the Apollo 11 mission, but the Irish, Australians, French, Germans or Russians did it, comically reimagined

i could have really used career advice and mentoring from people with different backgrounds some 25 years ago. i had such limited access to educated adults who could show me the way as a lonely teenager in my shitty little home town up north. i look at kids growing up here in the Oslo region and all the opportunities they have that i never had up there, and i realise that the game was rigged against me from the very start. i made it here and got into computer programming, but not because i was guided into it. i just sat alone and figured out what to do. i mean, i'll give myself a pat on the shoulder for managing to do that with zero formal qualifications, but i know i could've done better with some guidance and people to serve as door openers.

i tried asking Google why loans have interest. it gave me a single answer that doesn't really explain anything and then a bunch of pages about interest rates. i know that muslims do a workaround for usury where a one-time "administrative" fee is charged instead of interest. i was just wondering what would happen if we dropped bank loans altogether and borrowed interest-free straight from the central bank instead. sounds like it would be possible in today's world. just visit a website to apply. since they're affiliated with the state, they don't need to turn a profit. everybody is borrowing from them anyway. all money is credit from the central bank, and it's not clear to me why it even needs to be profitable. interest rates are currently used by the central banks to control inflation, but there are other ways of controlling the supply. anyway, this is just me speculating and i was hoping to find an article by an economist that answered the question.

kind of funny how the best cure for feeling too crap to get up and do something is to distract yourself from that feeling by getting up and doing something. 🙃

me looking at any conflict in the Middle East: hm, i don't know who to side with here. they all look like crooks to me. 🤷‍♂️

this is a character from Horton Hears A Who. guess where Sonic got his weird teeth from before they changed the design...

my post-supper soundtrack dishwasher: slosh slosh slosh fan: vvvvvvvvvvvvv hospital: *helicopter noises* cat: meow!

me, an intellectual: *uses a password manager*

conversation tips when you visit Norway for the first time "hva faen er galt med deg?" translation: what the hell is wrong with you?

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black metal is very white

if you're a guy with a social media following, are you a himfluencer?

one drawback of social isolation is that you end up getting your idea of "normal" from the media. your frame of reference becomes actors, influencers, politicians, news anchors, journalists, writers and scientists instead of ordinary people. you end up holding yourself and others to unrealistic standards.

when i have more money than i need to survive, i have a problem. "oh no, what do i do with it?" it's easy enough to spend it impulsively. the question is where to throw it to avoid that temptation. we're talking on the order of €200 per month, so it's not enough for anything exciting. i usually blow it on alcohol because i get bored. would be nice to spend it on something better, because although alcohol takes my mind off things, it's a very expensive, unhealthy and short-lasting way of doing that. i resort to it partially because it's a really simple way of entertaining yourself and taking your mind off things. unlike other activities, you never grow bored of it, because the very thing it does is take away the boredom (and all your worries too). it's a guaranteed quick fix, with no effort or creativity required. it's rather hard for me to find anything else that beats it. but it has so many drawbacks. so i would like something else, and i don't know what. in terms of experiences one can have, the only thing that's better than getting drunk is being with a woman, and by a wide margin. they're far too much trouble to find though. "find" isn't the right word. you come across one by chance, and if you're lucky, she likes you, so you're not really in control of that. in a way, i never had any hobbies, not even as a kid. every hobby i ever had was also a potential profession, and i lost interest in each one of them as it became clear that my services would not be needed. i'm very businesslike in that way. "what are we doing now and for what purpose?" i didn't do well in school because it didn't get right down to business. an apprenticeship model would've worked better for me. why waste time?

the scary thing about the Internet is that if you get vocal against violent regimes and organisations, and people actually start listening, you risk having one of their assassins take you out, even on your home soil.

i wonder what it is that makes the Anglo-Saxon countries such cradles of innovation.

my counsellor at NAV (work/welfare agency) wondered why i had taken a job aptitude test from the UK instead of one from Norway. because more resources are pooled into things that are in English. because it's a bigger and more successful language and culture. Norwegians usually prefer things to be from Norway. we're so picky that even Swedish stuff is sometimes seen as lower quality. we see ourselves as superior and the best country in the world, and i think that's ridiculous. massive national ego considering how insignificant we truly are.

sometimes you get the impression that showing music you made to people you know is like this: friend: i like the track X by Y. you: here's something i made that's similar. friend: (doesn't like it very much, because it wasn't made by anybody famous, so it can't be good)

1. foreigner asks question about the Norwegian language on a forum. 2. there are multiple answers that don't quite agree. 3. Norwegians have an argument about how their language actually works.

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