In this month’s issue of Keeping Up With the Erikssons: We don’t celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary, lose another pub quiz, continue my tattoo, take on the role of a sentient lizard, attend a conference in London, get Lucien declared healthy and finally, end our Wartime Life.

Fabulous February, Issue 02/15

1262 words about life — 19:00 · 1st Mar 2015

The first story isn’t even a story at all but rather the lack of one. We celebrated our fruit anniversary—that’s four years in case you’re wondering—this month. But when I say celebrated what I really mean is, we completely forgot about it. Both of us.

Consumed by our endeavour to live like it was 1943 we forgot all about it. It wasn’t until three days later that I remembered that, “Oh, shit we didn’t celebrate our wedding anniversary.” At which point we, sort of, figured that it was too late to celebrate it anyway.

Oh well, there’s always next year. Curious side note:

Before 1937, only the 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, 50th, and 75th anniversaries had an associated gift. In 1937, Jewelers of America introduced an expanded list of gifts, a gift each year up to the 25th, and then for every fifth anniversary after that.

6 Month Probation

To honour the 6 months of my employment we did the same thing as we had done before I started working at Squiders: Pints & Pub quiz. And just like the time before, we were quite terrible at it, finishing second-to-last.

Session #3

I also went for another session at Stainless Steve’s, continuing on my sleeve tattoo.

Carlos Eriksson at Stainless Steve's Custom Tattoos, for session #3 of his sleeve tattoo.
I still haven’t figured out how to get a good picture of the entire tattoo.

Escape from Mos Shuuta

A few friends and I have started getting together to play a pen and paper role-playing game, specifically Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.

Our adventure takes place in Mos Shuuta, a small city on the desert world of Tatooine. Mos Shuuta is situated on the top of a tall, rocky bluff, with nothing but endless desert in every direction around it.

As the story begins, the PCs are attempting to escape the servants of the ruler of Mos Shuuta, Teemo the Hutt. Each of the PCs is in trouble with Teemo the Hutt for one reason or another, as explained in their character folios. The only way to get off planet and escape Teemo the Hutt is to steal a ship and fly to safety. Fortunately, they’ll get a chance to do exactly that, by stealing a ship called the Krayt Fang from a Trandoshan named Trex.

Rather than use one of the ready-made characters, 41-VEX, Lowhhrick, Oskara or Pash, I decided to make my own, a Trandoshan droid merchant called Khreenk Cas Nal.

And although I’m not a massive Star Wars fan I’ve quite enjoyed the first gaming session we had. I got to create, assigned skill points and buy equipment for my reptilian friend, who is then forced to join DK88, an assassin droid and Lowhhrick, a gladiator Wookie, to try to escape Mos Shuuta and Teemo the Hutt.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, the first encounter of Escape from Mos Shuuta
Hiding behind a bar taking pot shots is also a tactic.

Apparently Trandoshans and Wookies hate each other, which makes for some interesting interactions. On one hand I need both of them to escape and on the other hand, I’m going to kill Steve Lowhhrick the moment he ceased to be useful to my escape.

But, “Sssh, don’t tell him.”

Reasons: London

Reasons: London, an event I had been looking forward to this month—though to be honest, there’s been a lot of things I’ve looked forward to this month—was the conference me and my boss were attending.

Rather than take and form of notes, or pictures for that matter, I just sat and absorbed everything. It was really nice and I said I would sign up to pitch them a talk for their Brighton event in September. Which is both terrifying and exciting and back to terrifying again.

In the meantime, here’s the wonderful people I had to honour of listening to:

Harry Roberts

Structuring your CSS, the DOs, DONTs and WHYs. Nothing particularly new for me, but it was interesting to hear Harry’s thoughts anyway and to chat afterwards.

Stefanie Posavec

Stefani’s talk was about how data visualization illustrations are not the same as posters with big numbers. Very interesting seeing how analogue her work really was, as she does her beautiful illustrations by hand.

Reasons: London, 2015
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get #twatinthebluehat to trend. Photo courtesy of @reasonsto.

James Hall

James managed to scare the crap out of everyone by talking about and demonstrating how no one is safe. Everything can be hacked, spoofed or otherwise tampered with to steal any and all information anyone could want.

Basically we’re fucked and I need to learn what the fuck a VPN is and how to use it. Thanks a lot James.

Anna Dahlström

The multi-device era is here and it brought with it a whole host of new challenges and problems. Anna talked about it, and how she imagines that the future holds a lot more for voice as an input method.

Andrew Clarke

Showing up on stage wearing an ape mask, Andrew Clarke talked about the power of advertising and how everyone’s so focused on metrics and measurements—my words, not his—that no one is being truly creative in the web design industry any more.

And whilst I get where he’s coming from, and partly agree with him, I also disagree and think that we’re looking at the result of refusing to embracing the fluidity of the web, circa 20 years ago.

Thought-provoking? Yes. Inspiring? Yes. And I also met him, which was also nice thought.

Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot, Creative Director of Adobe Typekit, talked about the journey he had made as a Designer, his new magazine Lagom and of course typography—thought not as much as I would have liked.

He did manage to give me an idea for how I could get multi line headings to work and still adhere to a baseline.

Status: Healthy

Lucien is finally, officially, all better as well, having been declared healthy by the cardiologists and doctors last Wednesday.

Lucien and I took another road trip up to London, to have follow up on his Kawasaki disease and there were no signs on any lesions on his heart so he was declared healthy and the doctors don’t feel a need to follow him any more.

Which is awesome news and we took skipped all the way—well, half the way—to the nearest restaurant to grab a bit to eat.

Lucien Eriksson and his echocardiogram.
His heart.

1943

As you might remember, we also spent the month of February in 1943. Today we’re fading back into 2015 and it’s been an interesting and rocky experience which I thought I would write about in its own entry a bit later.

Until then, you can read plenty of posts on our Wartime Life blog.

And that’s it for this month.

You’ve just read Fabulous February, Issue 02/15.

In which, 9 years ago, I wrote 1262 words about life and I covered topics, such as: keeping up with the erikssons , tattoos , wartime life , back in time , anniversaries , conferences , jobs , and father and son .