Bart's Blog

We did some skinny dipping & bbq-ing.

2008-07-22T06:07:00.001-07:00

We went out for some more skinny dipping as the weather was really nice and sunny, we seized the opportunity to BBQ as well. It's actually allowed to BBQ out in the open in Sweden so this was quite nice :)

The swedes were adamant that this was dirty water, despite the fact it some of the cleanest I've ever seen (you can see down for at least 1,5 meters just standing next to it, and it tastes fresh).

David rescued the ball which had inconveniently ended up in the water after we finished swimming.

Chilling on the couch watching "In Bruges".

Fireworks

2008-07-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

We went to see the fireworks over Trollhättan yesterday evening and got some burgers after, the fireworks were quite nice!

We SWEmmed we did!

2008-07-20T12:24:00.000-07:00

The water was "baltic" but it was fun also some brave people (Roy, David, Sofi & Ben) jumped off the bridge which was about 5 meters (or 2.5 Liche's) high in to the water. Afterwards we had some ice cream. As usual I made pictures.

Sunday.

2008-07-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

So we somehow survived the Saturday evening, and people are collectively suffering from hangovers again, we went out to get some pizza for breakfast and we plan to go swimming in a bit.

But just to recap yesterday, epic amounts of drink were consumed and people who shall remain unnamed apparently needed to be carried up the stairs (yours truly was fast asleep on the couch though when this happened) in order to make it to their sleeping accommodations.

Sofi went for a new hairstyle which can be admired here (the guy next to her is the glorious iron fisted dictator that rules OO). Anyway we had our usual loads of fun and I have more pictures to proof it!

No inspiration to write but i have pictures!

2008-07-19T12:34:00.001-07:00

Ben just turned nineteen.

2008-07-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

How often do you get "Happy Birthday" song to you in four languages?

Random update because it's fun here!

2008-07-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

We had pizza's, Ilin & David arrived and I have pictures! :) Oh there's an evil killer bunny too...

In Trollhattan

2008-07-18T08:25:00.000-07:00

Went into town for a bit this afternoon and we decided to eat something at a little bistro, turned out it was ran by some Turkish people who did not really understand any English add up to that the fact that our SWE!? isn't all that amazing and you can imagine that initial communication was a little hard. Eventually this was fixed by the Turkish lady phoning her daughter who did speak English handing the phone to Pix and communicating that way, minutes later the daughter actually walked into to the shop and acted as interpreter which was good cause the food was well nice in the end (and cheap unlike everything else in this country).

During our epic adventure Steve & Ben encountered Foxpersonman who they had been wanting to meet their entire lives, see the smiles of pure and undiluted bliss upon their faces when their childhood fantasy was finally fulfilled.
(Foxperson man seems quite amicable with Steve notice the location of his hand and the fact that Steve's zipper is half-unzipped, I reckon he needs to go on your hit list Georgie...)

Also we restocked today as Morani & Maddok will be arriving tonight after Steinmeister & Moone already arrived earlier today. Dan & Haley have sadly left us today an returned to the insignificant rainy island of the west coast of my glorious mother country.

Karp makes amazing pasta!

2008-07-17T10:21:00.001-07:00

Karp made us amazing pasta! It had pasta and bacon and cream and cheese and it was amazing.

Yummy in my tummy.

Also I'm not drinking tonight cause I need to actually survive :)

BBQ with SWEese

2008-07-17T03:08:00.000-07:00

So we had a BBQ which was well nice, we had sausages, chicken, pig and a really big slice of pig and some veggie burgers for our illustrious leader and salads of course as a bonus there was stuff with cucumber, garlic and yoghurt that I forgot the name of but it was created by Sofi!

The other thing was the arrival of Bette on the scene, stories of him being a midget are grandiosely exaggerated though (to my disappointment). He's very cheerful Dane with a pre disposition to drinking huge quantities Jack Daniels and Cola (which he kept up till 8 o'clock in the morning) I discovered.

Around 12.00 nearly everyone here was still asleep of which i ave these wonderful images that I feel it's my solemn duty to share with you ;-)

Maybeline (a.k.a. Chris fast asleep)

Bennios (a.k.a. Ben) sleeping on the couch and Haley also fast asleep 0n the couch.

Collective hangover day.

2008-07-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

So basically everyone here is suffering from a hangover or lack of sleep, and since we seem to have unanimously decided (without anyone actually saying so) that drinking before it's evening is not socially acceptable, we are basically doing what you can expect gamers to do, they're gaming.
Two more Bruces arrived on the scene today namely, Twinkly & Sugarbaby, we (Thom, Sofi, Georgie & Me) went to pick then up earlier today and we had some food and drinks (the non-alcoholic kind).

There's some "amazing" footage of Kevin almost rocking at rock star, which I included here :-) and a little tour of the house as well. Sofi's brother and pix and some entourage I can't currently recall have now gone out to collect yet another Bruce in the person of Bette who arrived in the town centre earlier if everything went according to plan. He's over from Denmark just for tonight so we'll have to throw a party in his honour, which should be fine since we're BBQ-ing tonight.

And I do apologize for the horrible video quality, but there's only so much you can do with a mobile phone!

There's Moving images!

2008-07-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

It's so silly :D

After the Battle

2008-07-16T02:22:00.000-07:00

Some pictures of after day 1 (day 2 for most the of the others to be fair).

The hallway, we're a tidy bunch as you can see.

Ben's 5 star accommodations on the patio, any less would be unacceptable for the creator of the giant cock.

The patio table. Only mild casualties here.

The table in the kitchen, again only mild casualties, it's also incedently where i am at the moment.

The field hospital in the living room, Maybeline (blue body bag bottom) Pixelsmith (covered by the white sheet -r.i.p.-) and Exelos/Angelo (blue body bag up top).

Theatre of Operations

2008-07-16T01:43:00.000-07:00

So we arrived at the Theatre of Operations and obviously after just having raided the liquor store the battle was going to be fierce. Obviously being essentially a huge collection of geeks there was laptops (I've counted 3 so far but there might be others in hiding). And one of these labtops (of the Apple subspecies) had the creature creator for the much anticipated game "Spore" installed on it, esentially it allows you to create creatres that can later be used in the game when it releases. Ever wondered what happens if you allow a Bruce to create a creature it thinks would do well in Darwinian environment? Right, a massive cock with feet... Why bother with unnecesary appendi and such when you can just BE a massive reproductive organ, ey? It eventually evolved to have antlers and an eye, it actualy evolved further i've ben told but Ben (the creator of this marvelous creature) had by then raised the moral of the troops enough for hem to return to the main stage of operations in the living room and outside on the patio. Beer, Cider, Wine and various forms of spirits were by now flowing richly and the mood was very cheerfull and light, topics discussed -if you can actually call joyous banter that- were varied and i remember none of them!

I'll finish up for now with proof of how awe inspiring I am, it''s clearly demonstrated by Maark in the picture bellow ;-)

Arrived @ Brucecon SWEdition.

2008-07-15T09:03:00.001-07:00

We have arrived at Brucecon SWEdition, there was an epic journey to Trollhättan in a bus with a little crying brat that i contemplated killing at least once (it cried 95% of th 1+ hour we were in the bus), however it occurred to me that the days of the vikings are long past and that infanticide is likely punishable by Swedish law. To give you an impression of what's it like here look at the pretty picture :-)

We arrived here by the bus with the infant i did ultimately not kill, and were awaited by assorted Bruces. It was promptly deceided that we needed to vist the liquor store first, a very prudent choice if ou ask me, futher opinions on this choice will or will not be available tomorrow morning. All The Bruces seem quite friendly and to figure out if this is correct i'm going to stop being anti-social now i'm sure i won't be proven wrong though.

SWE!?

2008-07-15T01:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening we (being me and Roy) arrived in Sweden or "Swe!?" as we've come to call it.

We started out at the train station in Goes our home town and preceded towards Eindhoven from where the big metal bird would take us to Stockholm Skavsta the journey itself was pretty uneventful, the morning before however was not!

My dear house mate Roy had decided to go and get drunk the evening before and got home that evening in the afore mentioned state managed to misplace his glasses, which as a result we spend the rest of the morning searching for to no avail i might add.
Their was a hilarious episode though where i offered Roy to try my old glasses on and after concluding he's me more blind with my glasses then without i placed above my keyboard and promptly forgot i did so.
Half an hour later i refound them mistaking them for Roy's proclaiming in a loud voice down the stairs "What the hell were you doing behind my PC then you silly bugar? I found your glasses!". So after 2 hours of fruitless searching Roy was comping up the stairs; "where, where did you find them?" only to realise "these are not my glasses!" and then it hit me...

The face Roy made when i made a slight about not being able to see well has been preserved on this page for eternity because i do not want to keep it from you! (please do not mistake this for a happy expression).
Anyway we made it to Stockholm in one piece and arrived at our hotel (Quality Hotel Prince Philip) without any further noteworthy events and had a good nights sleep plus a nice breakfast the next morning (today) . At the moment of writing this I am in the X2000 to Göteburg because the actual goal of this journey is not just SWE!? or Stockholm or even Göteburg it is infact "The Bruces" that have brought us to the north lands. The Bruces are a rather colourful bunch of people that share a hobby, namely gaming and predominantly this hobby focuses on one particular game, namely World of Warcraft. And The Bruces await us in Trollhätan, where if everything goes according to plan we should arrive in about 2,5 hours.

I'll be updating this blog daily from now on to write about all the Bruceventures over the next few days. For now I'll leave you with a few pictures of our lovely train :)

Atheism and Tyrants and why it doesn't matter.

2008-05-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

So for my first blog, I will skip the introduction's they're to the right of this little post anyway.

Recently I have been getting a little tired of people attacking atheism on the grounds that some tyrants were supposedly atheist, this usually happens in response to atheists pointing out that a lot of present day and historical leaders did a lot of wrong in the name of some theism or other.

I'll give an example; An atheist points out that the supposed leaders of the catholic church we're responsible for the crusades, to which a theist replies something like this; "Hitler and Stalin where atheists and they did horrible things too!"
The problem here is is that even if they were atheists, which is a different discussion entirely, one I do not intend to address at this moment, the argument the theist makes is flawed to start with.

I'll explain why.

Atheists (at least non I ever met nor any of my atheist friends) do not claim Hitler or Stalin for atheism, nor do any atheists I know claim anybody for atheism for that matter. Atheism is not an organized religion, it is not in fact a religion at all. Atheists tend to be free thinkers and unless you want to call one atheist free thinker recognizing a mind akin to his own in another atheist an organization they are not organized either.

Theists on the other hand claim all sorts of bigots, criminals and tyrants for their respective theisms I could make a very long list indeed but I'll stick to the crusade example for now, Pope Urban II instigator of the first crusade is in fact claimed by the theists of the catholic denominator as on of their own, he has a statue raised in his honour even because he was such a great catholic.

What this shows really is that where an atheist can in fact say; "Look mr. theist this Urban II guy was a pretty horrible person and you openly subscribe to the same theism he did and more so he did a lot of evil in the name of. And your theism still claims him as a member of that theism and raised a statue in his honour as icing on the cake, I find that pretty disturbing".
Now if mr. theist replies to this with; "You subscribe to atheism, so did Hitler, i find that way more disturbing".

The theist makes a critical mistake here, even if Hitler was an atheist that doesn't say anything about atheists in general "we atheists" do not claim Hitler as one of "our own" and I'm fairly certain no atheist ever raised a statue in his honour to celebrate what a great atheist he was. Furthermore Hitler didn't commit atrocities in "the name of atheism" he did so in the name of national socialism and at the worst one might argue that particular ideology shares the common characteristic with atheism that it doesn't subscribe to a big all seeing fairy in the sky as a matter of political practice, but this would even then be a minor commonality as it surely wasn't at the basis of national socialist beliefs.

So dear and not so dear theists please stop trying to force tyrants upon atheists as "one of theirs" we are not like you an organized group of people sharing a common belief claiming people to be "ours" the only thing all atheists have in common is we deny the existence of a god. Nothing more, nothing less.
Being told even if only by implication you share the ideals and morals of people like Hitler and Stalin is deeply offensive to someone who has never subscribed to an ideology or theism that warrants any such accusation.