Family

I visited my mum this weekend, and she had tons of pictures around:
sorry about the bad formatting, I blame Blogger

My cold-as-ice younger brother, Torjus


My not-quite-as-cold older brother, Andreas:

My mum claims this picture doesn't quite do her justice

She's right, she's more like this:


It's my sister Anna, we are pseudo-twins...


...on this picture I've probably told
her a joke via our telepathic abilities


There are few pictures of my father,
since he works as a special agent.
Here he is disguised as a paedophile.
My mum's parents Åse and Bjørn are present t00


Andreas and his fianceé, Cecilie.
They're getting married this saturday!

Audun!

Audun's seal!

I looked up my name on wikipedia today, to see what it said (wrote).
I always thought my name means "Rich in friends", as in having many friends, but it turns out it means "Rich friend", which sounds a bit like I'm the one all the leeching people wants to befriend.

Anyways, I also found out there used to a baron called Audun Hugleiksson, back in the medieval ages. He was a sort of a lawyer for the king, and also a finance minister.
He was highly educated, not only in warfare but also in law and economy. He was one of the few people rich enough to build a stone castle, and he had his own "hird" (personal guard).

He was also a diplomat, he was sent to negotiate various treaties and he was especially sent whenever there was a chance for the king to earn lots of money.
So this Audun was rather powerful, and he was rich, and a friend of the king = "Rich friend"!.

All of this made me a bit queasy though, there's no way I'll live up the heritage name has by being a video game designer :)


Audun's coat-of-arms!
(alright the colouring could have been better
but they're not the original ones)

Creativity

I've had some thoughts about creativity. I'll start by explaining the things that got me going thinking about it:

1. My oral exam grades. I had 3 oral exams this spring. On two of them I earned the top grade, what got me all the way was my ability to pull other things than what was written in the books into my answer and for my ability to draw paralells between situations and compare things. Think, perceive, consider, evaluate and other fancy things.

2. I read an interview with a Blizzard employee. From his point of view, what one would consider one's own creative ideas are usually a blend of impressions and ideas other people have given you. In other words, you very rarely come up with something new that is truly of your own. Businessmen calls it stealing, culture calls it inspiration.

So, what am I getting at? I'm cool and everyone steals in the name of culture?

There's nothing wrong in letting creativity benefit from other people's creativity, I think it's a good thing. And very often these new ideas are a blend of so many ideas they really are new.

I'm thinking this: Creativity is not about creating something new. It's more about putting what you already know together in a new way.

I got my exam grades by putting together old facts about the Second World War together in a new and interesting way.
An artist is artistic when she blends old ideas and makes a new one. She doesn't really have to add something of her own, the blending is enough.
This would also mean that unconventional people are more creative, as they are not "afraid" of having a different look at things.
A nice example from video games: Everyone "knew" that orcs were evil because Tolkien had said so, until someone in Blizzard suggested that maybe they were just possessed and weren't that evil after all.
Tolkien created something new and exciting, and then many years later Blizzard took that idea and reshaped into some new again.

So how many genuinely new thoughts are there?
I'm not sure. Does it matter?

wut food?

Today I ate at a place called Friday's. It's fairly expensive, not a place a student really should go to, but the food was phantastic.
I had a big platter of nachos with chicken, cheese, sour cream and guacamole, it was everything I wanted from a meal of nachos.
Then there was "Oreo Madness" for dessert, huge Oreo cookies where the filling was part ice cream and part cream, or something. Then said cookies were drowned in chocolate and caramel.

It's not that I haven't eaten good food before, I ate some really good lasagna this weekend. I'm not even sure why I blog about this, I never blog about what I eat.
Consider this an exception. Next post will be about some abstract meta-concept, promise.