But it doesn’t just take effort to voice ones opinions, defending them can be outright exhausting. Particularly if you’re like me – an conflict adverse, unskilled debater.

Continue reading "I’m a Coward." →