I can’t call myself a feminist. It’s a hard word to define but I’m pretty sure it involves some kind of activism and that’s not me. But I do think I’m at least a righteous guy that does “the right thing” and try to be a gentleman to ladies – but stopping short of making them feel incompetent. And in my opinion – women are just better in every way. And the fact that guys again and again take advantage of being physically stronger sickens me!
This week I posted what was supposed to be a funny joke on Facebook with a funny pun. But what I didn’t reflect on at first was that the joke was about a guy doing a guy thing and taking sexual advantage of a woman in a very exposed situation. So when thinking about it like that it really wasn’t funny. But it took someone pointing that out to me that even though it was a pun-joke, the situation itself was anything but funny. The person pointing this out knew I wasn’t the kind of person to think a guy sexually assaulting a woman is funny but the point was that I didn’t even think of it that way. And that guys rarely think of it that way. And I couldn’t really argue against it!
I also remember back in high school when the guys are talking about home many girls they grabbed on the ass and I can honestly tell you my score was 0. Because it was just a completely strange concept to me – what was the point?? Back then one could blame it on hormones and “guys being guys” but nowadays it’s so very common for guys to still do things like that and I still don’t get it. But reading what happened with our prime minster Ulf Kristersson the other day it’s clear that it’s very common.
If you didn’t hear the story, he was doing a round with the local police and ended up comforting a woman in Gröna Lund that had been the victim of some guy being a complete asshole – and fortunately he got taken in by the police. And in a public response to the family of the victim that thanked him, he made a awesome point by stating that this is not ok and it’s up to everyone to stop this behaviour now.
Some might say this is “an imported problem”, with the meaning that this is young Muslim boys who don’t respect women and behaves in Muslim ways – which I don’t buy at all. As I said, this was a thing that happened 30 years ago when I was in high school! And swedes have been raping women since the age of the Vikings so I don’t buy that. But I don’t get where these guys are – because no one I personally know would think it’s ok to go around grabbing women at a concert or crowded subway or something like that, let alone raping anyone.
And speaking of rape, if anyone thinks a rape is just rough sex and then it’s done and over with, I want you to read this PDF about how a rape and the failure of the legal system can destroy the victim. Everyone should actually read it, it s a very good read and something I hope with our new “mutual consent” law in Sweden won’t be as much of an issue as it has been. Or go read statistics about how a rape can destroy a person’s life with a lot of victims ending up in some addiction hellhole!
So no, “guys being guys” isn’t ok, it’s not an excuse, it’s a terrible way of trying to deflect from being an asshole!
But I still can’t undo being a part of the problem for posting a joke without thinking it through. Here’s hoping I’m not too old to learn and change my ways!
Thanks to the great article over here at Medium I finally have a diagnosis – I’m “Collapse Aware“.
I realized a long time ago that the civilization we have built for ourselves isn’t sustainable. For multiple reasons. And it will come crashing down – unless drastic measures that the public won’t want and thus no politician dares to propose, let alone enforce. It’s also a part of the diagnosis to feel frustrated, depressed, angry at how the rest of the world isn’t waking up to this fact and actually does something about it. And the diagnosis also comes with the doubt that I might be disillusioned and wrong about the whole thing.
I think it was back in 2004 back when I was finishing up my “world tour” working for our state department and traveling all over the world and I saw directly how different countries and cultures were living and using the resources of the earth that I had the first thoughts about “how in hell are we supposed to keep on going like this in our ‘western civilization’??”. The wasteful mindset of USA, the consumerism of Singapore contrasted by the “taking each day by day” in Kongo. Sitting in an airport counting the amount of planes every hour thinking how much fuel this is costing. The ever expanding population. How we keep getting older and older and not dying as much from diseases as we are ‘supposed to’. And this feeling just kept getting stronger and stronger over the years. It’s actually been growing for so long that I can’t even remember when it got to the point where I realized “this won’t hold for long”. But it was before I became a father because I remember having the feelings of “the last thing I should be doing is putting a child to this earth to hand over the mess we’ve made”. Which is one of the reasons we only had one.
But one pivotal thing I do remember was watching a documentary about the coral reefs and how they are slowly dying. And this I think was about 8 years ago. Also at this point I was having second thoughts about my job. I was working for one of the biggest charter/holiday companies in Scandinavia. Our bread and butter was flying people to Greek islands for all you can eat and drink vacations and back again. And even though that company was a leader in it’s field for fuel efficiency and being environmental aware, every time I was on one of those holidays and saw the waste at the buffet and the consumerism, it really didn’t feel good.
Since then it’s only gotten worse for our civilization – as far as I know. I try to be a critical thinker and not taking anything without checking the source but in these days it’s hard not to find a new scientific paper about how we’re sending this civilization down a spiral. Or listening to Johan Rockström (or watching his Netflix “Breaking Boundaries”) talking with all his years of research and studies, it all get’s a bit too much to ignore for anyone. What makes things even more frustrating is that conservative political parties are gaining grounds globally. And conservatives aren’t really known to put the planet first. Yet people are voting for them more and more globally. Even in Sweden, one year ago 18% of people voted for a party that gladly says the environmental problems are someone else’s problems to fix, not ours and also says “more people are dying from cold than heat”??
But then in 2020 something happened that gave me a little bit of hope. At first I thought it was nature’s “finding a way”. A new global pandemic to reduce our numbers. And with changing our way of living and with all resources thrown at that problem we got out of it pretty “successfully”. So we can change our behavior, we can change how we do business, we can change how we live our lives. But then we also proved how good we are at returning to the old ways as fast as possible even though we shouldn’t.
So now as the heatwaves of 2023 in Europe has dissipated and the storm seems to be easing up, what’s next for us? Are we going to continue like we have for the past decades? Or are we finally going to realize that the civilization we’ve built isn’t sustainable and start moving away from it?
What we need to do? (in no particular order)
But most of all we need to change our mindset. Because this isn’t going to end well and what we can’t do is saying “they will fix it” (who are they exactly?) or “it will sort itself out” (because we won’t let it).
I unfortunately see a future where countries go to war just because their country isn’t enough or they can’t live there anymore. Like 1 billion people in India facing a water shortage and daily temperature averaging over 40′. I’m seeing Spain being too dry and hot to grow food. I’m seeing USA taking over Canada for the colder climate. I’m seeing the world being dependent on Russia as the biggest land for farming in the areas we used to call “permafrost”. That is if a nuke or two doesn’t go off. And no more champagne as Champagne wine region will get too dry to grow grapes. We need politicians with balls to implement these changes but they won’t do that until there are enough of us wanting a change. Because me changing jobs to one that works for the science of how to beat this, me installing solar panels on our house, driving an electric car and reducing amount of meat, it’s all voluntarily and it’s not enough.
But I seem to be in the extreme minority to think we need a drastic change. And believe me, I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong about all of this. But the people doing the research agree that it’s not sustainable and we’ve entered damage limitation territory now. And we aren’t even doing that.
After a 2 year battle against cancer my oldest sister Amy died at 52 years of age. And four weeks ago we had the funeral service for her and I’m going to try to talk about it here.
Growing up I had two sisters, Amy and Anne-Charlotte (from now on referred to as AC). I remember that me and AC didn’t get along at all and we hated each other. But Amy kept to herself, at least from me. But she got along with AC and whenever we were in Scotland for the summer holidays they would run off together to do fun things while I was “stuck” with my parents. At least until I was like 12 or 13 and could shoot a game of pool at the pub. So growing up I hardly knew her unfortunately. But one of the good memories I have is one time when I had the house to myself for a few days and she stopped by and we watched some 80’s flicks together.
Then when I turned 16 I started working at a fast food restaurant in Stockholm and Amy was shift leader. But she worked weekdays and I worked weekends since I was still in school so I hardly saw her there either. Then she met her Paul and moved to Scotland to start a family. And I barely saw her after that.
We did meet for some family events and we met when they would come by Sweden now and then. And I went over there a few times to celebrate her 30th and 40th, and also the awesome weekend in Silverstone ’05 and so on. But we were never close and in some weird way we were fine with that.
When we first heard of the diagnosis back in July 2020 it was right when the world was panicking about covid. And one place that really panicked was UK so the idea of jumping on a plane to go see her was quickly ruled out. Then the prognosis was bad, then good, then bad, then not so bad, then terrible over a 2 year period which was awful for everyone but especially for her but also AC.
I did manage to get over there in July 2022 to met her and the family over there which was good although the diagnosis then was terrible but she was still in good spirits which was fun to see.
Then she had (or maybe I should say “made it”) a great Christmas, a Christmas that she wouldn’t have according to the doctors. And she turned 52 but after that her body couldn’t fight it anymore.
And in the last weekend of February we went over there to deal with a funeral service. Amy had already met the people organizing the funeral service so everything was done according to her wishes. The opening of the ceremony was spent remembering the good life she had starting a family in Scotland and her 30 years over there. And it made me sad because I realized how much I had missed, how little I knew about her life there. But then there was a great slideshow to some awesome music to remember the good times and that made most people feel better – I know I did. And after that some snacks and refreshments and talking to all the friends and family over there, most of whom I had no idea about. It all made me regret not taking the time to go over there more often!
After all that I headed back to the hotel for some alone time with “Drive to Survive” that premiered that weekend which made sense considering that was one of the few things me and Amy had in common. Then the day after I went home again. Or tried to go home but KLM did a terrible mess of the entire thing.
And now a few weeks after the fact it’s starting to sink it. And I still get reminded of Amy a little now and then, especially thanks to Facebook that likes to point out that we both liked Formula 1!
So all in all… “live your best life” and “you always regret the things you didn’t do”.
So it’s time for a general election again here in Sweden as is traditional every 4 years. On September 11th we’re heading out to cast our votes and both me and my wife definitely will. My son still has to sit out this and next election.
But I really have a problem with this election. Europe is suffering it’s worst heatwave ever and is drying up fast. There’s water shortages, rivers are so dry that boats can hardly transport freight and fish are dying by the tons, people are losing their homes and livelihoods and it’s all kinds of chaos caused by global warming. And you’d think that even after ignoring Greta protesting outside of parliament for over 4 years that surely this would wake politicians up? Nope. And why would it since the media isn’t holding them accountable. And worse yet, the voters aren’t holding them accountable.
Jimmie put it best during the “Aftonbladet” debate last night when he ‘attacked’ our environmental party by saying – “you only want to make things worse for everyone!”. And that’s exactly the problem. Elections used to be about people asking themselves “what party align best with what I want?” and vote for that. And nobody wants to make things worse for themselves. Nobody wants to give up their summer vacations by the mediterranean, take the bike instead of their car, go vegetarian and generally stop buying new stuff and focus on recycling. But in my opinion the time for “what I want” is over – now it’s critical for everyone to think “what does the planet want?”.
And it’s clear over the past 3 years that it certainly doesn’t want us! First it gave us the wildfires in Australia, then covid, then monkeypox and now a heatwave from hell.
So I wish that for once the voters would think more long term and more globally. Because yes, in the short term not going on vacation in Greece may suck but at least there’s a chance there will be a habitable Greece in 50 years!
As for who I’m going to vote for? Well I also always ask myself “what party align best with what I want?”. And I want a positive future for my son and the planet. And again there’s only one party that is taking any kind of attempts at doing anything about it so again I’m voting for our environmental party. I wish there was at least one more party that would at least try so I can look for other things that align with what I want but … nope!
Sorry but saying that “what Sweden does doesn’t matter and won’t affect anything” is a poor excuse for not doing anything (read “The Guardian” article here). And building nuclear powerplants won’t solve nothing since they won’t be operational for at least 12 years and by then the waters in the seas will be too hot to cool them (read analysis here, only in Swedish I’m afraid). And that’s about it. That’s all the options right there. So again I quote one of my all time favorite movies – “damn you for forcing me into this position!” (Ed Harris as General Hummel in “The Rock”).
But the way things are going we’re going to end up with team “do nothing since we’re so small what does it really matter” & “build nuclear powerplants”. So that’ll be interesting and I really do hope it doesn’t matter. But I wish I could say “we did our best” to our son but it really doesn’t feel like we did. Even going flexitarian, voting green every time, driving electric car and solar panels on the house, it’s not enough.
As previously mentioned Covid did eventually get me but fortunately I had 2 doses of the vaccine so it was fortunately mild-ish.
But I remember back in January of 2020 when I and a colleague at work discussed it and started hypotheticals about how bad it would get. And in February I realised that it wasn’t going to just go away so I did a bit of prepping- and yes I was one of the reasons there wasn’t enough toilet paper at our local store. Also bought masks, blood oxygen checker and stuff like that just in case.
And then me, the wife and our son got knocked out by something that could have been Covid but in late February 2020 they were only testing people that hade travelled to the high risk areas since it wasn’t out in the wild in Sweden yet. They said. And then we went to the Swedish Eurovision finale with thousands of people crammed into an arena. Right after that the shit hit the fan and those events became unthinkable because by now it was officially out in the wild in Sweden too.
And even though we took precautions and we spent over a year doing our best to social distance and going out as little as possible, I was never really afraid that I wouldn’t make it if I did get it because.. statistics! My wife’s grandmother unfortunately died from it just a few weeks shy of her 90th birthday. But when Adam Alsing died from it I actually did get a bit nervous.
At work this was a disaster since we pretty much had to stop working. No one was allowed to travel so very little we could do. After a few months of furlough for most of the staff (except me that kept on working at 100%, but from home) they eventually had to cut down on the staff. A lot of people in my IT operations team, a few of which I considered friends, was let go but I made the cut. Unfortunately my wife didn’t make the cut and her job so she was unemployed for a few months before finding another job.
Fast forward to October and my sister got it. She works at a hospital so it was just a matter of time. And she got it bad – not bad enough for hospital but bad. I don’t think her sense of smell and taste is fully back yet! But I was mostly worried for my parents and for my other sister in Scotland with comorbidity.
The winter was uneventful as was spring of 2021. During the summer we had a “staycation” on Gotland during which I felt that my place of work had lost its appeal a bit after so many people had left and things were really slow and no one knew how long this would go on for, so I decide to look for another job and pretty quickly found one. And I also got the vaccine as fast as possible because I didn’t want to be worried about it all the time, I had lots of other medical things going on so one less to worry about.
During winter I started my new job and a few months into 2022 our son got a mild case of the flu but we kept him home just in case. And I was still working from home. And the week after I got symptoms so I ordered a test and yep, it was covid! I was knocked out and in bed for a few days but nothing bad. My wife got it after me but she had just taken her third dose so she was only knocked out for a day. So that was disappointingly uneventful but I guess we have the vaccine to thank for that. Go science!
As I mentioned in the last post I’ve been struggling with mental health during 2020 and 2021. After talking with my psychologist trying to explore exactly what it is it was pretty clear that the major cause behind it was me worrying about my health and lately also my son’s.
I don’t know if I watched too much “House” or if it’s the availability of information but I’ve been self diagnosing myself for years and most of the time it was harmless. But since summer of 2019 I’ve taken it up quite a few notches to the level that I got panic attacks over small things. It could be a pain in my arms, something with my breathing, it was always something terminal. Or something serious enough that I couldn’t work anymore or something like that. Unfortunately it didn’t stop there – I would keep playing out the scenario that would end with us losing the house and “what would my wife do if it really was terminal”, all those thoughts that I couldn’t help having and losing sleep over. It doesn’t help that I know on the intelligent level that it’s ridiculous, when my mind started racing away it was too late.
But it didn’t stop there, when I started doing the same every time my son complained about something being wrong that’s when it got totally out of control. In my defense – the doctors still haven’t diagnosed reasons behind some things. Then you add a pandemic on top of that and eventually I broke.
But seeing a professional and talking about it really helped. I got some tips how to try to control it, also some breathing exercises and I even tried happy pills for a while. And now I still find myself having these thoughts but I’m way better at controlling it, being able to distract my mind with something and it’s been quite a while since I lost sleep over it! And it helps that so far after some 15 examination (everything from MRI and a camera up my ass) no one has found anything serious wrong with me.
It’s been almost a year since my last update and there are a lot of reasons for that. The primary being I almost burnt myself out last year. And I changed jobs. And got covid. And stuff in the family.
But first thing first – how I almost burnt myself out from stress last year.
I pride myself in being efficient and optimising everything I do. This is required at work but when you start optimising how to empty the dishwasher it takes on a whole new level. And a few years ago my lovely wife almost got burnt out at her work, so we both try to be observant for one another when it comes to stress levels. And she’s told me that ever since we moved to our new house my stress levels have gone up and my mood gone down. Stupid male as I am I didn’t listen to her. But after 2 years of uncertainty at work thanks to a bankruptcy and covid, taking on extra on call duty to make more money, a year of panic attacks over my and my sons health (we’re fine!) and the life during the pandemic which cause agoraphobia, as well as a member of the family being very, very ill, after last summer I found myself in a meeting at work that I had organised and 10 minutes in I forgot where I was and what I was doing. My body had had enough. I had a meltdown in my head and took the rest of the week off. After trying to work 2 days the following week my body said “stop it” and I took 5 weeks off to get myself together. I sought medical help and met a psychologist for a few sessions and got a lot of help from my wife and eventually I made it back to work. But during this time I was also transitioning to a new job I managed to get and fortunately for me that job doesn’t require 24/7 on call duty and I’m starting fresh with no baggage or expectations of being a miracle worker which I had put on myself at my old work. So I’m going to set expectations low for myself at the new place but fortunately I won’t have to worry about us going out of business because of covid, heatwaves, airport chaos or any of the other things you have very little control over!
So to sum it up – I almost hit a brick wall but fortunately I had the help and means to stop it in time and I’m very grateful for my family and friends helping out because it would have ended very badly. And I have a newfound respect for mental health!
And my advice it simply – listen to your body. It will tell you way before it gets this far. I didn’t. And take things slowly. Go for a walk in a nature. Put your fork down between bites. Don’t try to get as much done as possible. Put your mobile away.
So we finally did it. We got solar panels installed on the roof.
I’ve been sceptical about it since our house is facing east/west and for the highest efficiency you want south facing roof. But it was explained to me that with a east/west roof you can put panels on both sides to get solar electricity from when the sun goes up until it goes down. It might not be as efficient per solar panel but when it comes to getting the most amount of hours out of your installation it’s actually pretty good even if you have to pay more for more panels.
And after this winter with very high electric bills, finding out some of that was imported “brown” electricity and also finding out we’d consume about 16,000kWh annually, we decided to give it a shot. So we invested about $20,000 for an installation that would generate about 8,500kWh per year and got a company to do the entire installation for us, from climbing on the roof to hooking it up, they handled it all.
And now, after less than three months it’s produced over 4,000kwh! Granted, those months have been June-July-August but still. Also the electric bill have so far been in the negative, meaning they actually owe us money!
So so far we’re pretty damn happy about it. Fortunately we don’t have to look at our own roof much 🙂
Yay – I ‘m finally fully vaccinated to combat covid19 should I get it!
During this entire pandemic I’ve been trying to be cautious – staying at home as much as possible, avoid crowded places, not going out to restaurants or anything like that, order things on the web, basically doing my best to limit the risk of getting covid. But at the same time you still want to live, not just survive right so there’s been a few exceptions. I’ve had to take my woman out to dinner a few times and we’ve had to go on a crowded boat to Gotland and so on. I haven’t been panicking about “oh my god I’ll die if I get it!”. I’ve followed the statistics and risk of dying and I’ve been countering them as best as I can. For example I’ve started to… exercise! Yeah I know, but when statistics show that the biggest contributing factor to sever Covid, besides age, is obesity then you bet I’m on that treadmill!
But now that I’m fully vaccinated, how much of this will change? Covid hasn’t gone away and the mask wearing is still a thing for me to protect others. So until the booster shot I think I’m still going to be somewhat conservative of being in crowded places.
As far as going back to work, the biggest issue there is the actual going to work. They still recommend people working from home and one of the reasons is to avoid crowded trains and buses and since I can’t take the car to work (way too expensive) that means I’ll be working from home until either told by my superior I can’t or the recommendation goes away in September. But I’ll miss it, even if I haven’t been as productive as I would have been at work it’s still been way better for us as a household with me being home more and not having to spend about 3 hours commuting.
Hey. It’s me. I know, it’s been a long, long time since I updated this place. But the past months have been pretty boring. Which considering everything that is happening is a good thing!
It got a bit depressing after summer when my wife lost her job and was unemployed for a while but she got a new job so that’s over and done with. But other than that we’re pretty much in a holding pattern until we get vaccinated (or infected) so we can start living again and society starting to open up. Because I’m pretty tired of our house by now after spending almost 12 months here. I’m one of the lucky ones that can do 99% of my job from home but that also means I don’t get out much. Or at all…
But so far we’ve been able to avoid getting covid19, the closest it has gotten was my sister that got symptoms day after she was here for an evening of F1. She had pretty rough 2 weeks and is still suffering a bit unfortunately even after 5 months!
So here’s hoping we can get vaccinated and start living again and people can start travelling so our company doesn’t go down as a result of this considering how much we’ve survived. Tsunami, ash clouds, bankruptcy, we beat them all!
Since I’ve worked for a charter company for a while now we’ve gone abroad to Spain, Greece or Turkey for the past decade or so. But given the current situation that wasn’t possible so we looked at around at some place to go in Sweden together with some friends. And we ended up with Daftö Resort – a camping resort on the west coast of Sweden which we hardly ever go to. So we booked a cabin from Thursday to Sunday and packed the car for a 6 hour road trip and off we went!
We made a quick stop in Mariestad to eat lunch and were happily surprised by the local restaurant “Kingfisher”, that Google suggested. Then some ice cream and off we went again.
When we arrived and tried checking in they looked at me like I was the town idiot. Which of course I was because we had booked Friday -> Monday! So there we were, outside Strömstad on the west coast with nowhere to stay! 4 calls later we had 2 rooms booked at a local “spa resort” which was a pretty damn good hotel. But they clearly didn’t care for the covid restrictions like “no hanging around the bars” so I wasn’t too comfortable there.
After spending the night there we went into Strömstad to explore what this coastal city had to offer. And there were some nice vistas and atmosphere and we even started fishing for some crabs down in the harbor. Not to eat though, just for fun!
Then back to Daftö resort and we were allowed to checking and get comfortable in our rather large 8 person cabin. Unfortunately they had some covid restrictions here that mostly applied to how many people could be in the pool area at any given time but we managed to get a spot to get some pool action but you can clearly see that people weren’t too concerned about covid here. Safe to say I wasn’t jumping in when it looked like this!
Another covid thing was that they had shut down their little ammusement park which was really sad for our kids. Even though we had told them it was closed so they didn’t mind much but we knew how much more fun they would have had with there. But I fully support them not having it open given the current situation.
What was open was their crazy golf course. And it was really, really good. Nice designs and themes, well maintained and if it wasn’t for the queuing I’d say it was perfect. I wait, we were at the front of the queue all the time! Unfortunately the restaurants at Daftö left a bit to be desired but I guess for a camping site it’s ok – we all got something to eat and it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t up to our standards of “going out”.
We also got some time bathing in the sea and just kicking back in the cabin enjoying a few beers and I have to say that cabin was awesome – it had everything we needed and more (didn’t expect wifi!). We also tried some more restaurants in Strömstad and I can recommend the tapas restaurant “Il Toro” – but stick to the tapas. Not only was the tapas really good but the waiter even made a movie reference based off my wifes T-shirt that even I didn’t get, so kudos for that!
Then on Sunday it was time to pack up the cars and go back home. 6 hour drive back then unpacking and settling in to try to enjoy the F1 race from Silverstone. Which is hard since the Mercs are 1 sec faster than anyone else.
So that sums up our vacation for this year. Which was fun but also sad we didn’t do it more because our son really had fun without a computer!
I’m unfortunately not talking about that episode of Star Trek DS9 – it’s life in general right now. Not only is there a global pandemic that is crippling society and tanking our company and already caused my wife to lose her grandmother and her job.. now we got cancer in the family as well.
So now I’m gonna be one of those people who say – FUCK CANCER! Fuck it hard!!! Statistically it’s kind of amazing my family has been spared this long and I always assumed it would hit me because… well, not only am I the most expendable of the lot (in my opinion), I also live my life the least healthiest with all the chemical stuff I put in my body not to mention the red meat and then some lack of physical activities on top of that and sitting in front of a computer all day long, I thought it was a given! This fear is why I’m going to our local doctor so much and why I’ve have had two MRI scans in the past year. Both came back negative. But our luck had to run out.
We’re thinking of you and hoping for the best and let me know if there’s anything I can do!
So how are you handling this Corona thing?
Back in January even I thought China would manage to contain it. Neither the previous outbreaks had any major impact on life as I knew it. Even in the middle of the SARS outbreak I flew to Singapore without much hesitation because I had a job to do. But when we saw them building a hospital in what can only be described as panic I realised this would get out of hand. And boy did it ever!
But it didn’t take long for our CDC (“Folkhälsomyndigheten”, or “FOHM” for short) to tell people to work from home if possible. Which I gladly did and I’ve been to the office maybe four times in as many months. And working from home definitely has its challenges that I’ll make a separate post about. But I was still hoping it’d blow over rather quickly so we could all go back to normal but “little did I know” right…
In the middle of March my wife’s grandmother fell victim to our society’s failure to protect the elderly and she passed away which was a big shock to everyone because she was quite the iron lady and we thought that after a week of not getting worse that she’d pull through but unfortunately not.
So we, as in our family unit of 3, started doing our best to minimize the exposure. Not seeing as many people, not going out on many trips or excursions and staying home as much as possible. But the cabin fever of being home this much, especially when working from home, is rather intense and I’m so thankful that FOHM hasn’t instituted a lockdown in Sweden!
But by early April everyone realised how bad this situation was and all companies that were effected by this were allowed to give their employees a paid furlough – working from 20, 40, 60 or even 80% while retaining most of the salary. I wasn’t effected by this as I’m apparently that vital to our IT ops but most of my colleagues went down to 40% or less. And it also effected my wife’s work since people aren’t going out for coffee that much and B2B sales got hurt by everyone working from home so she went from working 5 days per week to 2. Which meant that for 3 days she was home while I was working from home which made it even more interesting.
In early June we finally got tested for antibodies which was negative so as it turns out, we just had the normal flu back in February.
Unfortunately that wasn’t sustainable and eventually there had to be downsizing. I survived the first round of layoffs but my wife didn’t so she’s soon out of a job. That sucks, not only because she’s unemployed but because this was a job where she worked with a product she loves – coffee.
But so far we’re in good health. Well more or less anyway, we’re not suffering from Covid at least. But I know 6 people that have had it and 3 of them are still suffering from fatigue, shortness of breath and heart arrhythmia, scary stuff to say the least so I’d rather sit this one out.
So right now we’re still doing the best we can in little family unit, limiting our exposure, shopping as much online as possible and trying not to go out unless we have to.
As you may know, I worked for the Nordic part of the Thomas Cook Group. I was the O365 admin for a tenant with over 30,000 user accounts. And we ran the Azure AD Connect service for the entire group and had just moved to pass-through authentication with Seamless SSO. Although it was a royal pain sometimes to work in such a large company where even a minor change could take weeks to implement and get approval for from everywhere.
As you may also know, Thomas Cook Group filed for bankruptcy in October last year. And there was no advanced warning or anything about what was going to happen next. But for our part, we realised that we would (if the company survived) most likely be moving our Nordic business to a new O365 tenant so we began planning for that. Over the next few months a lot of stuff happened. The Nordic part of the group was sold off and started their own company NLTG and the old group was shutting down all parts of their business. Except the German part because they were backed by their government so they survived (more on that later).
When we got back after the Christmas break we were given a clear order to evacuate the tenant before end of February. Since we were a separate company and legal entity we were no longer entitled to share the old tenant which, even though it makes sense, pretty much lit a torch under our asses to get this done now. And we realised it wouldn’t be a pretty or a smooth operation, as I recall saying, “this is going to take a sledgehammer, not a scalpel!”. Fortunately I’m very used to sledgehammer my way to getting results. Yeap, thinking back to that SharePoint upgrade that was all over the place!
So there we were, less than 8 weeks to pull off a migration with 3,000 users, 5,500 mailboxes, 10TB of SharePoint data, 8TB of OneDrive data and 12TB of Exchange data. And this is how it went…
Identities : The building block of any good tenant is the identities. When we first planned for the migration our plan was to have a new on-prem AD that would be fed by.. well that’s irrelevant since there was no time for that. The only way forward was to use our existing on-prem AD. But the problem was that MSFT doesn’t support syncing your on-prem identities to two tenants. Why? I have no idea – I fully get how you wouldn’t want that in a production environment (since the UPN domain can only be valid in one tenant) but for a migration like this it would have solved a lot of headaches if we were allowed to do it like that. But nope, we really wanted to have Microsoft support for this. And we also had to retain our e-mail domains since we’re heavily dependant on the brand which is almost as Swedish as Ikea, at least in Sweden. So that presented us with the first big problem – pre-populating the new tenant with 3,000 user objects so we could start copying the data and when it was time to migrate and then play around with the UPN domains so the matching would work. But the first step was creating the 3,000 users as cloud only “onmicrosoft” accounts. This was done using powershell to export as much info on the users as possible (including “usagelocation” and “preferredlanguages” since we’re an org with offices from Thailand to Mexico!) and then powershell to recreate the users as closely as possible. Another step we had to take here was setting up a filter in Azure AD Connect that would only sync users to each tenant depending on the value of an extensionattribute. That way we could make sure no user was synced to both tenants at any time, although it did take alot of tinkering to get that logic working but fortunately Microsoft have documented how to do attribute filtering, so thanks for that.
Authentication: Remember how I said we’d just gone over to PTA for the old tenant? Well this little thing meant that as long as users were logging in to the old tenant (which we knew the Germany company would) we couldn’t use PTA for our users since it’s all based around a computer object in the AD forest with a Kerberos encryption key that’s tied to the tenant! So if we set up PTA for our new tenant that would change the key on the computer object and they wouldn’t be able to login anymore! So to solve this we did a “quick and dirty” setup of a temporary AD FS for our users to use based on domain. This was a surprisingly easy thing to do in Windows Server 2019 but it was an added “gotcha!” of this entire scenario!
SharePoint : The first problem with SharePoint was to determine which sites were relevant to keep and which weren’t. Our entire SharePoint was well over 20TB so we had to make sure to only copy over sites we knew were relevant to the Nordics business. But there’s no way of determining that without going through all the underlying permissions and groups to determine if “our” users are working on the site or not. It’s not like you can ask SharePoint to “give me all the sites that any user with the UPN domain @domain.se is working on”. Or maybe there is, I just didn’t have the knowledge to write that powershell at the time. Once that was done we used ShareGate to migrate all the SharePoint data. The biggest fear was that it wouldn’t be able to match the old identities with the new ones – which it did! I’m pretty sure it went by “DisplayName” to match them but we’re just very very thankful it did because that would have been a mess to sort out. The biggest issue I had with ShareGate was how unpredictable it was when it came to doing incremental copies, which was done through powershell. We split it up on 4 different servers with about 80 sites per server. Sometimes it could complete them all in 2 hours, sometimes it took 8 hours for one server, sometimes longer. During the weekend of the actual move it took well over 12 hours to complete which caused me a bit of unnecessary stress.
OneDrive : Since we already had a pretty nice “masterlist” of users that we would be migrating it was pretty easy to setup a CSV file to map “Old OneDrive -> New OneDrive” that we then used ShareGate to copy. That went pretty nicely although there were some instances of data not being copied over so we had to sort that our after the switch and people were missing a few files. Other than that the issue was the same as above – it was very unpredictable and I had to mess around with the queues on the weekend of the switch. We had one incident of a users OneDrive being almost empty but looking back at the old OneDrive is was empty too. So our theory there is that his OneDrive client must’ve been paused so we had to send that computer to the lab for data recovery – but that’s not ShareGates fault one bit!
Exchange : Oh joy! I was in charge of the Nordics business moving from on-prem to Online 3 years ago so I wasn’t looking forward to another move at all. After doing a quick check around for what tool to use (with our extremely limited budget – our company had gone bankrupt and we were still getting back on our feets!). It ended up being CodeTwo which was by far the cheapest alternative. But as the saying goes “you get what you paid for” and in this instance we paid for a software to move data from Mailbox A in Tenant X to Mailbox A in Tenant Y. And it did that job without much of an issue. There were still a lot of things to sort out around the move (like transport rules, conference rooms) but the big issue was just moving all the data. The biggest issue I had with that software was that they didn’t have a CSV import function when moving tenant->tenant! When moving on-prem -> tenant that wasn’t an issue, but tenant -> tenant, well the only way to enter a mailbox was to actually manually enter a mailbox! So we spent days entering 5,500 mailboxes and matching them with their new mailbox. A simply CSV import would’ve saved us days of work on this. My next issue with the software was when we were up to about 800 mailboxes per server on 7 servers, that really slowed the UI down. At the end it was so slow that when you started a queue for a incremental copy the UI would stop responding and you didn’t even know it was working until it was done and it just popped alive again.
Teams: Now Teams was the most interesting bit. Because Teams is based on so many technologies it was difficult to do a proper Teams migration. No matter how far we looked we just couldn’t find a tool that would migrate Teams with the channel/chats that also took the entire underlying SharePoint site! If you had other document libraries or data on the SharePoint site, then that was lost if you migrated the Team. But if you migrated the SharePoint site you will have lost the data in Teams that wasn’t in the default document library! So we made the choice of migrating the SharePoint sites since noone should have have posted anything business critical in a chat in a channel in Teams. Fortunately ShareGate comes with the ability to recreate O365 groups so all the groups got recreated and we only had to make the ones that were Teams into Teams manually, that was it. But it was a bit of a “unexpected behaviour” for ShareGate when it came to legacy sites (that were migrated from on-prem) that now had an O365 group, it simply wouldn’t recognise them as O365 groups or O365 Group sites and created them as legacy sites in the new tenant regardless. But that was easy enough to handle afterwards.
Licenses: This was another headache but fortunately not mine! Since our old license agreement with Microsoft was tied to our old company we couldn’t use that. And since our company was brand new we had no credit score anywhere so Microsoft couldn’t just hand us 3,000 licenses and hope we’d pay. After a lot of back and forth we managed to get the licenses in place well enough to start the migration and begin copying all that data. But there was still the matter of support contract with Microsoft. There was alot of options floating around to try different support alternatives but in the end we agreed on a premiere support deal with Microsoft. Even though the paperwork got sorted and we were told on Friday January 31st that everything was done and we now had premiere support with MSFT it turns out that like a lot of things in O365, sometimes it can take a day or two for the wheels to turn and you’ll see how critical this became for us.
Additional headache: One headache we had was that we’re not only running a normal business, we’re also running an airline. And the pilots must be able to check their e-mail for any notices and warnings from the aviation authorities before takeoff. This may include stuff like “this aircraft model isn’t flight worthy so don’t fly this aircraft model” and “Iran just shot down a civilian aircraft, avoid their airspace”. Things like that is absolutely critical for the pilots to check for, so saying “e-mail will be down for a day” is completely unacceptable from that perspective. And we were supposed to retain all the e-mail domains, and a domain can only exist in one tenant at a time. So we had to figure out a way to handle this and move their accounts and e-mail domain as quickly as possible to avoid any flight delays because their e-mails isn’t working. (spoiler – their email was down for 90 minutes)
The plan: So the best plan we came up with was to start an incremental copy of all the SharePoint/OneDrive data first thing on the morning of Saturday February 1st. Then at about 18:00 CET we’d set automatic forwarding on everyone’s mailbox in the old tenant that would forward every mail to their new mailbox with the “onmicrosoft” address. That way we were guaranteed no mail would go missing in case of bad timings. Then we did an incremental copy of all mailboxes. We had done this in plenty of tests and it would only take 2 hours so we planned to start with the first most important domain for our airline at 21:00 CET, then when that was done continue with the largest domain we had (with about 800 users) and work our way through our list of about 10 domains.
The switch consisted of alof of steps since we weren’t allowed to sync an on-prem object to two tenants.
But… “no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force“.
How it played out: I woke up early on Saturday (at about 5) to start incremental copy of all the SharePoint / OneDrive data. Unfortunately Sharegate was a bit unpredictable in it’s behaviour so I had to move sites around in the queues to make it before 18:00 but make it I did. Then I ran the powershell to set the automatic forwarding and started the incremental copy of the mail. The team (4 engineers, 1 external SME/contractor and the project manager) met up at the office at about 20:00 in the evening for pizza and a last “go-no go” check for everything. And at 21:00 I started with our airline domain And by 22:30 it was all done, every user had the proper UPN, licens, login everything was good to go. And that’s when it started – the operations team in our airline said they couldn’t access their emails in the Outlook app on their phones or computers. We had ofcourse verified that it worked through the O365 portal so we knew everything worked. After troubleshooting this for about an hour we decided to log a Severity A case with Microsoft (at 23:30) and one of us would work on this case and the rest continue working with the other domains. That work with the other domains came to a halt for one of our largest domains which wasn’t removed from the ole tenant. No user had it in their UPN, no recipient used the domain, nothing. But the domain never got deleted, it was stuck in “pending”. So another severity A case to Microsoft (at about 00:30) and we proceeded with the next domain. At about 02 in the morning that domain did eventually go away by itself and we thought everything was good when our airline operations team (who’s responsibility it is to keep the planes flying, so I have the utmost respect for them and their challenges!) wanted us to do a rollback and try again at a later date. We spent about an hour with them arguing than a rollback wouldn’t solve this issue and we didn’t have time to try again next week since we had to evacuate the old tenant. Another argument was that this is a client issue and the mails are accessible through the web and we can get Microsoft to solve the client issue after. Fortunately we were able to convince them to proceed but now we’re at 03 int he morning and I had been working for 22 hours straight and I had no energy left in me so I tried sleeping for a bit. After 2 hours I woke up to cheers because now the Outlook clients in our airlines started to work so the biggest issue we had was solved and we could keep on with the remaining few domains.
At about lunch on Sunday morning we were all done with all domains and users and started to do the clean up job of on-prem systems no one knew about that had a EWS configured to the old tenant that no longer worked etc and that continued for days.
So where was Microsoft in this? As I mentioned our premier support deal with them got activated on the day before the switch. But that hadn’t replicated to all systems and instances of those systems in Microsoft so there was a big challenge even to get them to accept a SevA case from us. But we had two cases that managed to register as SevA cases with them during this switch and they weren’t helping us with either of them. The first case was regarding Outlook clients no longer being able to connect. Many blogs on many sites on the Internet says “when moving to a new tenant this may take a few hours”. In our case we were already up to hours and when creating new users we were able to connect to them immediately, but not the ones that had been switched and we didn’t see a reason why. This started to resolve itself after about 6 hours. And it wasn’t thanks to Microsoft doing anything on their side because they called me at about 5:30 on the sunday morning to say “sorry but we still haven’t been able to find any engineer to work on this case”. The other case we had with them was regarding the domain that wasn’t getting deleted. The called back on that issue also after it was resolved to ask us to verify the domain name because according to what they were seeing the domain was no longer in the old tenant so they obviously hadn’t done anything on their end in that case either.
Lessons learned:
I don’t consider myself a huge Queen or Freddie Mercury fan – I was unfortunately too young in the 80’s for that. But I do love their music! I don’t think there’s any other band that have more songs that I love than Queen, not even ABBA. And I love 80’s music in general. So when there was talks about a Freddie Mercury / Queen movie I loved the idea of it but I was always sceptical any actor would be able to do a good Freddie. And when Rami Malek, who is awesome in Mr. Robot, was cast I was even more sceptical. Then the movie came out with all kinds of great reviews. But it took me this long to actually take the time away from work and everything in life to go and see it.
And I liked it. I liked it a lot! I even liked Rami as Freddie, he obviously did a lot of research on the moves and Freddie’s style. And with the sunglasses it was actually a very good resemblance. And since I’m not that big a fan that I know all stories and band-moments it’s difficult to know how much of the movie is factually correct but since both Roger Taylor and Brian May were credited as producers (and yes I even spotted their cameos) I guess it can’t be too far off the truth. And I know they took a lot of liberties with the timeline so they could build up the Live Aid show as the movie’s crescendo and Freddie’s redemption, I’m all ok with that. I mean I love Braveheart even though it has more holes than Al Powell’s car at Christmas.
So what was my problem with it? Two words – “false” and “advertisement”.
In the press material for the movie and on the poster there is this image:
And that is indeed an iconic photograph of Freddie at Wembley. But it was taken at their concert in July 1986 – a concert I happen to think is one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen (even though I’ve only seen it on DVD), even including the concerts I’ve actually seen live this one takes the gold. But as I wrote – the movie’s crescendo and ending is the Live Aid concert in 1985, one year earlier. So this poster is for an event that happened after the movie’s ending and never appears in the film! That’s most definitely false advertisement.
But if you know me, if that is my only gripe with the movie, then it’s a pretty damn good movie 🙂
Me and the wife celebrated 10 years a few months back. And one of the things I had planned was going to see Ed Sheeran in Stockholm since she likes his music and the timing was pretty good. So I made sure to be there when tickets went up for sale last year and got two tickets and last Saturday was the day of the concert. And the result was … we’re too old for this!!
First of all, entry was at 6:30. I made jokes “the guy probably isn’t gonna go on until 9!”. I was wrong – he went up about 8:40 so off by 20 minutes. So spending 2 hours listening to pre-show / opening stuff is “as intended” I guess? And whoever organised the event should have planned a bit better and planned for the roof to be open for the event as it’s July!! The temperature was about 35 degrees in there by the end of the night. And after the concert there was a traffic mayhem to get out of there because they had blocked off most streets which congested everything. So instead of the usual 20 minutes from MoS -> home it took us about 1 1/2 hours.
“Well, what about the show itself”? .. well I’m not a big fan of his, even though I enjoy some of his songs and lyrics. I compared it to going to the movies to see a romantic comedy – It’s wouldn’t be my first choice, but I’ll do it with the wife and I’m bound to get at least some enjoyment out of it! But this show was really different than what I expected. The guy even tried rapping a few times! And no sign of Supermarket Flowers either.
But my biggest issue was the volume. I know, I know, concerts are loud. But this was way well beyond “loud”. I already have tinnitus on my right ear thanks to me underestimating the volume at a Röyksopp / Moby concert back in 2002. So I made sure to buy earplugs before the concert to try to make sure that didn’t happen again. And my ear is still ringing!! I honestly don’t get where the enjoyment is when the music is so loud it hurts my ears even with earplugs !? Yes, you want to feel the bass in your chest but I get that from my home cinema that never gave me a ringing in my ear! It just makes no sense!! Even in between songs when he was talking it was so loud I couldn’t hear what he was saying half the time. And this is completely accepted and expected today!? I really don’t get it!!!
The one good thing I can say is I was impressed that he handled the stage alone in front of 50 000 people superbly and his way of creating musical loops with his pedals was quite funny and unexpected. And I liked it!
This is going to be a wall of text. And 99% of the people I know aren’t even interested. But I’m writing this on behalf of every other SharePoint admin out there who are unfortunate enough to discover just how easy SharePoint is to break!
Little background: I’ve been working with SharePoint since about 2005. Not that long for some but long enough to know that after a few years of use a SharePoint farm has a few quirks in it and it’s a good idea to upgrade it. And you never upgrade an existing farm, you always start with a new fresh one and import all data! Now one of my jobs (!) is managing a 30k user corporate SharePoint – a business critical solution since all documentation are in there. And not only that, our entire BI solution is in there as well, complete with “PowerPivot” and “Reporting Services for SharePoint”… No pressure!
So now it was time to upgrade it from SP2013/SQL2014 to SP2016/SQL2016, including all BI solutions. We’ve gone through a “dev” environment, a “test” environment and even a “preprod” environment and everything went surprisingly well. There was ofcourse the usual glitches getting the BI features to work (and the S2S cert trust that is required for Excel with data source connection files now that Excel service moved out of SP to OOS!). But anyway, the preprod farm was so great that the plan was to take it into production. Our BI team didn’t see a big problem doing that in an afternoon on a weekday, whereas for me the biggest problem was the 1.5TB of data that needed to be shuffled and upgraded. And “even the best laid plans”, you know. I also knew that one of the biggest issue was network infrastructure which for a global company is so complex that the best way forward was to swap IP addresses of the servers so we wouldn’t have to change DNS or static IP routes anywhere, we’d just solve it at the load balancer level. So I managed to get a whole Saturday from the business to have SharePoint offline, but no more. After all, all documentation is in there!
That Saturday was last Saturday April 14th. I got up at 4am to start shuffling the data. By 7 that was done and I started upgrading the database with the normal “mount-spcontentdatabase”. Here was my first mistake (in hindsight). I had already written a script to do this, but that’ll come later. By 10 everything was loaded, upgraded and I proceeded to change IP addresses around and change it in the load balancer, then go through my long list of checks that normal user SP functionality works while our BI team were updating all of their things.
After lunch we had a “go/no-go” meeting and everything looked good. I also noticed at this point I had a case to create a new SharePoint site for a project, something I actually hadn’t tested since that’s not a “normal user SP functionality”. And that’s when the shit hit the fan! What I had missed thanks to my scripting was that one of the content databases had failed to upgraded and was now corrupt and when I wanted to create a new site it did it in that database since it was the “least used” and hence the error. “No problem, plan a) I’ll just delete this database”, right? Nope, SharePoint wouldn’t have it because the database wasn’t attached since it was corrupt. Yet I could see the sites in that database listed with get-spsite?
Tried a few things but couldn’t recover so I decided plan b) remove the web app and create a new and re-import/re-mount this corrupt DB, all other DB’s were already upgraded successfully so not a big operation. Well, SharePoint wouldn’t have that either – it couldn’t dismount this database because it was corrupt so I couldn’t remove the webapp! I was completely stuck with a broken web app that I couldn’t remove because of a content database that wasn’t mounted?!
So plan C) rename that webapp with the corrupt database and give it a nonsense URL so I could create a new web app with the proper URL. That seemed to work but when I tried importing a new backup of this content DB it didn’t import any of the site collections! .. digging around I could see that the sites in the broken webapp, with the new nonsense URL, still had the original URL! It couldn’t update them because… there was no content DB attached to them! I dug around in SharePoint Manager (which was designed for 2013 I know) but it kept crashing when I clicked any of the sites in the broken webapp.
So there I was with a broken web app with a corrupt contentdb with sites occupying the URL I needed to create our proper web app. Came to the conclusion that the config db was pretty much fucked at this point at now we’re at 2pm. Best option available to me at this point was calling Microsoft premiere support case with a severity A case. I’m pretty sure if I had gone for that they would have looked at it, made the same determination as me and said “since this is a farm not yet in production, I’d say the best way forward is to recreate the farm”. During that time our BI would be in SharePoint 2016 but the “big” web app in 2013 on separate IP addresses! God knows how the network would handle that and getting the engineers in India to change firewall routes in less than a week wasn’t that likely. Because rebuilding a new farm in production would take at least a week, right?…
After clearing it with my supervisor that this was indeed the best way to solve it NOW! All other options led to some unknown hellhole – going back was always a possibility no matter what.
I got a green light and Red Bull at about 3pm …
Basically I had done at least a weeks work in 7 hours and all in production environment!
The “Done!” mail got out at 9pm! Now I’m not one to brag, but any SharePoint admin must be impressed by that! Hell, even Scotty would be proud! I spent a few hours on Sunday cleaning up the mess and sorting out the BI issues (since this was a new farm there were a lot of BI configuration that was lost) but by Sunday 6pm everything was fully operational and I promptly went to be and slept like a baby. And one of the first things to hit me on Monday morning was “why is Managed Metadata empty” because yeah, in my haste I forgot that little thing ?
How was your weekend?
It’s been 10 years since me and my wife met. It’s been an unexpected ride that I’m incredibly happy I took a chance on!
Wind back the clock about 10 years and I was living very happily alone (but not lonely!) in my apartment in Visättra. My life was computer games (mostly WoW), movies, TV, F1 and my family in Nynäshamn. And the job at the lawfirm. Everything was great and I didn’t feel like I needed a girlfriend or live with some other person, I had way too many “special” habits to live with another person for long especially a girl. But I was still signed up to some dating sites and had the odd date or two. But then a mail dropped in through Parship from this chick who I just loved the way she wrote and expressed herself, she was funny, she was honest and open and the “straight to the point” kind of person I can really dig. So we set a date after work, hooked up and just walked around in Stockholm for a while, only stopping quickly to grab a coffee. Then I tried kissing her goodbye (DENIED!) and off she went. But I felt and knew this was something special so when I got home that night I ordered her flowers. Nice and romantic right? It was my way of saying “I don’t mind getting turned down for a kiss, I really dig you and I wanna meet again”. Little did I consider the fact that she works in “logistics”, which is a very male dominated area so when her male co-workers saw she got flowers the day after she’d been on a first date they jumped to conclusions! Anyway, a few days later she decided (without telling me!) to test how allergic I was to her cats by inviting me home to her place! Fortunately for me it wasn’t a big problem and after passing that test we went to see a terrible movie (“Jumper”) and made out a bit. And then we met a a few days a week but eventually I felt it was “do or die” and moved in with her after only 6 months. Yeah, I know, crazy but that’s how perfect this relationship felt. And 4 months after that we signed on for a house together. And 3 months after that we were pregnant. And the hits kept on coming!
It’s been a few lows here and there but as I see this has gone way better than I could have hoped for and I can just hope it keeps going that way because I’m having a blast!
Last weekend we had booked a room at the B&B at “Kastellet” at Vaxholm. That’s an old fortress on a very small island. It was used to fend off invaders in the archipelago but now it’s mostly a tourist site. But because of the extreme weather we had in Sweden last week there wasn’t anyone there during the weekend. At all! Not even the staff who had given us the code and put out the key for us for a room. So we had the entire place to ourselves! And it was absolutely amazing!!
So here’s hoping for another awesome 10,20, 30 or even 40 years!!
K mår bättre än bra
Yeah, I don’t know why but NASA has a special place in my heart. Maybe cause I’m a tech nerd, a scifi geek or just like to have my shit together, or maybe it’s some visionary part of me I don’t know I have but I just love it. In everything from fictional NASA in “Contact” to proper NASA in “From the Earth to the Moon” it’s an inspiration. That’s one of the reasons I made a point at going to Kennedy Space Centre when I was in Florida and one of the reasons that trip was an awesome success to me. And one of the reasons I didn’t have a problem opening up my wallet in the gift shop!
And yesterday I saw the movie/documentary “Mission Control” – about those 20-something engineers that made up the mission control team. I really recommend catching it on Netflix or renting it on bluray cause it’s awesome. One of the things that surprised me was the interview with one of the engineers who was there in the trench for a lot of the Apollo missions, even the moon landing, that said he regretted doing it because of the toll it took on his family! I mean, it’s one of the things I can only dream of doing so hearing that makes you wonder what really is important – making a mark in history or being with your family.
Another NASA “merchandise” I can recommend is the book “View From Above” by austronaut and “photographer in space” Terry Virts. You can get it from Amazon or something but it’s well worth it. Not only because of the awesome pictures that makes you feel tiny and insignificant but also because of the stories he has to tell.
How can I make that statement this of all years, when the best Assasins Creed “in years” launched, best “Star Wars” game ever, sequal to “Shadow of Mordor”, a WWII “Call of Duty” and oh so many other great titles come out!? Well, bare with me…
You know I’ve always been a gamer, right? Ever since my dad dragged home the first “portable” computer in the 80’s and we were playing that terrible olympic Decathlon game, through the Commodore series (VIC20 -> C64 -> Amiga) all the way up till now, I’ve always played computer games. Never been much for consoles though but that’s a different story. And playing games have been pretty much the same for most of that time. But when “World of Warcraft” launched back in 2004 it was… a subscription!? $60 to buy the game plus $10 per month!? Well they pushed out content on content so I thought that was ok. Think I paid about $1300 for “World of Warcraft” all in all. That was for over 10 years of entertainment, pretty sweet deal if you ask me!
And being a Blizzard fanboy I’ve gone through their “Heroes of the Storm” and “Overwatch” too. One thing I never really liked about those games was the lootboxes. I didn’t mind it much, I even bought a HotS lootbox pack once, but I can’t say I liked it. But in Overwatch it was always just skins which made it more ok than in HotS when it was actual characters you needed. But I never actually bought HotS for $60 so still fine (I’ll give them a pass on the D3 AH because they took it down and said “our bad”). Then there’s been “gold edition” of games and DLC packs and stuff like that that ads value over time, but it’s always been optional.
But now it’s just getting a bit much. Like most other gamers out there I am so very frustrated at the new schemes coming out of Ubisoft, Activision and most of all EA. Ubisoft has had “cosmetic” items for purchase a while for both “Assasins Creed” and “Division” but nothing more than that. Now it’s changing and it’s affecting gameplay! The most recent and extreme example of this is Battlefront II. With their way of pushing lootboxes on consumers I absolutely won’t be paying $60 for that game! Maybe I’ll pick it up next year on Black Friday sale, I dunno, but paying $60 for game where I have to grind grind and grind to even play characters that should be there out of the box?! Or you can buy lootboxes for more money! Really!? And then EA releases Need for Speed with… “speedcards” that you can fast-progress by buying lootboxes! Another game I was absolutely planning to already be playing was the new Mordor game (“Shadow of War”). But oh no, they had to go ruin that game too with in game store to buy Orcs. Yeah, buy Orcs in a game for real money!
And they even have the balls to call it “microtransaction”, you know like the “micrtransaction” for a Android app that cost like $1? No, because here we’re talking about getting 20 lootboxes for $60 – as much as the f*cking game costs! And don’t come with any “but games have been $60 for ages now!” because yeah, they have, and have the profit of any publisher gone down because of that? No, they’ve made more and more money every year! Look at “Cuphead” that cost like $20 which is turning out to be one of the best games all year! No, games don’t have to cost $100 million to make! You don’t have the PR push it that bad if it’s good enough, you don’t have to have 1000 song in the music library like GTA!!
What makes this even worse is that in some of these cases you’re not even buying the thing you want – your paying FOR A CHANCE at the thing you want! You may get the Orc you want, but you may end up with nothing. You may get the power up for your Heavy stormtrooper, or you might get a silly emote! It’s gambling and feeding on addiction and it’s loathsome and everyone should be ashamed of it. I know I am and I’m not even buying or playing those games! The irony is that Battlefront 2 is made by DICE – a Swedish studio. And the government in Sweden are pretty strict when it comes to gambling. Pretty strict as in “only government run gambling is allowed!”. Yeah, someone should maybe look into this! (and not the ESRB, that’s like Donald Trump saying his son is a good person!)
The last game I bought was Assasins Creed Origin which came out a few weeks ago. And so far I haven’t run into much lootboxes or “pay to get this über gear” yet, if you don’t count the gold edition addons. But looking at the horizon, I have no idea what I’m actually willing to buy even though there are plenty of games I should love to buy and play but my moral compass really gets in the way.
Fortunately people are rising up and raging against the machine. Just youtube “lootboxes” and you’ll find tons of videos on the topic. Or you may have seen the news that EA’s reply on reddit regarding Battlefront 2 progression is the most “thumbs down” comment ever on reddit?