In this month’s issue of Keeping Up With the Erikssons: I have another one of those pesky birthdays, attend the Kent Digital Awards, celebrate Midsummer, try to play Batman: Arkham Knight and get a secret tattoo.

Jubilant June, Issue 06/15

1349 words about life — 23:15 · 1st Jul 2015

Whilst I got around to quite a lot of things this month, some didn’t seem fitting for Keeping Up with the Erikssons.

Like the date I went on with Rebecka.

I tried calling it our, “date night,” to which she flat out refused to succumb and rightfully so. Her argument being that it made it sound recurring when in fact, it wasn’t.

But aside for our disagreement in terminology it was a wonderful evening of going to a restaurant and getting a moment to ourselves—sans enfant.

Other events, like attending my very first cricket game has grown so much that it’s getting its own entry—look out for that in August.

In the end, these are the events that made the cut—if you want to think of it that way.

Turning 31

I, of course, turned 31 but before you get your hopes up, no, I actually decided against having a cake this year. Last year’s fire hazard of a cake still brings a smile to my face—which is all I wanted anyway—and the thought of a sugar-laden cake just didn’t do anything for me this year.

I was as shocked as I’m sure you are.

I blame this stupid ageing of mine. Between last year’s June and this one, I’ve apparently grown and matured. Or some shit like that.

Instead, I decided to take two days off work and take the time to relax and—in anticipation of Fallout 4—play Fallout 3.

Blowing up the Megaton nuke as viewed from Tenpenny Tower.
Bye bye Megaton. You won’t be missed.

My character, a woman named Ratchet, with Agility at ⑩ but both Perception and Intelligence at a measly ②—I used an online character generator to determine these stats—who isn’t afraid to put her own needs ahead of others, stealing when it suits her and more than capable of voicing her often misinformed opinion.

Some highlights of what has mysteriously transpired in her presence include nuking the shit out of Megaton—because fuck those guys.

Now Fallout 3 wasn’t pretty to begin with and it hasn’t aged well either. NPCs look like someone wiped their ass on the keyboard and called it, “a good day’s work.”

The game doesn’t work on multi-core Windows 7 machine—i.e. it crashes constantly. Thankfully, the internet came to my rescue and by editing the fallout.ini file to limit the number of cores it can use, I got it to stop crashing.

But despite these nags—and other a few other—I still love Fallout 3 as much as I did the day it was released.

Kent Digital Awards

Oh, would you look at that, it’s award-winning Designer and Front-end developer Carlos Eriksson.

Why thank you, don’t mind if I do.

Carlos Eriksson accepting the Gold award for Creative and Market at the Kent Digital Awards.
Here I am, graciously accepting the award and rambling about people and their navel-gazing websites.

The awards show was hosted by former BBC journalist Robin Bailey—who I guess is famous from something or other—with a stand-up routine provided by TV actor and stand-up comedian James Redmond, who has appeared on Emmerdale but is more famous from Hollyoaks—something I only know because he mentioned it all the bloody time.

Most of his jokes was comprised of talking about the career he used to have, which I’m sure was funny. Had I had any idea what that career had been.

No offence Mr. Redmond but I prefer my jokes wrapped in a handsome man dressed as an executive transvestite.

Now when I say that I won an award, what I really mean is of course that Squiders won an award because Squiders were the ones who were nominated, not me.

But since Kris insisted that I go up and collect the damn thing, I figured the least I could do was pretend—for a fleeting moment—that I had, personally, won the award.

Even though I hadn’t.

The Squiders team holding the Gold award for Creative and Market at the Kent Digital Awards.
The only “decent” picture of us.

Still though, congratulations to us. And to everyone else who won awards that evening. You’re all winners as far as I’m concerned.

Well, except all of you who lost. You guys suck.

Midsummer

No June would be complete without a little pagan celebration in honour of the summer solstice.

This year was no different. The plan is always the same; get some friends together, have a booze-riddled barbecue with silly dancing and pickled herring.

We had fun and I’ll leave you with the funnies picture of the evening, courtesy of Steve.

The beard growth after 32 weeks.
Gaze into my eyes and lose your soul forever.

Batman: Arkham Knight

I’m sure you all aware of my love of all things Batman—I mention it every now and then—so it should as no surprise that in honour of the release of Batman: Arkham Knight, I decided to take the afternoon off from work and play it.

At least that was the idea.

A screen capture of how I tried to Batman: Arkham Knight
I am not bat-amused.

But it turns out that Rocksteady Studios had a different plan when they neglected to port the PC version properly, instead relying on Iron Galaxy Studios to do it for them.

So instead of glorious bat-tastic gaming I had to turn everything to either off or low and set the screen resolution to a pathetic 640×480 pixels and still only managed to get an average of 0.2 FPS.

Which I hope you imagine wasn’t bat-fun in any way and made for a completely unplayable game.

You could say it bat-sucked.

An illustration of Batman sheding a single tear.
No one knows what it’s like, to be the sad man.

Should I make that design into a T-shirt?

This is how my excitement level went from 4 and a half out of 5 orphaned small boys to a measly 1 orphaned small boy.

Now publisher Warner Bros. has issued an official apology and officially suspended any future sales of Batman: Arkham Knight until they’ve managed to fix the plagued PC version.

I wait, batappointed, until they have fixed because I can’t actually play it in its current form.

Tattoo, again?

Remember last month when I told you that I was finally done with the tattoo?

Now whilst that was certainly true, what I didn’t tell you was that I had booked another session for two new tattoos—this time much smaller than an entire sleeve though.

After the disappointment that was Batman: Arkham Knight I was quite happy that I had booked that appointment.

Carlos Eriksson and his shoulder tattoo.
Some people just leave their marks on you.

I got a Lucien’s hand print on my left shoulder and Rebecka’s lips on my right chest.


Now, I’m going to have a vacation from writing—like I had planned all along—and I’ll be back on August 31st. Until then I hope you all have a great summer and I’ll see you in 2 months.

And that’s it for this month.

You’ve just read Jubilant June, Issue 06/15.

In which, 8 years ago, I wrote 1349 words about life and I covered topics, such as: keeping up with the erikssons , batman , tattoos , midsummer , kent digital awards , and birthdays .