Tintin LEGO in my dreams

@malincarliusen was asking for tintin video games the other day, and there are rumours that there is a Wii and a PS3 game according to the up coming Steven Spielberg movie.

A game would be fun, but oh how I would love if LEGO would present an according set for me and my kids. We'd be able to create tibetan and inka temples, castles, nomad tents, african schools and savanna animals, indian villages and chinese houses, maybe an egypt pyramid from inside and an old fashion rocket! If I say please

Previous on LEGO - LEGO only for 50% of all children?

I feel Swedish when I...

1. Love the Josef Frank wallpapers from Svenskt Tenn

2. Jump around the maypole as a frog.

3. Use the sunny hours to oil the deal decks.

4. Start a dinner outside, bringing all the porcelain in when in starts to rain.

5. Make chocolate balls and play Ludo to the rhythm of the rain in the summerhouse.

6. Sweat in the sauna – anytime.

7. Bathe naked from the rocks, all alone in the ocean.

8. Get hopeful for mushrooms and blueberries in the woods when it rains.

9. My husband is on paternal leave, not only in the summer months.

10. Get afraid that the summer is already over… in July

Overall, it has mostly to do with weather... summer weather.



Update: I had knackebrod for dinner and realized that it can't be forgotten. How much can you love water and flour made to burned cakes, hung on poles in the roof?

Everybody wants happy users

When searching on ’responsibility cyber bullying’ almost all hits concern the schools’ responsibility in this. E-mail, sms and personal homepages have eased being bad to each other. Teachers, parents and school have a tough time raising kids to humanitarian citizens.

When working with Stardoll, we’ve seen this as a part of the responsibility to run a community, as well as a demand from the users. We early decided we wanted our members to leave the site ever day in a comfortable and even empowered mood. A bullied girl is not feeling empowered.

When inheriting 200 dolls and 200 000 member pages from Liisa, I spent many months parallel developing the game and hours in customer service. It stood clear from day one that there was a subculture of girls who liked girls who was not combinable with most teens and tweens from all over the world. Only their names made me blush and both their language and missionary were not appreciated by most other users. We erased these kind of accounts again and again and again until they accepted that this was no longer a place that they could use for their purpose (might sound harsh, I hope they have their community somewhere else where everyone feel comfortable and are happy with this, maybe even get empowered by it).

Next question was not as evident. We could clearly see from the user input that American tweens were much more sensitive to foul language than most others. With their background they did not let one little ‘shit’ pass and they reported everything. By our Swedish standard I guess we found these kids a little policiere and prudent. When translating the site to several languages we implemented a strict language filter that doesn’t let any bad words through. When releasing this feature we had to take a stand – what words did Stardoll accept and not? Would older and European users find the conversation too childish and boring if they weren’t able to write even the tiniest little ‘shit’? We considered that if half of our users didn’t feel comfortable with this language, we had to try to ‘raise’ the rest to accept this. We never had ANY comment or disapproval of the strict language filter.

One of the conceptual values we worked by when developing the site thereafter was ‘Safety’ (later Haven). The girls should be safe to be on Stardoll. Safe to be girls. Safe to try out their style, personality, social interaction, creativity and more. Safe to be online in a big community.

The members also kind of raise each other, they let others know what is ok and not, but to get there the community have to set the right premises. In every decision – in everything from sales, design, banner production, conversion layers and in all communications with the members - we weight in the value concept of Safety. Doing this the entirety will come as close the the ideal goal as possible. Example of details where the Safety value makes big difference is

- Categories available for report. Presenting specific categories for the users to report each other in gives a hint of what is accepted and not.

- No personal information is aloud. Both language filters and categories for report informs of this. All reports are followed up.

- Only winners are presented, other voting results are not visible for anyone. It’s not empowering to get bad votes on something you have put lots of effort on, and it’s an obvious trigger for others to pick on you. The trigger ‘to win – to become covergirl’ is the only that matters, internal hierarchies are not necessary for a great game.

- The copy in a banner is changed from - ‘Everyone is pretty on Stardoll’ to ‘Be who you want on Stardoll’.

- No real life images of members are allowed as they would completely destroy the possibility to try out different personalities without being bullied. The game would be ruined.

- There are space for 30 Best Friends in the presentation, not only one. If only filling in one, the empty spaces look kind of... empty.

- Despite user requests we don't publish a bold Britney Spears when there is something that doesn't seem sound.

- Keep at least one gift free for everyone to give to anyone and encourage to send this gift to newbies and others. This gift must thereby be very general and maybe even be a trigger to start a conversation.

At rare occations when this value has been compromised, when prioritizing something else before the Safety, there has appeared leaks where cyber bullying has found its way. If there is only a tiny chance that a feature might lead to attempts to cyber bullying, it will. It’s a choice – a safer, maybe little less challenging/fun/selling version of the feature to avoid an overall negative experience.

This kind of ‘leaks’ must then be followed up and contraproduced. We run a Best Friends Forever campaign. In the first step we encouraged the members to suggest how to be a good friend on Stardoll. We put 10 of the great suggestions together to a code of conduct and for ten days 200 000 girls returned every day to sign under each of the bullits. The campaign was hugely appreciated and the bad tone we had experienced was calmed – for some time…

I guess what I’m saying is - parents, teachers and users – tell the people behind the features what you want! Don’t work against cyber bullying on your own, but take the producers to your help. They have great opportunities to make impact, to reach out.

Alla kan inte vara vuxna och professionella

Efter att ha läst Kristina Alexandersons ypperliga inlägg (ett av många) om huruvida lärare ska lägga till elever på Facebook eller inte, har jag pratat med tre olika sällskap om detta med olika reaktioner.

Den förskoleföreståndare som satt vid middagsbordet reagerade direkt mycket starkt mot detta. Hon förstod inte alls varför lärare skulle, och upplevde direkt att lärare och elever inte ska involveras i varandras privatliv. Normalt sett vill lärare inte jobba i det område de bor i just av denna anledning. De vill inte jobba när de är lediga. Det ska vara skillnad mellan arbetsroll och privatliv.

Jag förstår det. Det är ett stort ansvar att ta när man överskrider den gränsen.

De föräldrar jag pratade med som båda har barn i förskola och lågstadium upplevde precis som jag att det vore fantastiskt om lärare ville ta det ansvaret.

Jag tänker mig hur lärarrollen såg ut för länge sen i mindre samhällen och tror att människor då inte hade samma gränsdragning mellan jobb och privatliv som idag, utan att man var sitt yrke hela tiden. Lärare hade samma status som brandmän, läkare och butiksägare, och det gick inte att inte vara förtroendeingivande och respektabel ibland och ibland inte. Småskalighet och skola låter alltid positivt i kombination.

Jag minns min egen högstadietid som fasligt rörig. Tonåringar (fler än jag måste jag väl ändå tro) bryter sig med bravur loss från sina föräldrar och lyssnar främst till sina vänner och till media (Internet, TV, musik). Jag uppskattade mina klassföreståndare enormt mycket. För det första var de feminister och noga med att hålla en jämn fördelning av uppmärksamhet och hörda röster tjejer och killar emellan. Men sen var de också ganska privata – vuxna, mycket närvarande och personliga. Jag trodde på dem, på vad de sa, och på att de fanns där för mig.

Det är klart att jag inte visste allt om dem, men vi visste att Christina hade lappar på kylskåpet som stoppade henne från att småäta och vi visste att Anna hade en käresta som hon senare gifte sig och fick barn med. Vi visste att Annas pappa hade varit aktiv och synlig socialdemokrat och att Christina bodde i Husby, där vi fick hälsa på en gång och dra en tipsrunda runt hennes joggingspår.

De var tydliga människor som gav bort rätt mycket av sig själva som personer och vad hände då – jo, vi gav bort rätt mycket av oss själva tillbaka. De kände till våra problem vilket underlättade deras arbete med att undervisa och hjälpa oss. Inte heller ville vi göra dem besvikna, de svek ju aldrig oss.

Facebook är ju ett galet bra medium för att enkelt och inte särskilt tidskrävande skapa och vårda en sådan relation. Jag själv skriver inte något på Facebook som inte avlägsna vänner eller mina egna föräldrar inte tål att höra. Jag lägger upp några extra fina bilder på mina barn, på något pyssel jag just har avslutat och kanske en solnedgång en härlig sommarkväll. Vad sjutton är det de där lärarna som inte vill vara privata med sina elever inte vill dela med sig av??? Är de hemligheterna ett måste i sådant fall, eller kan kanske detta medium få bli en del av arbetet också?

Svårare är det åt andra hållet tycker jag då. Eleverna har sämre minne av att de har en lärare som följer deras bilder och inlägg och har kanske svårare att förstå vilken bild de ger av sig själva. Då måste lärarna med elever som vänner ha stor förståelse, kunna blunda och bara se när de ska se. Vara vuxna och göra professionella bedömningar. Det klarar kanske inte alla?

Girls’ Games IV – tweens and teens today are same same but different

We adored Madonna, today there is Lady Gaga. The through all times eternal icon for all girls of any kind is Marilyn Monroe – these are the women who are sexy and thereby adored by men, but who still keep the power over themselves and turn the worship to their own profit. This is why big busted Lara Croft worked well also for women even if her breast size was debated.

We found inspiration in future heroes Princess Leia, Ripley and E.T. Today’s girls get inspired by mystic Bella Swan, Arven and Avatar. I’d say the only difference is that in the 80s space was the mystery – the future, today the Twilight zone is what we long for – a place we don’t know anything about and therefore can have promising hopes for.


TV provided us with Pamela Barnes Ewing, Sammy Jo Carrington and Melissa Channing. Today it’s Hannah Montana, Lauren Conrad and Sara Sidle(CSI) and many more. In the 80s the grown up intrigues were showing us how normal we were in our real lives. Today someone else’s strange real lives are telling us how boring we are in our real lives.


We wore Levi’s, Converse and biker tights. Today’s girls dream of Chanel, Miss Sixty and Louis Vuitton. The economy is kind of different and the kindness of the parents has grown.


We screamed after Michael Jackson, Kiss and a little later on Public Enemy. Girls today have a wider selection and much younger, almost peers to follow. Some of the faves are Tokio Hotel, Robert Pattinsson, Zac Efron, Jonas Brothers, McFly.


So the habits are the same while there are minor differences in economy, lifestyle and male icons. What differs is of course the standard access to Internet, mobiles and games.

Most remarkable is probably the mobile phone use. 54% of all am teens text daily and sends and receives 50 or more messages per day – 1500 per month! 14-17 year old girls are the most active texters, sending 100 or more messages per day.

Next is that girls play games. 97% of all American kids and more than half of American adults play often. The NPD Group report “Gamer Segmentation 2009,” says that 28% of females are playing video games (40% of all players). But not all female gamers are young. More than 33% of women ages 18 and up play video games – surpassing the 18% of boys ages 17 and younger who play video games.

With Stardoll’s 60 million members there is no doubt that girls like and spend time on online fashion games, if they are designed the right way. A majority of the girls on Stardoll are 11-12 years old.

Stardoll was specifically designed for these young girls – those who had left their Barbies and who started to turn to the grown up world for the first time. It was designed to be a free pass from school yards’ peer pressure and from impossible media dreams. It’s a place where girls know they are welcome, where they are safe to be girls. It’s a place where they can explore their growing personalities and try out both looks and social behavior without worries, restrictions or risk taking. They can’t do anything wrong, their creations are always right, they are right.

But it is also those who still have the time, and who is still more in an experimental world of play. Around the age of 15 these girls are turning to the real world for real life practice. They almost don’t play computer games at all.
What they practice on and offline is self marketing – to be seen. They blog and participate in social networks to promote themselves. They do absolutely use Facebook or other social networks, but not as often as those age 25-45 years old. They don’t need to, they see their friends much more often than we oldies do.

Overall the media time spent is not that different!
8-18 years old spend 32% of their media time on TV, 25% on their computer and 20% on their mobile phone. Consoles only take 5% of their time, partly due to that it’s not a multimediatasking activity. Both TV and videogames are decreasing the older the teenager get, while music takes more and more of their time. Style, music and friends make the identity.





Going back to my own teenage head I guess girls run about the same kind of mental life today. Friends and media are the only things that matters. Popularity and being seen is in focus and most girls don’t have time for games between school, sports and friends as soon as they are free to go and do where/whatever they want.

all stats are found here

Previous Girls' Games Posts
1980-1984
Kids 2010
1984-1994

A flash of Sherle's gym from SF to Sthlm

This t-shirt I bought in San Fransisco a few years after my first visit. This time we stayed at the Spray mansion on the hills - as taken from a 70s movie. We spent hours in the vintage stores before we returned to Lake Tahoe for my first attempt to snowboard ever. Lake Tahoe was fantastic but this winter – 10 years later – I finally stated that steep slopes are not for me. I love to ski for miles, all alone in the white quiet, but fast slopes are made for another type than me.

It was great though to learn it in the US. People all around me in the slopes were yelling at me – ‘Up you go’, ‘Give it another try’, ‘We’ve all been there’! And everybody used the few minutes in the lines for the lifts to get a chit-chat. If anybody would yell at you in the slopes in Sweden you would get scared and establish that they were drunk.

My boyfriend made me aware, just a couple of days ago when I was working out in this t-shirt, of that it doesn’t say Shirley’s as I always thought. It’s Sherle’s. WHO WAS SHERLE? Maybe not even a she I realized! This t-shirt has probably fit some San Fransisco gay gym owner from the early 80s! It was maybe combined with tiny shiny satin shorts once, maybe even roller skates. I suddenly got a flavour of the 80s Jane Fonda glamour around me!

Previous vintage stories
Quality to Use and Reuse to Reduse
Vintage Levi's from Height Street
Bondelid 15 years + (baby birth story)

Let's Create! Pottery app

I'd say Polish Infinity Dreams had a female gamer in their mind when developing this great iPad app.

It's great looking, full of extra graphic elements that make me happy. It's not just to create your potter, but also to see polaroids of them, to sell them and to buy new beautyful patterns to decorate them further. It's the full dream, not only a small part of it made because someone discovered the technical possibility.

Introduction and pushing me further in the game play is made through a fake e-mail conversation with the game that encourages me to take step after step, just the way I'd like to be involved in any social community with too many details to learn at first visit. I learn it at the time I'm ready.

Also it's not crucial that my copy gets identical with the suggested original. I don't have to start over, and I don't loose anything. It's fun just to create, and I get rewarded with money to buy new patterns for if I can make it identical. This is probably one of the issues that is the most female friendly feature.

More about girls' games later...

Full summary from toucharcade.com
Let's Create! Potter in iTunes store

Girls’ Games III – 1984-1994

In 1984 I was eleven and games had become quite male gendered, but I didn’t really notice. At that time all we wanted was to have fun together. We watched videos at home or hung out in the park and made all old school pranks we could come up with. The first ‘date’ was a gang of us going to see Splash and the next we went to the Tivoli, always with our parents in the background. They kind of supported us to do fun stuff together in a demi freedom.



This absence of problems soon turned to something very complex and confusing – the teenage. The old classmates went out of status as we changed school and the run for the top started. The top equaled being popular and seen, preferable by everyone. There was no self analysis or strategy in that plan, only thoughtless action. And the peer pressure was heavy. Everyone did their best to sit on everybody they could sit on to reach higher status. It was all about doing things nobody else dared and about doing things everybody else did - rebelling from parents, school, teachers and old friends – embracing new friends and media. Brands, style and music were some of the very important details to get right.


In the late 80s the supermodels were the most unreachable goal every girl aimed for. Elle McPherson, Paulina Porizkova, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington were later run over by even more unattainable Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campell and Kate Moss. http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f96/supermodels-1980s-35456.html I scanned every magazine, knew every Stockholm based model and even today I know every image from these times by heart. They almost feel like old friends of mine when I see them today. The girls with contracts were admired by everyone. My doubtlessly biggest focus was not to get a boyfriend, it was to lose some weight. I was 100% convinced that that would do my success in all ways.

The goals were clear: to be popular, to be seen

The method was: to lose weight and become a supermodel



During ‘college’ years the girls started to work weekends to earn extra money to save. The boys did not in the same extent for some reason, maybe they trusted everything to solve by itself, maybe they were always saved by parents when needed?
Everyone was going to the gym, solarium and spent a lot of time on their hair. Things were more relaxed and the hunt for popularity in school was not at all as intense. Studies, work and a few selected friends and gossiping occupied all our time. We played board games, went to discos and parties and baked a cake in the afternoons. We never watched TV, at most an hour between school and homework. Games did not exist. To the girls.

But the boys played all along though we didn’t know. Or rather – we did know, but we were that uninterested that we didn’t even hear them talking about it. It was something they did by themselves or boys only and probably didn’t talk about not to be a bore to the girls.

I realized this when I met my first boyfriend (I was very late on this, more interested in myself than in boys as said before) and a console was a natural part of his apartment even though he wasn’t a big gamer. I had no fear though and outplayed him frequently. I didn’t last for very long there. I'd say that both he and his friends had no problem with the girls playing though, rather that they were not going to change their interest for any girl and almost forced us to play if we were going to hang out.

On the arcades I felt a little more mal placé. Those places were dark, uncozy and non social. Not very girly in any way.

Finally, in the university, Internet, e-mail and mobiles appeared!!! The two first were easy to adopt. No more did we have to run around all libraries to find the information we were looking for, and no more did we have to send letters by snail mail to our abroad friends.

The mobile phones took some time though to approach. They were no very user friendly to begin with and many girls hesitated to use them when it went ok as it did, but finally we did and no more we have to get up early in the weekend mornings to not miss everyone before they were out of their homes.

So what’s the same and where are the differences in teens’ habits today? To be continued…

Previous posts on Girls' Games
Girls' Games I - 1980-1984
Girls' Games II - kids 2010

Girls' Games II - 2010

In 2010 7-10 years old boys play football and/or hockey. Girls too, 'it’s so good with team sports'. Then girls also do the gymnastics, ride horses and dance. No boys do that. Obviously it’s not considered important for the future.

Girls’ and boys’ outfits are more clearly separated both in colors and styles than back in the 80s, and the toys provided are still different according to current gender. Girls play with Littlest Pets and boys with Star Wars dolls, sorry figures, and Pokemon collectibles. Barbies are often passé already by 7. The ‘throw ball on the wall’ game has completely vanished. There were of course little commercialism in that, and no status gained.



But even though girls and boys seldom mix, the love games appear in the same age as before, around 7 or 8, and offer opportunities to spend some time together. Otherwise it’s only in computer games that I see girls and boys unite.

Today the computer experience starts a lot earlier though. Seven years ago we played on Disney.com with our one year old daughter. Today our youngest boy’s first words in the morning are ‘I want to play the veggies’ (veggie samurai for iPad).

My girls and their girl friends join at someone’s place playing Indiana Jones or Wii , and iPet. The family favourite is Little Big Planet. The girls spend most of their gaming time customizing their sackboy while dad is running the game forward.


The girls also play online. I’d say none of their male friends would ever join in the favourites girlsgogames or Stardoll, but otherwise it’s both online and by the consoles that they and their class mates find a common interest that today is gender neutral. The girls sit in the phone with Eliot and Linn while playing Panfu. They suddenly spend a couple of hours at the boy next door – playing Star Wars – a game they would not choose themselves, but that is fun enough and the console itself is not a problem.

Somewhat we’re back to the start of the games. I’d say many children don’t see the games, computers and consoles as male gendered. They don’t see them as techniques or machines, but as media for entertainment. They are not afraid to handle a joystick, even though I admit that the girls still want to watch for a while before trying a game, while the boys just jump into the game giving it what it takes.

Why this has changed lately? Both computers and consoles have become a standard in our life style? Lots of dads (and some moms) keep buying new consoles and want their kids to play too? Computers are both tools, entertainment and communication today?

I know I generalize a lot. Also there are more local preferences today as the supply is much wider than 30 years ago (at least in Sweden who has shifted from a social state to a capitalistic model), but I have also run communication with millions of girls word wide for the last 5 years, why I believe there is some truth in these generalizations.

There are some stronger separations in real life toys and spare time occupations than 30 years ago though and there are yet not many games that are built for girls by girls, or even for boys and girls, by girls. And why don’t women play as much in the middle of their lives and returning stronger than men later on. And what do the girls find so great about the sackboy? To be continued…

Previous post
Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

I'm thinking about girls' games, why and what they are, and I begin here today with my own experiences of games, friends and what we played back then around 1980-1984.

Me and a friend went to see a movie on our own for the first time when we were about seven. We choose Star Wars. Soon after dad returned from the States with a Star Wars printed long sleeved t-shirt for me. I wore it every day. It made me kind of interesting and in and Princess Leia in the front of the image was radiant.

Star Wars was a big thing by then. The boys in class did nothing but played with Star Wars dolls (for boys called figures, for girls dolls), while the girls had absolutely no interest in spacecrafts’ heavy artillery down the sandbox, resulting in explosions throwing the dolls, sorry figures, in all directions. We were lining up for ‘throwing ball at the wall’, where the rules were clear and everybody waited for their turn. Conflicts were by that easy to solve through discussions, and no pell-mell necessary. A few of the guys were sometimes jumping in.


About the same time most of us got a Game & Watch. I got some strange copy from dad when he came home from Asia. There was also a digital watch including a plane bombing game that gained me some status amongst my classmates.

Neither Star Wars or these first games had any gender tags by then. They were marketed as family entertainment.


A couple of years later the talented boys (these later on, not very cool guys) in class started to focus on Dungeons and Dragons, as well as designing road and water maps on checked paper. The girls at that time were lining up for jumping twist with rubber strings, waiting for our turn, following the rules. Sometimes we tried to adopt the guys’ interests as football and marbles just to get some time spent together, but most of all we enjoyed the mixed teams hunting each other down on the meandering backyards. Actually when thinking about it, the same guys sometimes jumped in on the rubber strings and also preferred the mixed team hunts.

A guy in our class got an Atari console. We used to gather at his place to race with cars. The girls tried it. The guys had absolutely no problem with that, and they did not in any way try to exclude us, and yet we weren’t that interested, only for shorter pauses in more interesting real life interactions. Soon all boys had a console at home. None of the girls did. I guess also the parents found car racings and war games more proper for young boys than for the girls.

As I remember it the girls and the boys had different interests of their own as well as mixing up and trying out each others' games. The theme of the console games did by time not match the girls' interests at all why the games became a boys' thing.

To be continued...

Red Cross app is out of King... and symptoms

You see content is still King. You get reminded when you run into a feature where this is forgotten.

When you have put time on programming this great summer tool, why on earth don't you fill it up properly - with content. It's just to put a student to do some quick research and to add it to the database - and voila - this would be a great app. Now it is just a few posts on what you can do when being hit by a small selection of summer terrors. There are not even symptoms described why I'm not even sure what it is I am hit by.

And nowadays it's impossible to suggest an over-the-counter cure without partner deals as I guess Red Cross don't want to be subjective, a service I'd love in this app.

A little more job must be put on the content to make the concept good, and all marketing is not good as I distrust Red Cross a little more after this.

Art inspiring to art

Now I get it - my fascination for 3D and art getting inspired by eachother. Julian Meagher is here showing me that it is more about art inspiring to art that is the interesting thing about it.

4 Previous posts on art inspired by art

I succeeded this Summer

This is my most successful summer buy. Every year I see all the fantastic summer dresses and it's really hard to only pick one or two, more is not necessary when I spend four weeks in the countryside summer house. There are no occations for changing outfits there. This onoe is from WERA, Åhlens. I wear it every day for everything - Midsummer, beach, work, cocktail. I picked the right one.

LEGO only for 50% of all children?

All my family loves LEGO. The two older girls build fantastic villas and rebuild them in three different versions. Their dad is freebasing anything they ask him for, and the 2 years old boy create high towers in Duplo, and show big interest in the girls' creations. But those villas is just about the only 'girly' full LEGO set there is to find on the market.

Why on earth is LEGO mainly targeting boys??? Hwo decided that girls don't buy LEGO? Of course they aren't - when this is the range to choose from...



We are totally looking forward to the new product Architechture! Highly educational, so much to tell and talk about when building.

We love Indiana Jones, Star Wars and Pirates but there are not many female carachters to choose between, and they all seem kind of helpless.

It is very much of the early gaming industry with heroes saving the females from Donkey Kong and others. Also games were from the very start very gender neutral with Pong and Pac Man as family games, and also games turned to a boys' activity. But games have come further when presenting a variated range of characters today.

My girls' also ask for fairytales as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. As a parent I would of course love to see bigger variations in products as Technic and Mindstorms to let the girls build something else than cars and maybe a more feminin designed robot.



The girls love Atlantis though I'm very much missing the sirens to make it a little more diversified. I'm wondering why they, as in the early gaming industry, have chosen the very male inhabited Prince of Persia before any Greek or Roman Mythology that would both be wonderful, educational and fully gender neutral with lots of diversifed characters.

The BelVille range is INSULTING!!! Mostly small sets with mainly big modules to put together in a few moves.


What kind of City is this? Do you think anyting is missing? See my girls' whish list below...


We would like to complete our city with
hospital (Grey's Anatomy?)
school (High School Musical?)
nursery school
café
square
tivoli
zoo
cinema
church
castle
farm (the one there is is also insulting)
public bath
sports arena
department store
shopping street
chinese, greek, dutch, swedish traditional houses
and more and more...

Please LEGO, reconsider your entire brand promise and add some gender neutral values to reach out with education and entertainment for all children, not only half of them.

Vintage Levi's from Height Street

This old Levi's sweater I bought in one of the vintage stores on Haight Street in those happy days even before Spray supplied their employees with a spectacular villa in San Fransisco. This first visit was in 1996. It was our first summer together and Sebastian had to go there for a couple of weeks with a bunch of rediculous young guys, making business in the enormous States.

When it was my turn to join them, Sebastian and I made the classic Highway One by car to LA, over to Vegas and on to Lake Tahoe. Sebastian had once been to Lake Pahoe and we thought all the time that was where we were going only that it had been moved many canyons and hours further away than the time he had been there. It was fun afterwards, but we have lots of photos of never ending roads in the desert indicating how strange it was right then.

Now I realize how I'd love to know where this sweater had been before I bought it. Who wore it?

Previous saved garment
Bondelid 15 years +

Bondelid 15 years +

As writing about Quality to use and reuse I started to think about all those old garment I have, which they are. Many of them are actually Swedish brands, most of them are also classic styles, they never go out of fashion really. These I have here in the summerhouse are non what fantastic, just comfortable.

I realized many of them have their story, this is maybe the more dramatical one, but I promise it’s not due to the story that I have saved it, but to that there is no reason to throw it away.

This shirt is inherited from my boyfriend. It was there when I moved in with him 14 years ago. I have never seen him wear it, it was probably several years old already by then.

It’s a Bondelid oversized cozy shirt, perfect to just put on for the late night video sofa. The winter 8,5 years ago when I was pregnant for the first time, was a cold one and I wore it daily the last month. I didn’t actually wear it on the day the labor started, I had a job meeting. I thought the labours would last for hours, and I did as they had told me – I took a bath. Thirty minutes later I started to bear down, rolled myself out of the bathtub and put on just anything I could reach – this shirt and my brother-in-laws knitted sweater. My sister helped me put on my silk pyjamas pants for the bottom, plus a terry cloth.

It had been snowing all morning, everything was chaos, the traffic was completely jammed, and fourty minutes later Lily spotted the light. The next time I came in the same door I didn't recognize a thing and I can't remember a face from this happening, only that I wanted to get there in time. We did.

In Fashion I go for version 1, in Tech I wait for version 2

I’m not an early adopter of technology. When it comes to fashion I am quite savvy and passionate why I understand what drives the tech people. It sounds cool to be one, as if you’re in the very front of the future, but I don’t have the patience with the first version. I let those who are the savvy ones guide me, they enjoy it.

I don’t have a genuine interest in how the technical development is possible, I just want it done. I want my tech stuff to be usable, to solve my problems in the best of all ways. I don’t want to struggle with bugs, bad user interfaces, buzzing fans, disproportionate sizes and missing dampers. It is not fun, but expensive and unecological as I have to buy a new one very soon.

Being an early adopter also means being alone in for example a community. Boring. I jump on the train when others have tested the advice for me and the improved version 2 is released, when there are many users sharing the experience.

This tells me how important it is that version 2 is improved according to the previous problems. Early adopters accept bugs and difficulties, we followers don’t.

I use myself as a landmark when developing features on the latest techniques. I know when the mass is prepared to welcome them – for their purposes. I’m good at finding new using areas with existing conditions. If I use it, everyone else will sooner or later too.

I am never alone.

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Digital inspried oil canvases

Again a wonderful oil on canvas inspired by the digital formats. Hand made is appreciated mostly by the time put on something easy to make fast kind of. By Maurizio Bongiovanni. More to see on my fave design site Koi koi.

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