Life, the final frontier
Survived vacation
Well, I’m back at work, after a (short) 2-week vacation. It’s nice and peaceful here, as opposed to the hectic (but very fun) vacation schedule. And the office has air conditioning, which is a win these days.
We spent the first weekend in Joensuu, at Isosaarirock. Very nice rock festival, and nice trip overall. The hotel was an “eco-hotel”, which proved to be bad on Friday when we arrived: “eco” meant no air conditioning and poor ventilation, resulting in a room temperature easily in the 30s (C). We finally managed to sleep without dying of overheating by (also) leaving the room door open to the corridor. The temps dropped a bit the next days so it wasn’t so bad, but… that place really wasn’t built to handle heat waves. Nice enough otherwise.
The festival itself was good. Nice selection of bands and a wide cross-section of genres. We listened to everything from big band jazz to heavy metal and (Finnish!) rap. I primarily went there to see Imogen Heap (she was good), but many other gigs were also very much worth seeing and listening to. My feet were killing me near the end; 12 hours or so of standing / bounding about in soleless shoes (Feelmax) starts to get to you. We got a bit of a sunburn, but nothing too bad… and the beach there was awesome. You could wade in the water or go for a swim, while seeing and hearing the band on stage at the same time.
Imogen Heap seemed happy about the very positive reception she got (she hasn’t been here before), so I’m hoping she’ll do a “proper” tour with a Finnish concert at some point. It would be great to see her in a more focused environment.
The following week our house started filling up with guests. A lot of EVE players were coming to Finland for Ropecon, and we housed some at our place. Actually, we still do, I think the last of them leaves tomorrow. We also got well-known VTES “celebrity” player over (I’ve met him before at ECs), who got crash space on the floor on a mattress since our guest bedroom and sofa were already occupied my others. Fun guys all, and it’s fun to have the house full of people. Well, now and then it is, anyway ;)
Last weekend was Ropecon, of course. I ran the big VTES tournament on Friday, and it went very well. Excellent turnout with 93 players, and we also had a record number of foreign players attending. The win went to Otso Saariluoma, with the final round ending around 3am. It was a good final round too, with lots of stuff happening all the time. I’ll write up a full tournament report during the next week or so, with details on all that.
On Saturday I played in the VTES draft (fun, but only got 1 VP total), then caught some random program events and finally stumbled home to sleep for an all-too-short while. Sunday back to the con area to listen to Guy Windsor’s traditional “Realities of Steel” thing, and then an 8-hour info desk shift. So the con went well, though this year most of it went towards VTES for me.
…and now it’s (slowly) back to normal routine. That’s not a bad thing, as such. The kittehs will miss having a million people around the house, though, they’ve grown used to always having a human around who has time to pet them. […]
Busy
It’s been a semi-hectic few weeks. Oh, fun, and almost all of the “hectic” part has been due to various hobbies and stuff like that. Still, I’m left feeling a slight bit frazzled and thankful that this week looks more sane. Maybe I’ll just get time to curl up with a book, or something..
The weekend before was spent mostly in the forest, at a paintball war weekend organized by a friend. Good fun and nice exercise, and some of the scenarios were especially cool (notably the VIP escort one, where I was gunned down by “terrorists” but the VIP survived by doing an very fast “duck and cover”). Extra thanks to the cooks on site, the food was delicious and there was tons of it.
This weekend was also full of stuff: on Saturday I ran the Battle Lines storyline VTES tournament in Otaniemi. We has 16 players and the win went to Aleksi Nuora with his True Brujah deck. Nice work. I’ll post a short tournament report about that in the newsgroup soonish. Yesterday I ran Exalted for most of the day, which is always fun but also pretty exhausting. The previous week went into a combo of game prep, toying with the new “Planetary Interaction” thingy in EVE, the Roxy Music concert on Thursday, and just… stuff.
I’m slowly gearing up to run a limited Dark Heresy campaign, based on the fairly interesting Haarlock’s Legacy pregen campaign series. Character generation is next week, after that we’ll see what happens to mutants, aliens and other Enemies of the Empire. It’s possible that all that happens is “they get nice things to snack on”. […]
Snow! Jacuzzi! More snow!
We’re escaping the traditional Vappu celebrations and heading north. Tomorrow evening I hope to be soaking in a spa, then with any luck I’ll be snowboarding at Ruka on Friday & Saturday. Haven’t done any snowboarding at all this year… but hey, this is a good time to start.
All this assuming there’s no new surprise volcanic eruptions, airline strikes or whatever. […]
(Vaguely like) Scorchio!
The tipping point for “summer”, for me, is the point where I can sit outside on our patio and read in the sunshine, without needing winter wear. That point came last weekend, where it was almost hot there for a while. Granted I was wearing a fleece jacket, and the moment the sun vanished behind clouds the temperature dropped fast. But who cares, it felt like summer, or at least like a proper spring.
The cats approve, too. Despite the still lingering huge piles of snow all over.
Managed to switch to summer tirer on the car, too, though otherwise the car is still in an immobile state. The radiator leaks and (I think) the thermostat is also a goner. That, or the water pump. Hope it’s just the thermostat since that’s a fairly cheap replacement. Anyway, the thing started overheating recently and I just barely got it home. Now have a new radiator as a spare part and garage time scheduled for next week, we’ll see what the mechanic says. Hope it’s nothing too serious, the weather is starting to look like I can finally drive with the top down. Whee! […]
Yakuza
Boing Boing is running a series of short Q&A sessions with Jake Adelstein, a writer and crime reporter in Japan who has both reported on and had run-ins with the Yakuza extensively. Pretty fascinating stuff, especially the bits about how openly entrenched organized crime is in the Japanese infrastructure (entertainment industry, politics, etc).
10 trillion boxes of cards on the wall...
Though it was a pleasant weekend as such, I was feeling seriously under the weather with some lightweight-but-tiring flu strain… not properly sick, but tired, head-achey and generally “meh”. That meant that I also stayed in for most of the weekend.
…which meant that on Sunday I finally got around to doing some organizing on my tons and tons of VTES cards. Oh, they were more or less in general order to begin with, but I had 3 boxes of new(ish) cards waiting to be filed and my card storage space is/was running low so I needed to weed out extra cards. Started “work” sometime before noon, and I was still at it close to midnight (with some breaks in between). Did manage to sort most of the stuff, though, and now I have a huge pile of commmons (& some uncommons) I’ll probably just donate to someone. Some cards I have way too many of.
Now that the heavy lifting has been done, I can finally get around to building some new decks based on the new Heirs to the Blood cards. Lots of potentially fun stuff there.
Otherwise, I’m waiting for this white stuff to disappear from the ground. Winter is fine and all, but I’m really looking forward to actual spring and summer now. Our yard still has ridiculous amounts of snow, and the kittehs are quite annoyed at us since their yard is full of cold, wet crap. I also want to get a new set of summer tires for my car, but most shops are still only showing “prices will be up Real Soon Now” signs and anyway, I can’t switch tires before it’s reliably above zero at night (ice and summer tires mix badly).
Oh, and I caved in and bought Mass Effect 2. It took most of Sunday to load (via Steam), I had that going while I was doing card organizing. Only got around to playing it around midnight, played around an hour before going to bed. Looks pretty nice. The controls have changed a bit, but otherwise the gameplay seems similar and the initial plot twist is interesting. We’ll see how it develops. […]
Gaming weekend
Busy weekend.
On Saturday I ran a release tournament for the new Heirs to the Blood set. Went well; we had 19 players and these release tournament things are always fun. I had personally avoided reading spoilers much at all so for me the cards were largely new surprises, but even for people who had bought some the previous week (when it went on sale) it was probably the first chance to actually play with them.
The win went to Tuomas Vuokko, playing with Salubri Antitribu. Tuomas has been in torpor for almost a year now due to suffering a bunch of pretty horrific real-life events… but he decided to join this at the last minute and proceeded to win the whole thing. As an amusing side, all the players with game wins were playing Kiasyd/Lasombra, Tuomas was the only one able to get a game win with something else. Impressive.
Sunday I ran another segment of my ongoing Exalted game. I had done quite a bit of prep, due to having no real certainty of how the players would react to the things I threw at them… so even though I suspected they’d go for Plan A, I also had to have Plans B,C and D available in some form. Mostly things went as I had suspected (though there were a few surprises). The gang is now in the Northern Wyld Borderlands, planning an assault on a massive Pale Hunter fortification, all because a young Lunar managed to land on their lap.
I was pretty happy with the thing, especially since a major part of it had been written from scratch. […]
Another one bites the dust
Well, the best record store in Helsinki, Tunnelin Levy, is closing its doors after being a fixture for music fans for 40 years. In other words, pretty much as long as I have been alive.
It’s not surprising as such – digital music and other forms of media are steadily eating away at “regular” CD sales, and it’s hard for a small store to compete. Tunnelin Levy has tried, for years… they’ve always had pretty reasonable prices, an excellent selection which also contained a ton of eclectic stuff, and usually very knowledgable staff. You could go there and ask about some pretty obscure bands, and even if they didn’t stock them the guy behind the counter usually would know what you were talking about.
…but all that doesn’t help when the bottom line is continually in the red.
I can see that trend in my own music shopping. Even though Tunnelin Levy has pretty much always been my “go to” place for CDs, during recent years I haven’t bought all that many physical CDs. I get most of my music via eMusic nowadays, and the CDs that I do buy end up getting ripped to high-quality AAC immediately. I don’t listen to CDs, as such, at all. Physical “containers” for music, be they CDs or records, are slowly on their way out. The future for music is digital – it’s hard to fight against that, even if you wanted to.
But damn, it’s sad to see Tunnelin Levy go. It was a great little music store, and I’ve bought a ton of music from them over the years – including some stuff you would never find in a “normal” chain music store: the Camper Van Beethoven “Cigarettes and Carrot Juice” box set, lots of non-standard alternate editions of CDs, stuff like that.
“Thank you for the music”, as ABBA would say. […]
Avatar and other stuff
We stayed cooped up inside for most of the New Year extended weekend; we originally intended to “do some stuff”, but the extra-chilly weather and general laziness put a stop to that. It was nice to just cozy up inside for days, don’t get me wrong. Anyway, yesterday we felt like doing something, so we decided to go see Avatar since a) it’s by Cameron who is generally awesome and b) it had been getting generally positive though slightly mixed reviews.
Well, it was very much worth seeing. It’s not a perfect movie; the plot is more than a tad predicable and follows the classic “boy meets girl and becomes hero” pattern a bit too much by-the-numbers. Maybe the most fitting thing to say about the plot is that it was serviceable; while it could have been (a lot) more original, it didn’t get in the way. But the visuals. Damn, they were jaw-dropping, especially when seen on the large screen with 3d. This is the best visualization of a science fiction world and native culture that I recall even seeing. Even though I knew that most of what I was seeing was computer-generated, my eyes were telling me the stuff was real. During the whole 3-hour span, there was only one short clip where the CGI was obviously CGI in a way that jarred me. That’s damn well done.
So. The complaints about the plot do have merit. But it’s not that bad, and this is one movie that is worth seeing for the visuals alone. They are just that good. The star of this movie is the planet Pandora.
(Added later: here is a hilarious plot summary. Spoiler alert, you might want to skip until you’ve seen the movie!)
Apart from that, I actually spent a large part of the mini-vacation coding and watching “TV” – coding in one window with a video player running in another. I’m working a hobby-project Exalted character generator web thingy. I’m not sure when if ever it will be ready, let alone ready for general use, but it’s one of those things – a way to learn lots of new tech while building something useful. I’m using a lot of bleeding-edge stuff, and Ruby on Rails of course. Among the toys are: authlogic, declarative_authorization, formtastic, css_dryer, jQuery & jQuery-UI, AJAX (with dynamic jQuery/Javascript generation via Rails views), and rspec test cases for all models and controllers. Fun stuff, and complicated enough to keep it interesting.
On the TV side, I managed to watch:
True Blood season two. Good stuff, and very interesting “bad guy”. Still among the best of the current crop of series. Not for the prudish, though.
Californication season two. Very good and very funny. Also not for the prudish, and I mean it: this show is mostly about sex. And about how people deal with it. I really like this show, because the characters are excellent and it somehow manages to be lewd & irreverent and warm & understanding at the same time. The characters screw up (and just screw) all the time, but you can’t help understanding and liking them at the same time.
The Doctor Who “specials” Waters of Mars and End of Time (parts 1 & 2). Watchable but nothing all that special. Will be interesting to see how the new Doctor works out, since these were the final ones with the (great!) David Tennant.
Some other bits and pieces… some Heroes (meh, but at least getting a bit better), Sanctuary (meh), etc. Nothing much worth commenting on. […]
Where's my flying car?
Somehow 2010 sounds very futuristic, yet my car solidly refuses to fly and I can’t find any reasonably-priced flights to the moon in the morning paper. It’s a scam.
We were at a nice New Year’s party, which went on until the early hours. Uncharacteristically we didn’t grab a taxi home at some point, but instead stayed there until something like 6am and then took a morning bus home. The rest of the day was a wash, of course, but still… fun.
The Ice Age conditions outside (-18 – -20C) put a stopper on our preliminary “let’s go do something outside” plans, so we’ve just lazed about and played computer games and stuff. No complaints, as such. Yawn. […]
