October 31st 2025

This entry is in part a combination of two dreamwidth entries. With some fixed grammar and modifications.

Happy halloween!

Fall really is here.

This month me and Tofi harvested all of my carrots, since it was getting too cold to leave them out. To make sure they stay fresh we buried them in sand in a couple of crates. While we do have a potato cellar where we could keep them, the cellar hasn't been upkept in many many decades, so we're storing the crates in the workshop for now, since it's pretty cold in there, but not as cold as it'll get outside.

I should bring out my wool coat soon, the jean-jacket+hoodie combo really isn't cutting it anymore.

Also, a word on the music linked up top? I started listening to Nasa Histoires because of fanart of Lucifer from Hazbin Hotel that featured some of their lyrics from their song Cactus, and they quicky became one of my favourite bands. Bless my RSS feed keeping me up to date with their music after I broke up with Spotify.

This song? Garras? I've listened to it like 50 times this month alone.

What's funny is that while I took Spanish as my third mandatory language in middle school, I barely remember anything (I can order a beer - I don't like beer), but thanks to this band I've started to learn it again. Duolingo is just AI bullshit now, so I've been using a vocabulary app for now, and later I'm planning on learning through what is available at the library.

Getting bonus vocab lessons through reading the lyrics and their translation, too, which is obviously the most fun way to learn. If you feel like it, do check them out, they're really good.

Torka aldrig tårar utan handskar

Okay, so, this section is going to mention AIDS, so do skip it if you need to, I'll be talking a little bit about a Swedish horror TV show after it. Ctrl+f "färjan" or scroll til you see an image with a kid in a red hoodie and a captain's hat upside down.

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I finally finished reading the book series Don't ever wipe tears without gloves by Jonas Gardell a while back. It took me months to read because AIDS is such a heavy subject. I had to take a lot of breaks.

The first book is called 'the love', and it's definitely the happiest of the books, and the easiest read, though I did spend some time crying over those pages as well. The second is called 'the illness' and the third 'the death'. You can imagine they are... very hard to read. I also had to take breaks cus I got so pissed off at the blood relatives of several of the characters, and the newspaper headlines and articles that were featured.

The happy moments interspersed in between made me smile, too. But there were still enough painful things in it that I had to take many breaks.

It made me sad and angry to think about how this happened to a lot of people in the queer community, though not this exact way since it's fiction. But how the families of those who passed did everything to hide that they were gay after their deaths, that they died of AIDS, that partners and friends weren't allowed to come to funerals, things like that no doubt happened. All of that is what made it so difficult to read.

There's also a TV series based on the books, but I haven't watched it yet. I tried to, but had to stop pretty soon. I think I need some more time between reading the books and watching the show, or I won't be able to finish it.

Färjan

So yesterday a week ago the last episode of the TV show adaptation of a book I read several years ago (almost a decade ago at this point) became available online. I don't have TV channels in my cottage so idk if it also aired on TV.

I've been checking out whether or not the adaptation was out yet every few years, cus there's been talk about it for a pretty long time, and I remembered last week that it was supposed to come out soon, and what do you know, all but the last episode were out. So I've been watching one episode a night, and then had to wait only a couple of days to finish it.

The TV show is called Färjan, and the book was written by Mats Strandberg. Its English title is Blood Cruise, but the literal translation is just 'The Ferry'.

I actually read the book in the first place because Mats was one of the authors of a book trilogy I used to really really love, to the point that one of my tattoos is a fandom tattoo for that series. Though you might not guess it, as it is uuuuh, literally just the earth alchemy sign. But I got it because of the Engelsfors trilogy. I actually went to the late night premiere of the movie adaptation of the first book, Cirkeln (The Circle), way back when it came out in 2015, because I happened to live in Stockholm at the time. Did you know that one of the members of ABBA owns the film company that adapted it? I sure didn't, until just now, when I went to double check what year it was released. Sadly they only adapted the first book, so one of my favs never got to appear, since he doesn't show up til book 2 (Felix Nowak, btw. His last name always makes me think of the book Kim Novak badade aldrig i Genesarets sjö (Kim Novak never swam in Genesaret's lake))

Punny Engelsfors tumblr post (link to post):

Translation: Since Taisto's element is earth, does that mean that he is.......... a strawberry (lit. 'old earth man')

I know it doesn't work in English whatsoever, but I still think it's funny, so I'm including it anyway.

Anyway, back to Färjan!

IMDb summary:
Every night, all through the year, 1 200 passengers board Baltic Charisma for a cruise between Sweden and Finland. But tonight there is something evil on board the ship, and there is nowhere to escape.

Färjan is a horror book/now also TV series that takes place on a Finland-cruise and is about a vampire who is fed up with following the rules made by 'the elders', and is ready to make humanity remember that vampires are more than just a myth.

The setting being on a cruise makes for a very claustrophobic environment, as there are only so many places you can run and hide. I didn't remember much from when I read the book, so I was very stressed out by the last episode, not remembering who lived or died.

I don't know if the show has English subtitles yet, but it might have, or they might sub it eventually.

They definitely left it open to make a season two, though it would be TV original since there's no sequel to the book.

What's funny is that it features yet another Skarsgård as a vampire. They like playing vampires, apparently. Likes being in horror too, I suppose, didn't a Skarsgård play Pennywise in the recent(ish) movies?

While I wouldn't rate it a 5/5, I did really enjoy it. Maybe a 3.5-4/5? Or so.

At 0:19 you can really tell that he's related to the guy who played Pennywise...

A movie adaptation of another of Mats Strandberg's books, Hemmet (The home - aka old folks home) has just come out in theatres, but the times when I've seen horror in theatre it's been way too loud so I'm probably gonna wait til I can see it on TV/computer instead.

September 14th 2025

Hi! Hello hi!

I haven't had any internet access for the month of September aside from phone data, so I haven't been able to update till now. I have pretty terrible internet right now, but I do have it more than on my phone, so while I would usually upload videos in a post like this, I won't. The videos I've linked to I've pre-watched on break at work where I have wi-fi access. Emailing myself the links to the videos so I didn't have to open the videos at home made it easier to conserve data.

So, why would I have posted videos today? Because I went to a music festival!

Well, the free parts of one, anyway.

So in Örebro, there is a music (and apparently also film, but I didn't catch any of that myself) festival called Live at Heart, that takes place in the center of the city; in different venues, inside cafés, out on the city's squares, etc. The outdoor performances are free, as well as those in a café or two.

I considered buying access to all the performances, but since several of them ran pretty late on a work night I would have missed a bunch of them anyway. So, free performances only it is! I'll have you know I got a pretty good bang for my buck!

Without further ado, let's get into it.

The image above is the banner from their website, featuring the water tower "Svampen", or "The Mushroom", in the center.

Wednesday

Wednesday only offered one free performance, so I ended up checking it out. Got to sit front row in the little café where it was, even!

Backa bandet

These guys are called Löfroth & Grabö, they introduced themselves as brothers whose names I can't remember, but I enjoyed their playing. They performed a song that they had only finished writing a couple of days earlier and had only played together like four times before that performance at the café where they were playing that day.

Apparently they've performed at that café before, earlier this summer, so I wouldn't be surprised if they showed up in there again at some point.

It was a pretty chill start to the festival.

Friday

So there were no free performances on Thursday, so we'll hop step jump drew draw drawn right on over to Friday afternoon.

On Friday the weather was terrible later in the afternoon, which is exactly what you'd want when you go to watch a bunch of outdoor performances. Especially when your last umbrella broke during the last storm not too long ago.

So you can imagine I looked like a drowned rat by the end of the night.

Forest Song

First performance I caught was Yellowbrenda.

I was late to this performance, so I only managed to catch the end of it, but what I heard was nice. They had a song where the background track was a recording of the sea from Malmö, a city in southern Sweden, where they were from.

...Actually, scratch that, now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure it was recorded in Malmö specifically, or if it was in some other city, but I know it was from the Swedish coast.

I really should have written this down as it happened, even though I had no internet. I should still be able to open and close a paragraph without internet access.

Oh well.

Olycksfågelbarn

On to Haiko!

Though I should probably list some more names of other people too, cus he had a few guests who performed with him. I admit I didn't catch all of their names though, and they weren't actually listed as performing, so I have a hard time finding their names now.

I liked the hiphop and chill melodies that switched off with each other, the hiphop mainly while he sang with his guests.

As you might be able to see in the upper left corner the weather was still pretty okay at the start of his performance. It was somewhere during it when the rain started to come down.

Hur hon va

Someone I'd actually heard of before this festival, Angelina Pavanelli!

One of the first of her songs I ever heard was her song "Klick klick köp dig hel" ("Click click buy yourself whole"), a song about trying to buy your happiness by shopping, which... well, I can't say I haven't done that myself, especially when my mental health was terrible. I think a lot of us has done that, just to find a way to get seratonin somewhere when you can't produce any on your own (thank you chronic depression).

This is where the weather became completely horrible. I was sitting on top of the shopping bag I carry my lunch box in on top of a beach chair set out for a different thing Örebro's had out on Järntorget all summer, and a guy decided to sit down on the chair next to mine without emptying the chair of collected water first.

You can imagine how soaked his ass became, he seemed to have forgotten to check beforehand since I was sitting so casually in mine (my ass still got wet but it wasn't nearly as bad).

Saturday

Saturday was the last day of the festival, and this time I actually managed to catch three full performances.

We were even in luck with the weather!

Burning Ships

Anyone remember Mondaine?

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember me going to see them and the band Granit perform at the end of December last year (though I only wrote about it in January this year).

At Live at Heart I got to see them perform again, which was fun! I don't know if I've been able to catch a band more than once before. They're a local band to my province, which makes it easier to catch them live in my area.

Their song Kaleidoscopic Visions was one of my most listened to songs in 2024, btw.

Baby Lady

Örebro goes punk! With the post-punk band Hot Bloke.

I haven't listened to a lot of modern Swedish punk (kind of stuck myself to Ebba Grön, a late 1970's-early 1980's punk band that my mum has on vinyl), so it was fun checking them out.

Honestly though for a festival that's been going on for about 15 years you'd think they'd have figured out how to do better audio mixing (that might not be the term used for live music), punk can (and should) push speakers and mics to the limit.

Guy on the left had a string break mid performance too, it's gotta be stressful to have that happen.

I still had fun with this performance though.

all my lies

Okay I'll be real.

This was the highlight for me, cus. Uh. Gay. Jävligt gay. And Akabane Vulgers on Strong Bypass? They were really cool.

They'd flown over all the way from Japan to perform twice during Live at Heart, once for free, which I got to watch. As mentioned, I haven't listened to a lot of modern punk, and that goes for more than just Swedish punk. But I really enjoyed this.

They had really good stage presence too, but apparently they've been playing together for a while, so it makes sense. They really knew how to excite a crowd.

Did make a post on bsky after that said "Moments that make me get even gayer".

If that's at all possible.

You get a second photo of them cus I wanted to showcase where Mondaine, Hot Bloke and Akabane Vulgars performed.

It's at the edge of a skate park, right in front of a pit-thing people skate inside. During Mondaine and Hot Bloke's performances they had people skating in it, which no doubt got some cool action shots for any possible photographers (I did not manage to get any cool shots of it, unfortunately), and during Akabane Vulgar's performance there were people dancing and rocking out, headbanging and shit down there.

Definitely a pretty cool spot to watch performances at, though it was hard to get that close when they're standing right at the edge of a pit.

I had a great time watching all of these performances, and I'll definitely try to catch whatever I can next year.

Hej då for now, see you next time!

P.S.
Petition for small/indie bands to upload their lyrics online so I can actually tell what's happening pls
(3)D.S.