My good friends at Arcticlean (car care) are crazy about old junk junk Volvos. They do nothing but peddle car care products and buy old Volvo cars. And now they are up and running again. An 800 year old 240 has been taken from someone's barn and needs to be fixed, to Elmia. Funny episode, good shit. Take a look here:  Go!

Tuesday, it bangs. BadooOOoom! The mods at Orbifold then unleash  Half-Life 2 RTX Demo and I'm ready. Me and my HP Omen 17 are ready to revisit a Ravenholm illuminated by ray tracing. Read more here!

"Today, we've announced a free Half-Life 2 RTX demo is coming March 18th. Owners of Half-Life 2 can soon experience Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt remade and remastered with full ray-tracing, remastered assets, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, NVIDIA Reflex, RTX Neural Radiance Cache, RTX Skin and RTX Volumetrics. Half-Life 2 RTX is a community-made remaster of Valve's classic game by Orbifold Studios. With a mission to remaster the entirety of Half-Life 2, we're updating every texture, model, and level, adding extra geometric detail to buildings and surfaces to realistically interact with fully ray-traced lighting. Even particles and animations are being revitalized to bring Half-Life 2 to modern graphical standards. To ensure the tone and feel of Half-Life 2 is retained, while enabling remastered assets to look realistic in fully ray-traced environments, the entire game has also been relit, replacing twenty-year-old tech with today's cutting edge lighting through RTX Remix. Essentially, we're remaking the entirety of Half-Life 2 graphics, while leaving its beloved gameplay untouched."

Succession man Kieran Culkin took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in A Real Pain, and he deserves that statuette several times over. Kieran is superb. Perfect in Succession, brilliant in A Real Pain. He is extremely present, his intensity and naturalness when it comes to dialogue is hard to beat and I don't think this movie would have been possible to watch without him, unfortunately. Because apart from a stressed, nervous, neurotic  Jesse Eisenberg and the absolutely fantastic Kieran, the Oscar reel itself is nothing to cheer about. The idea is to offer a kind of twisted, insightful, emotional and at the same time tragicomic journey of discovery through the different stages of grief, but it never becomes anything other than rather flat and a bit monotonous. Unfortunately. But yes, a capable movie thanks to Culkin.

Jonathan Tropper's book Seven damn long days is one of my absolute favorites. Masterful drama comedy. Heartfelt, charming, gnarly, funny, sad, human. It really has it all. Of course, it is also thanks to that book that I am a Tropper fan and follow his career. The most interesting project he is working on right now is the Apple TV Plus series  Your Friends and Neighbors with Mad Men man Jon Hamm as a kleptomaniac. It starts in exactly four weeks, looks very promising and my body... Is thus ready. Trailer!

One of my first watches... 32-33 years ago, was a Citizen Promaster Aqualand, which I loved. Holy, heartfelt, passionate. When I bought my first Omega, I gave my Aqualand to my stepfather (awesome old man, one of the very best people I know) who still (!) has it left, and it runs like clockwork (hah!). As Citizen celebrates the model's 40th anniversary, they are releasing a new special model with a Lume dial that shimmers bright green before shining like a lamp in the dark. Or - correction: They released this in Japan in 2024 but only now has it found its way out into the rest of the world. And I have to have one. Of course. I need one.