Incompetental - not a real word. I know Joanne.

To quote Professor Farnsworth from my favorite cartoon (Futurama): "Good news everyone!"

I'm blogging again! I know, all 8 of you following my blog were just sitting in front of your computers, frantically pressing the F5 key (that is the key used to refresh a website, although only on a PC, for Mac its probably the one stupid mouse button on your mouse that you have to use for freakin' everything!) hoping that a new post would appear. Well, you can stop pressing F5 now (Seriously. STOP), because the day you have been waiting for has finally arrived!

(Oh man, this post better be super awesome, after such a mayu-is-so-full-of-himself-but-still-super-hilarious introduction)


Let me go ahead with a bold statement then: Continental is the worst airline in the world!

There I said it. We had the pleasure (NOT!) of flying with this airline twice now (once to visit my family in Costa Rica and just this past Christmas to visit Sarah's family and some friends in Canada) and let me tell you, the level of incompetence demonstrated by Continental was so extreme that I had to come up with a new word for it: Incompetental.

Now technically this is not a real word, as Joanne (Sarah's mom) was quick to point out when I first debuted this word on Facebook, but I have officially submitted it to Urban Dictionary and it is currently under review by their editors. I am not getting my hopes up that it will get approval, but if it does it will be a small victory for all of us who like to make up words.

Here is proof of the submission, just in case you didn't believe me:

You may think this is a bit harsh, especially if you have never had the pleasure (NOT!) of flying with Continental, but seriously, they are the worst! I would even go as far as saying that they are even worst than a budget airline like Ryan Air. At least Ryan Air is honest about their shittyness. You go in knowing that you will likely have to pay if you want to take a dump on the plane, knowing that the flight attendants don't give a rats ass about anything but selling you as much shit as possible and knowing that you will not actually be landing in the city you booked the flight to, but rather somewhere in the general vicinity of it. But that is what you expected and you probably paid less than 50 EUR for that. So thats OK.

Continental however pretends to be a top class airline. They even show you a fancy little video of their CEO telling you how "committed" they are to providing you with "excellent service", but as I mentioned in my Urban Dictionary submission, I don't think any of their employees have ever seen that video.

It is hard enough to travel long distances with a toddler and a baby, but apparently the kind folk at Continental thought it was not hard enough and decided to do everything humanly possible to make our flight, the flight from hell!

But I guess I should have thanked the one flight attendant that kept repeatedly kicking my foot every time he passed my seat, while I was trying to sleep with Olive on sleeping on top of me, because my foot was in the hall way, for providing me with a "real" challenge. Flying with kids without people kicking you is waaaaaaaaay too easy!

Well, EXCUSE ME for not being able to fit my legs in the very generous 5cm of leg space you provide in your shitty airplane, kind flight attendant.

That same guy, was also the one that came storming straight to our seats asking us if we had just changed a diaper in the toilet, because apparently there was some poop smeared somewhere in there. Maybe that would have been OK to assume if we had been the only passengers with small children on the flight, but it was the flight back to Stockholm, and the plane was jammed packed with babies! WTF!? Or to quote one of Sarah's favorite shows Grey's Anatomy: "Seriously!" (By the way, have you noticed how the dialogs in that show consist of characters saying one thing and then repeating it 3 to 4 times with slightly different intonations? Really irritating. But that's for another day).

Anyways, if you are traveling with children avoid Continental at all costs! And if you can't avoid them, at least make sure you smear some poop all over their toilets!

Until next time! (Hopefully I'll keep the posts coming this time)

A few more beatails

Hello again,

It has been a few days since my last post and that is mainly due to the fact that busy over here since Sarah needs to finish up her Master thesis and she can't be all super smart when there is a little monster running around the house asking her to play the same YouTube video for the millionth time in a row. 

(WARNING: if you don't want your child to get addicted to the computer, make sure he or she is nowhere near when you play the below)

This is the dreadful video:

Yeah, it's not even moving pictures! Just a still image of Pippi! 

Anyway, you might be thinking: "Mayu, this post has nothing to do with the clever play on words in your title. I was expecting some details on your beat making or something."

And of course you are correct, that was more of a side note I guess. So let's get to the topic of this post: Beats.

I wanted to give you some more info on the whys and the hows of me making beats. First of all, I am a complete beginner in making beats and everything I know I have taught myself by trial and error and looking up stuff on the internet.The first time I got into trying to make beats was probably like 10 years ago with my friend Sören, back in Berlin. We were really into German rap, specifically anything from a guy called Kool Savas and we were inspired by him I guess. Of course we didn't know shit about making music so we got Fruity Loops and started experimenting. I got more into the beat making part whereas Sören stuck to writing raps. We even formed a "crew" called the Beam Brothers Crew, which consisted of Sören, his brother Björn and me. Haha, what a crew that was! We called it the Beam Brothers Crew because back then our drink of preference was Jim Beam whisky. Sooooooooo original, I know.

Anyway, this obviously never got any further than being a hobby and just for fun (I am sure it never will be more), but I do enjoy making music and it was definitely a lot of fun. I even ended up recording a song back then with a beat that I made and lyrics that I wrote. Sören also has a part at the end of the song. Even though the song is pretty bad quality I do feel kind of proud about it just because everything in it was done by us. We recorded it on Sören's PC with a shitty microphone in his basement. We never got to really finish it, because I ended up moving to Costa Rica, but here it is (contains harsh language): 

Rapkannibale feat. Sören - Was Willst Du? (What do you want?)

Now you will most likely not understand much of it since it is mostly German. But there is also some English and Spanish in there in case you speak any of those. If you did understand any of it, you might have noticed that is all pretty immature "I am better than you" stuff with a lot of bad words thrown in. Well, you know, back then we were really into these aggressive rap artists and so I just went with what I knew and liked.  Looking back it makes me smile and brings back cool memories. Oh and "Rapkannibale" is my rap name by the way. But please don't start calling me that in public. :-)

I stopped making beats for many years either because I didn't have a computer set up that could handle the software or because I was less motivated without my crew, or because of a ton of other little reasons. But one day I decided I would try to get back into it. So I got the newest version of FL Studio (which used to be called Fruity Loops back in the day), and just started experimenting. The beat that I posted earlier is the first one I created with this new program and I am actually actively trying to learn how to become better and make them sound more professional. I even asked a guy at work who has some experience with this kind of stuff for his opinion. His name is Hampus. Yes, that is his real name. I don't plan on ever doing this to earn a living of course. It is, and will remain a hobby, but I would like to get better at it, just for myself I guess.

So, I'm not sure any of you even like this kind of music, but even if you don't you at least learned something new about me. Well most of you anyway. Some of you already knew this part of my personal history.

So, do you guys have any hobbies that you really enjoy even though you are not really all that good at them? Let me know in the comments below.

Until next time!

The Pied Piper of Stockholm

Hello again!

So this past Sunday I went to the 1-year birthday party of a friend's daughter. And let me tell ya: 20+ kids in one room can be awesome, frightening, pure chaos and super fun all at the same time! Sarah didn't come since she had some work to do and really deserved (and probably needed) a break from her daughter and her husband. We can both be pretty annoying at times, but most of the times we are awesome.

For example. Here is Olive being pretty awesome:



Awesome on-command dance moves FTW! (FTW = For The Win, for those non-nerds among you)

Now, I don't know if you knew this, but not only people you know can be awesome (wow, did I just write a sentence with two "know"s and one "knew"? Guess I did). Sometimes, you stumble upon complete strangers that are pretty awesome. And it just so happened that Olive and I ran into an awesome person on subway ride home back from the party. Well at least I thought he was awesome. Opinions will be polarized is my guess.

So, it was this 13 year old kid (I am guessing he was 13, but I'm usually pretty bad at guessing children's ages) who sort of looked like he ran away from home (this is not the awesome part by the way. Olive, please don't run away from home!!!) and was traveling with his 3 pet rats. Yes, three pet rats. As in Rattus rattus. Or maybe they were Rattus norvegicus, but let us not worry about the technicalities. Now, I knew that some of you might think: "OK. Mayu ran out of things to say and is now making shit up!" So I took a picture. I didn't ask him or anything, I just used my super secret spying device, a.k.a. iPhone and pretended to do something on it, while really I was taking a picture. Sneaky, sneaky. I think he didn't notice. At least he didn't send his rat army to attack me. So, if proof is what you want, proof is what you get:

Yeah. There he is. The Pied Piper of Stockholm (minus the pipe).

Not only was he traveling with his awesome herd of pet rats, but he was also wearing a Carlsberg t-shirt. One of my favorite beers and definitely the beer with the most awesome commercials (as you can see here). Yes, even better than the Heineken commercial. At least I think so. If I had to say one negative thing about this kid it would be that that tattoo on his hand was not ready. He just drew it with a pen.

What do you guys think? Are rats awesome or disgusting? Those are the only two options so get off your fence! On a side note, my sister used to have an albino pet rat. Don't let this fact influence your answer though. You can still say rats are disgusting, even if you like my sister.

So I will be ending this post shortly, but I thought I would introduce a recurring "feature" in my blogs: Mayu's Fun Facts. These will be lesser known bits of information that could be useful in very specific situations, but will be completely useless in the vast majority of situations. They may or may not be related to the topic of the post. So here it goes.

Mayu's Fun Fact #1:

Rats cannot sweat. Instead they have to use their hairless tail to regulate their body temperature.

Now, this information will be worthless most of the time. But what if one day you encounter a rat that has been the victim of some kids that were up to no good and they covered their entire tail with tape. If you didn't know this you might not be concerned. How harmful can a bit of tape be? Right? Well, in this specific scenario tape can be deadly! So one day, one very unlikely day but still, Mayu's Fun Fact #1 will safe some poor rat's ass. :-)

Until next time!

Pimp'ed my blog!

Dear blog,

My wife suggested that I start every blog post with "Dear Blog". I am doing it this once, to keep the peace at home, but then it stops. It has to.

Speaking of my wife, I asked her THE question the other day and here is how that went:

Me: "Sarah, will you ever play World of Warcraft?"

Sarah: No. Never. Never. I have more interest in cultivating manure for sale than playing World of Warcraft!"

Those were her exact words. I know, because I wrote them down after she said them. A simple "no" would have sufficed.

Anyway, if you have been here before, you will have noticed that I made some changes to the look of this blog. For once, you will now be able to follow me on Twitter and other social stuff like that, but also, I have added a little music player where I have the current version of the beat I am working on. It is still work in progress and I am, what some might consider a beat making novice, but hey, I just wanted to share it and see what you guys think. Maybe I can incorporate some of your suggestions into it. :-)

Also you can now subscribe to this blog via email, so you can always stay on top of new posts. Only if you want to of course.

Overall I am pretty happy with the new look, but I have noticed that the blog can take a long time to load, so I need to look into this. Did some research and it seems that it might just be one of the shortcomings of Google Blogger so I might look into switching to WordPress. Any of you people out there have experience with WordPress?

If any of you have any suggestions on how I could further improve the blog, that would be much appreciated.

In other news, this has been the shittiest spring ever in Stockholm! Well, I've only been here for two springs, but of those two, this one is definitely the worst! It is almost mid-may and it is still freezing cold! The summers here are already so short, and every day that it stays shit is one less nice day. It sucks!

Before I became a dad it wouldn't have bothered me this much since I could just stay inside if I wanted to. But with a daughter that gets bored of her own home within minutes of being awake, I am forced to go outside. I would be so much more motivated if I didn't have to put Olive in a thousand layers (which she hates!) before being able to go outside.

If I had to put how I feel about this weather in one picture, it would look like this:

Yeah, pretty depressing, right?

I took that picture with a cool app for the iphone called "Hipstamatic". It simulates the effect of using different types of lenses, film and flashes with pretty amazing results. 

So, that is it for this post. 

And remember, every person following me, commenting or subscribing will drastically improve the chances of good weather here in Stockholm!

Until next time!

Do we all become hypocrites eventually?

Hello again!

So I will be turning 30 this year. I guess you could say that is kind of a milestone of some sort. I must say, if 5 years ago someone had asked me where I would see myself in 5 years, I would have never said: "I see myself living in Sweden, working in the gaming industry and with two kids before my 30th birthday." I guess if I had been able to say that I should have used my future-telling skills to look up the lottery numbers or something, but then again, I probably wouldn't have ended where I am right now, and that would have been a shame. I would have had to drown my sorrows about the life that could have been with expensive liquor and wipe my tears with 100 dollar bills. Anyways...

Getting "older" got me to thinking (isn't this how Carry Bradshaw used to start all her columns? OMG, am I turning into a character from Sex and the City!!!??). Do we all turn more and more into hypocrites the older we get?

For example, the other day I was walking home from the subway and walking towards me was a teenager holding his cellphone in his hand and using it as a tiny ghetto blaster, playing some stupid song. For some reason it got me really agitated. I was thinking to myself: "Dude! No one wants to hear your shitty music, coming from your shitty cellphone with shitty speakers! Doing this does not make you cooler! Everyone has cellphones and smart nerds have invented these cool little things you put in your ears, so you can enjoy your music by yourself and not bother every one with it!"

Now you may ask: "How does that make you a hypocrite, I think people that do that are super annoying also!" Well, the things is, I am pretty sure I used to do things that were pretty annoying to "older" folks back when I was a teenager. I mean I didn't have a cellphone that I could play music with back then, but I recall many occasions of drunk bus or train rides that were super fun for us, but probably not so much for the other passengers. I am sure most of you were also annoying as teenagers, at least sometimes. Does that mean I am a hypocrite? Or that we all are? Am I not allowed to get irritated by obnoxious teens without having to buy this mug?

I actually did make an effort to calm down after the music phone incident and try to look at it from a more grown up perspective. I said to myself: "I was also a teen once. I did stupid stuff. That is just how teenagers are." But even after that I was still wishing I had gone up to that teen, grabbed his stupid phone and smashed it on the ground. It's kinda crazy. I wasn't even having a bad day or anything. I just think its stupid to use your phone as a tiny makeshift ghetto blaster! 

Then I thought, if I get so irritated with this stupid stuff some random teen was doing, how will I react when my own kids become teenagers and start doing stupid stuff? But then I remind myself, my kids will be angels and not be some rebellious teens. They will do as they are told and never cause us any grief.

Yeah right. 

Olive threw a giant fit because Sarah didn't lift her onto the computer chair today! That computer chair will soon be replaced with not letting her get married at 16 to some guy she fell in love with at first sight at her friends party.

Olive is 13 months now. Is it too early to start worrying about these kinda things? What do you think? Let me know in the comments section.

Until next time!

WoW! Just WoW!

Hello you 4 lovely followers of mine! By the way, Sarah has not started following me!!! My own wife! WTF is up with that!? I guess she just reads my blog right after I write it, but she should subscribe anyways, right? 5 just sounds so much better than 4. Looks better too, in my opinion. More curves. :-)

Anyways, today's blog is probably not going to be so interesting for those of you following more for the "Husband.Father." part and not the "Nerd." part, but anyways, you guys knew that the day would come that Mayu would nerd out on his blog. That moment is now. (There is some food for thought further down though, if you manage to get through all the full out nerdom)

So yesterday was one of my game nights (I usually get two a week unless Sarah is in a very giving mood :-)  ) and I am very thankful for them, even though I am in "big trouble" if I come to bed past 23:00. ;-) Anyways, my game night usually consists of me playing World of Warcraft, specifically raiding with the guild I am in, Eradication. "Raiding" in WoW, is when you get together with 9 or 24 other people and try to get through some fairly tough boss encounters. I usually only do the 10-man raids. Anyways, the place we are raiding is called Icecrown Citadel and it has 12 bosses in total, the final one being the Lich King himself. He is eeeviiiil! I mean, just look at him, over there to the right ->

Yeah, evil. Anyways, we have managed to kill 10 of the 12 bosses but are kinda stuck on this giant undead dragon called Sindragosa. She is also evil. Very evil. Here, have a look and judge for yourselves:

Pretty scary, huh? Anyways, we have tried several days, for hours at a time, to kill this damn dragon with no luck. We will get it eventually, and then we will finally get to face the Lick King (that's that evil guy a bit higher up, in case you had forgotten already).

Last night we only got to this boss called Professor Putricide, who is inspired by Professor Farnthworth from Futurama (one of my favorite shows, by the way), but the we started failing on the next boss because one of our main healers has the shittiest internet connection in the world. So we decided to call it a night. Lets see how far we get on Tuesday.

Attention: Food for thought incoming! (mmmm, jummy!)

Sarah and I actually had an interesting discussion last night on whether or not a game like World of Warcraft is social or not. She is of the opinion that it is not social and I think a lot of people would agree with that. Hell, even I agree that it is way less social than going out with friends or hanging out with the family. I do however think that there is a social aspect to games like WoW. The thing is, that it can be as social as you want it to be, really. I mean you could spend all your time in the World of Warcraft without ever interacting with another player or you could be in a super close knit guild that regularly meets in RL (Real Life) and socializes outside of the fantasy world. Back when I was living in Canada I actually met a couple of people from the guild I was in (The Twlight Phoenix) for a couple of beers. The people in that guild are super social and friendly and most of them actually have met in RL at some point. I am actually still in touch with the guild leader, Mona, through Facebook. For me personally WoW would not be as appealing if I wasn't playing with other people that I can relate to. I am still getting to know the folks in the guild I am in now, since I just joined a few weeks ago, but so far it's been a really fun time. :-)

So I think there are good arguments for saying that a game like World of Warcraft can be social, but don't necessarily has to be. And there are many good arguments for saying that games like that are super anti-social. What do you guys think? Are online games social, not at all, or sometimes?

OK. That's it for this super nerdy blog post. I promise I will do more on "La Familia" in my next blog.

Until next time!

Of birds and other annoying things.

 You know what's annoying? Birds! Yes. Fucking birds! (I guess I gave that away in the title, didn't I?)


Your daughter is sleeping through the night after months of night-wakings and then, the fucking birds start coming out again, because its spring or something, and start making the most annoying sounds you could ever imagine! Right outside your bedroom window!


Now, you might say: "Mayu, just close the window." In theory, that is a great idea, except Sarah get's really hot at night and demands to sleep with the window open. So I guess it is all her fault! But that's OK. She is pregnant after all. :-) Sorry about the rant, but it had to be said.


Oh, by the way, you might have thought that I was exaggerating with the tomato plants thing on my last blog post. "How many plants could Sarah really have planted?" - you may ask. Well see for yourselves:

Yes. Those are all tomato plants. The thing is that when Sarah planted these she didn't know that 70% of all tomato seeds will actually become plants. "Come on Mayu, that doesn't look that bad." Well, Sarah also didn't know that every plant, once it becomes a bit bigger, will need a gigantic fucking pot! Yes. Each plant needs a giant pot like the ones you see on those chairs. 


Those chairs that used to be for humans. That means that all those little plants you see by the window will be needing huge pots. I don't even think we have that many chairs.


Oh, and the plants you see here are not all of them. There are more in Olive's room and Rachel already took like a thousand. So yeah. It's a lot of tomato plants.


I guess I should be happy because I will be eating tomatoes for free for the rest of my life. Thing is, I don't even like tomatoes that much. Any ways, enough about the tomato plants. I guess I will just have to deal with it.


So, other than the birds and the tomato plants that are taking over the apartment like some kind of really aggressive mold, the day was actually pretty good. I mean, there were still some annoying parts, but hey, it's not realistic to not have any annoyances at all, right?


We finally found a cheap grocery store close to us (Lidl). It's just a few stops south of us on the train and we never knew about it until like last week! Amazing. Guess we should have tried going the other direction on the train some time sooner. Or just asked a neighbour or something. It's just that the further south you go, the more graffiti you see, and we all know what graffiti means: GHEEEEEETTOOOOOOOOOOO! But then Sarah mentioned that Berlin is practically covered in graffiti, so I guess I am from the ghetto. Touche Sarah. Tou...che! (Don't judge me if I spelled that wrong. It's French after all.)


Later a friend came over with his daughter and Olive and her played outside. The thing about Olive and the outside is that it can either be really awesome, or really annoying. This afternoon, it was more on the annoying side. See, Olive loves to destroy plants. And usually I am all for that (as long as they are not on our property), but today, of all plants out there, she picked the one with these huge thorns! I warned her that she would hurt herself, but she didn't listen. So she hurt herself. She cried and cried. Then calmed down and as soon as I put her down again, she ran back to that same stupid plant! I guess 13 month old humans do not have the ability to learn from their mistakes yet. So really it was a lose - lose situation. If I took her away from the plant, she would cry. If I let her play with the plant, she would sting herself and cry. So I let her sting herself. Then we went inside.


In other news: Olive and Minuet (one of our obese cats) are now officially friends after being enemies for a loooooong time.

Cute. 

So, I guess I should wrap this up since Sarah is waiting for me to watch The Time Traveller's Wife. She is really excited about this movie because she loved the book, but it got shit reviews, so I am not so excited. But nonetheless I will watch it. The things you do for love.

Any ways, hope you guys had a nice Saturday too and if you want, you can tell me what kind of things you find annoying in the comments. :-)

Until next time!