Nanako SoS

One of the most hilarious cartoons I have been watching has been Nanako SoS.
One thing that was the most funny was the voices of one of the characters. But in general, the story plot was unexisting but each episode was quite crazy and funny on its own.

Not so long time ago, they have finally published the manga and hence, I have grabbed it and read it during the summer.

It was not that many numbers to dig into, just 5, but the manga is quite...dense!
Some of the episodes are purely crazyness. There was no sense at all into them and I was really don't understand them, even though I tried to read them a couple of times.
But the comicity of it was devastating and it was really an entertaining read!
The manga differs a bit from the anime, for number of characters and story, of course, but the personality of the main characters was respected and that was what mattered!

A mixed post

I have so many things I would like to blog about, but for the moment I will limit myself to two.

First of all, I have retouched once more the blog graphics. This time I have corrected a tiny "misspell" in the header image, adding the right Swedish vowel. Secondly, since I got nicely pointed out that reading all the blab that I write with the previous color font could make a person sea-sick, I have changed it to a darker brown. I hope it has improved! Feedback is always welcome, good as bad!
Finally, I have improvised and this time, without the help of a tutorial, I have fixed the sidebar and added the same separator as between the post. So now the blog looks more coherent in itself. Fancy!
I still have the Chrome transparency issue on Ubuntu, but if some other geek wants to help me out with that I will be happy. I have sent a bug report to Chrome, but so far, they have just ignored it.
I think I would like also to have the pictures I post in some nice way. Fix the transparency of them and maybe a bit the border. But I am not sure I will do it also for the pictures of the previous posts.

Secondly. Let's change topic fully and talk about a game that we have been played about one week ago.
Arkham Horror. I think the main horror is the rules and the amount of cards that one has to display over its table. We just have a small expansion, but if one is geek enough, probably you would need to play on the floor to have the perfect area to play on.
The game is based on the novels written by Lovecraft, set in Arkham, a town in ...somewhere in USA.
Some divine monsters and other kind of creepiness are terrifying the town and the big Cthulhu one day, might decide to wake up and destroy everything.

So, the game is about being collaborating together in order to avoid that one of the Ancient Ones will wake up, by entering dimensional gates, exploring the other world, closing and sealing the gates and solving some other entertaining task, like killing various types of monsters.
All together, the game is pretty funny, but playing it the first time can be really a killer. Many cards, many rules, a lot of explanation that can be a good resolution if one suffers of insomnia, and so on, however, it is exciting to try to beat time (and the game itself) attempting to avoid all the catastrophes that instead the game is placing just in front of our heroes....

If you are an Arkham Horror freak, I really recommend to check this funny site:Indie Squid Kid. Hilarious against Carcassonne :-)

Some minor beauty changes

Yesterday, since unfortunately we couldn't fulfill our romantic plans to celebrate our third wedding anniversary due to sickness (it sounds like we could not fulfille a time plan in a project ;-D), I ended up having some free time to work on the "ugly" things of this blog.

I hope you can see the minor changes!
First, I have fixed the header name and the title of each post by changing font. I think this is much more readable!
I have found that I could drown into a huge amount of free cute fonts by looking at the usual homepage. It is there that I found "my" new font and I am sure I could have spent some more time looking there.

I then decided that I wanted to enhance the blog by adding a post divider. This was an harder task, mainly because I could not find a post divider that I liked (too many were just silly blinking GIF images with a terrible graphics).
Adding a post divider was a fairly easy step. It was enough to follow this guide.
So that was quick enough.
I then tried to revive my graphical skills, but by using GIMP and by not having the right image, I spent a lot of time without doing anything good (just wasting time :-( ).

Desperate, I was ready to beg the authors of The Cutest Blog On the Blog to fix a separator, when I saw that eventually among the extras there was something for me...thank God!


And now...what more I have to fix (excep the Google Transparency issue on Ubuntu that noone wants to recognize as bug?!?)

Puerto Rico

The other day we have had the occasion to play again one of our favorite board games. It is called Puerto Rico.

The one that finds the most efficient strategy wins. Well, there can be several strategies, the problem is that others might obstacle you and the game itself, having a limited amount of resources, doesn't allow to fulfill a static strategy.

The game is settle in Central America, just after it has been discovered by Cristoforo Colombo, in the 16th century. One has to produce resources that are typically for that area (corn, indigo, sugar, tobacco or coffee) thanks to the colonists and ship the products back to Europe. All of this generates money, which will allow to have buildings that will facilitate one of the phases, and will finally help to collect the points that will judge the winner of the game.

Nothing is said until the very end. It is possible to still win even though maybe the production is not as vary or intense as one of the other players.

Hope to play it again soon and win, this time :-) I have never managed yet!

A birthday dinner at India Restaurant

We have tried to find a nice indian restaurant in Malmö (the ones in Lund are quite disappointing, imho), and we have tried so far three places. The last one is the one that has been impressed me positively the most so far.

Ok, the name is not that original and if one passes by the place might wonder where did they pick up the sign that is blinking outside, it seems coming out from a american hamburger place from the 50s, however, once in, things start to change. The place is quite clean and had a nice and simple way of having the table prepared, but it was having a nice atmosphere. The menu was not extremely huge, but offered quite some variation.

Strangely enough, they don't even have an homepage. Or if they do, it is impossible to find. Anyway, by Googling one can find at least the contact info.

I have often wondered how indian restaurants can have a quite huge menu and I think I have realized that they have everything pre-made and what they cook at the moment is the meat, that then it is added to the rest of the sauces and stuff. This gives the side effect that often the meat/or whatever is not perfectly integrated with the sauce.

I think that issue here was most identifiable since the meat (we took a lamb dish and a chicken dish) was a bit dry. However, the taste was just amazing!We also took a vegetarian dish, that had some vegetarian meatballs and that was the best dish we took.
We even managed to squeeze down an ice cream, and that was nice as well.

I think we will pay some more visits to this place and probably, we will go less and less to the other restaurants we have gone previously instead.

Solomon Kane

It will be soon time to play a role playing game with a bunch of friends. We usually play with them in a fantasy setting, that I maybe will describe another time...
Anyway, with about the same group of people we are going to start also a game in another setting.

The world of Solomon Kane. Or better, the Savage World of Solomon Kane.
For the moment, we should have been working in preparing the characters.
So, I read some of the setting material that was sent and thought of what character I wanted to be.
I usually play, in a standard fantasy setting, elves druids (even though my first "powerful" RPG character was a strange evil cleric troll - with a past as a gnoll and born as something else that I do not remember - who lived in the worlds of the MUD Tempora Sanguinis 2 at least 10 years ago).
And here, of course, there are nor elves, neither druids.
By reading the setting, I thought that an inquisitor would have been fun. A female one. At the end, I am an inquiring person anyway, so it can't be that hard.
I thought though that it would be nice to try to make something strange for the setting, and that could get inspired by my usual characters.
So, Karura-o, with Garuda (taken directly from the manga RG Veda) will be an humble japanese herbalist. I believe it will be quite challenging to make her live in this world where women are usually not that positively appreciated, magic gets persecuted and let's not speak about foreigners.
We will see how the game will develop and how Karura-o will survive it :)

Accessories for the balcony?

I have not yet managed to complete our balcony project since we are a bit indecisive on how to proceed.
My flowers right now are suffering some lack of sun, it would be nice to have maybe some little table in shabby style, but the space is limited and we don't want it to look it like a deposit.

My idea is to put some spark of color in accessories that will complete the balcony.
We excluded the idea of a carpet, since that would mean a lot of extra vacuum cleaning and I saw some wonderful pillows for our chairs (Rice) but we realized that it would be hard to clean them, and if they get dirty it will be a mess, although they were just adorable.

I then thought about buying some tableware (cuttlery and plates) in melamin, to make it more "easy going" and colorful. But we have plenty of such things already (not in melamin) so it was maybe a bit unnecessary...

We shall then attempt to buy a tablecloth. My suggestion is something colorful oilcloth but right now I can't find anything we both like!
And I don't know if we want to have something that would cover the table completely (but preserving the table) or two table runners that would make the table more elegant, but more risky to get some fancy stain.
I like (still from Rice, Mattias discarded just the first):

Last, but not least: I have fallen in love with these lanterns (Dixie Interiors). I just need to find them because at least one of them must end on our table! There are in white, pink, cherry, turquoise and green.

Hatsukanezumi no Jikan

Written by Kei Toume, this manga has been recently published in Italy as "Vita da Cavie".
It is really a weird manga, which I borrowed from my friend Luca, and it is hard to understand what it is really about for half of the manga. At least, I had some serious problems :-)

I can't say that it is a masterpiece and I am quite happy it is nothing I have bought myself.
However, I found the plot original and I think it could have been developed in a more exciting way. Maybe it lost its charm in the way it has been published in Italy (since before it was part of one of the big "magazines").
The ending seems quite quick and it left me with a "aha!?" when I concluded to read the last number.

I think there is some hidden "morale" or metaphor that  I don't think it is as trivial as one might understand at first. It is a lot about the fact, in my opinion, that humankind lives in a situation on which big companies/few people are manipulating life and the way of living without us being really aware of it, but also the impossibility of some to live in a normal social context (in the last number some were having the opportunity to escape, but fail and are not regretting that option since they don't think they could live differently than what they have been used to).
Some classifies the manga as "scholastic thriller", maybe that is the genre, but I think it is more about criticizing the society of our world.
Or maybe I am just over analyzing it ;-)

Some serious shopping

It was about time that I allowed myself some serious shopping.
I was planning to buy just one pair of jeans at the Replay outlet in Gallarate, but I ended up buying 3!
That is because since it is soon the new season starting, they had to get rid of everything there (or most of the things) with the nice benefit of 50% discount over the outlet price for us.

This is what I managed to find:

• Teena model (flare line), with the nice gradient of the blue tone from dark to light (bottom to up)

• Wendie model (bootcut line) in white 

• Ioko model (bootcut) in denim

I have noticed that similar discounts are available in the online shops - I still prefer to try the clothes on (especially jeans, it is hard to know exactly which one will fit and which size) but the prices are quite tempting anyway!

And the result is...

So, today the table and the chairs have arrived.
It took a bit to mount it (surely  not Ikea mounting simplicity, but at least the table is stable!) and after moving some plants around, we managed to squeeze it out in our balcony!

I hope to find some nice, colorful accessories to use outdoor! It will be great!