year: 2025

A month ago, “competitive programming” was a term I barely recognized—Today, I participated in the Northwestern European Regional Competition (NWERC) 2025 in Karlsruhe, Germany!

Together with another CS- and one math student, we formed team UmU (get it? we’re from Umeå University). My teammates had both qualified through the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (NCPC), while I was recruited in lack of a third eligible contestant, unable to decline a free holiday. Before the competition, we actually got interviewed by the university, archived here.

With the small amount of practice we managed to squeeze into the month before, we were very happy to complete 6 out of 12 problems during the competition! My teammates are much to thank for cracking some tough ones.

I am very pleased with the whole event and would like to extend my thanks to any organizers reading this for a wonderful weekend! As a nerd, it can be frightful to initiate contact with other nerds. Alas, I did have some most delightful encounters:) (Even though I must admit I fled the board games room on Saturday)

Looking very much forward to next year when I hope to actually qualify, and get further acquainted with the competitive programming community!

This article was originally posted in Swedish to Bar Total.

The department of animation and existential bloobalooby at Bar Total have picked out three short animated series that have got us raving in ecstasy. As if by divine decree, we feel an importunate longing to share these masterpieces, and as we’ve already pestered our closest relatives, the lot now falls on you dear reader. So here are three cartoons for your viewing pleasure:

• MTV’s Downtown

With stories and voice actors straight from the streets of 90s New York, there are few series as authentic as Downtown. The characters are based on interviews with real downtowners and the dialogues are mostly unscripted. The series, which aired during three months on MTV in 1999, got cancelled after only 13 episodes. It is however a lasting time capsule from “the era of the slacker” — when kids were just hanging around — and have grown a big following of young souls in recent years. If you like films by Harmonie Korine, Richard Linklater or Gus Van Sant this series is something for you. We pay our thanks to CKS RIchardson who revived this gem by uploading all episodes to Youtube 🙏

• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjLt9Ko9Xnsicvt79T6plaoDguyPpzbuM

• Scavengers Reign

From an animation studio founded by none other than Chris Prynoski, the creator of Downtown, comes a criminally unknown series that’s all we’ve ever dreamt of. A group of space travellers gets stranded on a remote planet with incredible biodiversity. The animation of intricate biological processes are in the ranks of the best “trippy psychedelic animations” found on Youtube or BBC’s Planet Earth. Tech and biology are woven together under a reverence for the unrelenting forces of nature, with an aesthetic that screams solarpunk. That Scavengers Reign also did not receive a second season is further testimony that the streaming giants, who took their turns owning the rights, simply do not keep our best interest at heart. Therefore, watch Scavengers Reign on Dopebox:

• Dopebox: https://dopebox.to/watch-tv/watch-scavengers-reign-online-hd-101734.10022227

• Common Side Effects

For a happy ending we’ll go with a series that’s acctually been renewed for a season two by Adult Swim. Common Side Effects tackle the pharmaceutical industry and our collective medicating in the spirit of Luigi Mangione meets Terrence McKenna. In this conspiracy thriller we follow Marshall, discoverer of the “Blue Angel mushroom”, through difficult conflicts of interest and mind bending experiences. Similarities in art style to Scavengers Reign may be because the shows share Joseph Bennett as a creator. We tried creating his Wikipedia page, but someone else had already got a draft of it rejected. The draft however did open our eyes to a book released by Joe Pera, illustrated by Bennett, called “A bathroom book for people not pooping or peeing but using the bathroom as an escape”. Anyways, binge Common Side Effects here:

• (HBO) Max: https://play.max.com/show/eaa21376-a54d-4245-95d6-a86dce6313c8
• Dopebox: https://dopebox.to/watch-tv/watch-common-side-effects-online-hd-120265.10920814

As winter here in the north tightens its grasp once more, I am due for some reflection. On my life situation, goals, relations, creative and not so creative endeavours and how to balance it all.

Yesterday I watched Boyhood for the first time. I felt some of the same loss of clarity in the boy’s life as in my own after becoming an actual adult — aka growing into a pretentious directionless stoner. Up until like age 15 is fine but then the world becomes too large to make sense. There isn’t an optimal path anymore and successful navigation demands steering straight ahead into some unknown.

I oft wonder what kind of direction I am keeping in my own life and if I have the guts to see it through. When I started my studies in computer science I mostly wanted to utilize it for creative work. I have since found myself entrenched in meaningless schoolwork I find too rigorous, boxed in and joyless, and been too stressed to focus on the things I really love. Of course I have also practiced useful skills, responsibility, time management etc., and I know an education is ultimately an important investment for getting over some societal hurdles alot easier in addition to a well needed kick in the arse.

Five years is a dauntingly long time, but I’ll still be myself in the end. I choose CS because I believe the digital to be the most plastic form of expression, capable of the wildest malleability. It can also be a real trap. Technology is best used sparingly.

From what I understand it takes a real commitment and a real disciplined work ethic to succeed with creative endeavours. I do (at times) believe I have enough of the creative magic dust inside me to create cool (great..🫣?) stuff, if I dedicate myself enough, which of course is the really hard part.

tldr; Adulting takes too much energy from sensitive young bean who wants to be a creative but not too fuzzy.

…

Sooo… what I wanna do then?? Can I say digital concept art ? Freedom technologies ? Hymns for the lonely ? Silly little jokes ? Cozy collaborative spaces ?

Through education and pursuing interesting side projects I hope to launch myself into a position where creating some stuff of that sort is possible.

My dream is to have a graffiti crew. Or a band. Can I start a band of blogger punks? Would you join it? That small scale, strong bond, creative energy is what I’m after. And not boxed in either, I want a crew that can make digital as well as physical graffiti.

If you want to achieve something it is a good idea to surround yourself with people who are doing that thing or as close to it as possible, I have heard. But surrounding oneself with a specific group of people is not so easy. It requires reaching out, communication, participation, engagement, all that stuff that I find outside my comfort zone. And most of the time the people I find doing interesting stuff are micro-celebrities online — people who already deal with many others reaching out, which makes it harder for me to justify that they should be allocating time for me.

…

Coming back to this draft a week later, I’ve been bogged down by a feeling of hopelessness for the state of the world — global heating, oligarchy and so on. I realized what I really need is to give myself some space, patch myself up and start rebuilding my shrivelled up creative and social muscles. I have been putting too much pressure on myself and looking too far ahead. Getting good grades while also working and doing interesting side projects was too much.

The time may come when I can articulate my winged unicorn of a dream and actually do somethin’ about it. For now I’m not gonna let it chew my heart into pieces, but simply sleep soundly in its depths. The sun will rise again. Peace to you, you strange fellow sojourner.

My collection of cool interesting art:

Very work in progress, unexhaustive etc. Leave any suggestions u think I might like in the comments.

Web based:

• Contemporary Stockholm based Civil Polis blur the lines between a band and a movement, with a supposed 200 members and distributed songwriting. Their website is an image board and they roll their own streaming platform on port 4533.

• The website mebious.co.uk from serial experiments lain that is sadly unusable since 2020.

• Radio station Hbr1 is also a favourite of mine.

Rhizome’s collection of surf clubs lead me to some interesting projects:

• Cloaque is a long vertical internet collage colab between artists.

• Sadly also discontinued dump.fm seems to have been a perfect shitposting ground.

• Last but not least are.na is just like the memex! Check it out:-)

Other collections:

• Evergreens fav artists

Backlinks

• Real vs. online worlds
• Stoner doers

If you are a stoner and a doer hmu

we could organize a rave,
do new interesting art,
build a system to overthrow the world governments,

Maybe I’m just dreaming…

Evolves into Rave agents.