…Or maybe I’m just the guy with the least luck in the room. This is what usually happens:

1. I think about buying something. It may be something fun or something useful – the evil seems to not be very picky about that.
2. I buy the thing, either on the net or in a shop or store. Again, it really doesn’t matter how the purchase is done.
3. I use the thing for a short period of time.
4. The thing breaks or shows some fabrication fault.
5. I return the damn thing.
6. I get a replacement.
7. Everything is fine and dandy and suddenly the spell of evil is broken. The item works and can be used for years to come.

The scheme seems to be always the same. My new Wii managed to burn its graphics card while on standby for 2 days (it’s on service right now and I’m expecting a replacement in a couple of days). And before the Wii:

• A USB harddrive that after 1 hour of usage just died. The replacement is doing just fine.
• My Nintend DS had a bad WiFi and had to be replaced. The new one is working like charm.
• My LaCie Firewire drive sounded like a cräck-baböön and had to be replaced. New one is dead silent and is 100% healthy.
• My iBook caught the graphitis and needed to get some serious physical therapy. A new motherboard and then everything was fine, fine, fine…
• I got a IP telephony router from my broadband company. Worked an hour maybe, then dead. Replacement one was fine.

Well, I don’t think I need to say anymore. There is obviously something fishy going on and I bet it’s spelled E-V-I-L.

This spring has turned out to be a period of change. I resigned from Starbreeze at the end of February and spent Mars and April trying to get going as a freelance contractor. The Darkness turned out to need more from me so I have spent some time in Uppsala, but mostly I have been really busy with other things.

My initial plan was to continue working for game companies as a writer/designer on a freelance basis and alter that with other jobs, but I had barely packed my stuff together at Starbreeze before I got a call from Avalanche, a game company here in Stockholm. They wanted to meet and a few weeks later I went to visit them. They presented some really interesting stuff and in the end they asked me if I was interested in working full time as a lead game designer on the project. That was not really what I had in mind when I started my own business, but the offer sounded too much like a great opportunity and chance to do something really fun so I accepted.

During these months I have not been able to find the time to sit down and write anything new here, but I have an interesting backlog of notes, ideas, issues and thoughts that I really want to put into words. So keep a look-out for new material in the near future. I am looking forward to continuing sharing.

Oh, if you understand Swedish, I wrote a small piece for gameplayer.se that you can read here.

So it was time to move the page to a new server. Unfortunately I was more or less forced to do this (the bastards on my old server charges way to much) and an unpleasant side-effect was that my own content-management system (written in Perl with a SQLite backend) does not work – at all. So it’s either rewrite or charge up a ready-made CMS. I tried MovableType before and absolutely detested it. This time I’m gonna try Textpattern. It looks kind of nice and has Textile built in right from the start (I used it for my system) so I hope I won’t choke…

Still, there is a lot of work to be done. I need to move all the old material over here and do some visual customization so this place will probably be a mess for some time now. We are currently crunching “The Darkness” too which means I don’t have much spare time to spend on such worldly matters as the ol’ homepage. So bear with me.

My site was moved to a new server a week ago and suddenly my Movable Type installation stopped working like before. I never really liked MT so I am taking the opportunity to rebuild the whole site like I want it to be. So bear with me during the near future. All of the game design articles has been migrated, but there’s still lots of things to do.

For the time being the only thing here are my articles, but in due time I will start publishing photos again. Managing photos in MT was pure evil so I guess I can get something going that I can actually work with and that feels nice. We’ll see.

Yesterday was my last working day for the three upcoming weeks. So, I’m pretty much busy with having my vacation right now, which is very nice. I live close to a couple of excellent little lakes where swimming is good. I just returned from one of them. The water is warm and the sun is nice in the evening…

I’m not very fond of staying in the sun too much. Moreover, the last week’s been pretty much awful in terms of weather-conditions that allows oneself to feel comfortable at the office. It’s been about 30 degrees Celsius and no clouds. Quite nice if you can go to the beach, but not so nice when you stay inside the office sweating all day.

Anyway, I plan to spend my vacation mostly here in Stockholm. I’ll probably just hang around with friends, have a few beer at times, relax, read, play some videogames (I still haven’t played neither San Andreas nor Resident Evil 4 so I hope that’s gonna be a thrill) and do other things that I enjoy.

I actually hope for a few rainy days during the next few weeks (you can get hanged for making such a statement here in Sweden). Those days are extremely relaxing and I enjoy sleeping while it rains and staying inside and just watch a good movie or attend to one of my many unfinished projects. But who governs the weather? We’ll se how things turn out and I am definitely gonna spend each day just as it comes.