Apocalypse Nöw, II

Yes I am recycling titles. You can read Apocalypse Nöw I, about surströmming, here.Göran Svensson looks over his shoulder as he pilots his chopper low over Vietnam’s dense forest canopy. Beside him, his buddy mans the machine gun, strafing intermittently out the open cabin at nothing in particular, just like in the movies. “It’s the perfect shoot-em up,” Göran says too loudly, on account of his headphones. He should be paying more attention to his flying — his helicopter catches some branches and lurches for the ground. He survives; but his buddy does not.
 
Ten seconds later, after suffering a time penalty, they’re back in the game. Göran, a twenty-something engineering student, is sitting to attention before a …

Read the rest of my article on computer gaming in Sweden on Sweden.se, minus the above first paragraph, which was edited out on account that Swedes do not revel in violence (or maybe they are better helicopter pilots than that?). Writing this article was a lot of fun, but my style may have suffered a bit as it is a uniformly positive piece, devoid of the cynical turns of phrase which I know and love. (Also, links were removed from the text and grouped together at the bottom of the piece — it feels odd to have written someting online without links in obvious places). Feel free to point out mistakes I made and clarifications you might have.

5 thoughts on “Apocalypse Nöw, II

  1. I’m just a non-intellectual and I don’t know almost anything about journalism or writing, and I wonder if it is common that writers will have to do this with their articles?
    This article goes well on sweden.se which claims to be “the official gateway to Sweden” but is more “the propaganda ministry of Sweden”

  2. Interesting that the para with Swedes shooting the VC virtually was edited out… I was in the gym the other day, and on the gym-MTV, they had some throwaway euro-pop dance group’s video (I’m guessing they were dutch, as canals were involved).
    In the video, which was one of those “chase” videos (where the lead singer is pursued by mightly incompetent minions of who-knows-what), the bad guys held metallic-colored, gun-shaped, digitally-blurred items in their hands. The overall effect was so ineffective, I thought I had lost a contact at first, and the image on the screen was fine.
    While I sympathize with avoiding gratuitous violence, the result was absurd.

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