Life, the final frontier

Doctors and Dwarves, hi ho

It’s funny, when you’re at the “student” age it’s pretty much impossible to figure out who will go on to have a career in research, and who won’t. A friend did his doctoral dissertation last Friday (“Integration of Broadband Direct-Conversion Quadrature Modulators”, Helsinki University of Technology), I attended but didn’t really follow much of the discussion – broadband transmission and IC design theory aren’t my strong points. Anyway, the thing went fine. It was weird seeing him there, and remembering the guy who we had partied with so often and so long ago – let’s just say that at the time, the idea of him doing this would have sounded very bizarre. A bunch of us were laughing and saying things like “who would have thought?”. That’s the way the world turns, I guess. It’s a huge accomplishment in any case; pretty much anyone can graduate, it “just” takes lots of work… but getting a doctorate, that’s something that not everyone can do at all, even if they wanted.

The post-party was fun; not because it was anything special as a party, but because I got to see and talk with some people I hadn’t met in a while. That’s always good.

The next day, Janka stayed horizontal nursing a killer hangover she had somehow mysteriously acquired (I blame poisoned wine, it’s the only logical explanation…). I shambled upstairs sometime around noon and got to installing the new DVD burner I had bought to replace the ancient Samsung. Things went fine… and lo & behold: Neverwinter Nights 2 actually started up with this drive! Much rejoicing.

The SecuROM guys actually got back to me with an alternate binary I could try, I told them “thanks, but already got it to work”. Nice response, anyway, can’t fault them for that even though I really do advise people to be careful when buying games with this copy-protection, especially if your hardware is a bit older. Copy-protection schemes that end up hurting the honest customers are a very. very bad idea.

Anyway. About the game. It seems there is a universal law that says that second versions of games tend to be very good (whereas second versions of, say, movies tend to suck). It holds true for System Shock, it holds true for Baldur’s Gate, and it holds true here. Where the first Neverwinter Nights has hobbled by a crappy single-player campaign and ended up being more a technology demo than a game, here they have corrected that failing. The game looks gorgeous (assuming powerful graphics card) and the campaign is actually pretty good. So far, at least. Oh, it’s cliche city, but this is D&D and cliches are part of the fun. So once again we have some ancient evil returning to life, some mysterious artifact pieces, and “only you can save us!”. Shocker.

The thing that made Baldur’s Gate 2 so much fun were the various well-written NPCs that you could team up with (“Go for the eyes, Boo!”), and that facet seems to have been carried over here. Unlike the first game where you were pretty much solo, here you can have a party of max 4 people. The NPCs so far have been stereotypes, but fun stereotypes. There’s a semi-psychotic dwarf, a teenage half-demon thief, a “holier than thou” elven druid, and lots of others. The hard part is actually trying to decide who to include in the party, four members max doesn’t give you too many options.

I had intended to do a lot of stuff over the weekend but ended up playing NWN2 for most of it. Guess that says it all, it’s a pretty good game – an it’s hard to quit, there’s that “I’ll just do one more little quest” factor. It’s no BG2, at least not so far, but it has promise.

Some small negatives, of course, every game has them. The camera is a bit funky, and needs some getting use to (and even then annoys now and then). The framerate tends to crawl a bit in the more complicated locations, but there I can blame myself since I have enabled most of the eye-candy – framerates aren’t that critical in a game like this, anyway. The “AI” of your party members can be… “interesting”, and you pretty much have to run all spellcasters in “puppet mode”, otherwise they will decide to throw area-effect spells at the worst of times and do other bizarre stuff. No showstopper bugs so far, in fact very few bugs found in general. I did run into a “need to reload an earlier save” situation once when I decided to be preemptive and fireball a suspicious-looking group of thugs from the distance. Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea, I was supposed to talk to them first…

It also needs to be noted that at least to the point I have played to , the game is very linear. Maybe it will “open up” later on, but I’m not counting on it. That’s another reason why BG2 is Superior(tm). […]

Birthday, and off to Italy

Had a very fun birthday party, thanks to everyone involved (you know who you are). Got the world’s coolest watch as a present from Janka (and others who helped, you also know who you are). Thank you all, very much appreciated.

We had Yoe attending the party remotely from Japan (via Skype and webcam) as a mobile image on our TV. Cool. As someone at the party said, “Japan looks just like Finland”. It’s a small world…

Would write more now, but have to rush to the airport. Intended to write this yesterday, but spent all of last night (again) tweaking VTES decks for the tournament. Oh well.

Back next Monday. […]

Foot in grave, head in clouds

find yourself in the middle of a storm
you thought you were hard
but you’ve barely been formed
see who you are as your future is faced
it’s not that far
no step is retraced

today you’re safe
tomorrow who knows
guarantees are fool’s gold
34 turns to 43
see my mistakes
don’t become me

– Curve, “Storm”

In a few days I’ll be 40. Scary, a bit… I find it hard to think of myself as “old”, I don’t feel old. I wonder if I’ll feel the same when I’m 50, will I start feeling like an old man? Maybe, maybe not. I’m halfway convinced age is a mental thing – I’ve known so many people who have just turned 30 and feel so… “adult” in a bad way, in that static, “we don’t do that anymore because we’re adults” way. On the flipside, I’ve known and met quite a few people way over 60 why are still bouncing around and refusing to let that “age” thing get in the way of the interesting stuff in the world. Oh sure, different things start to interest you as you get older, and you tend to get a bit more lazy about many things; that’s normal I guess. I just wonder why some people seem to lose the drive, the need to see and do new things, or at the very least to constantly try to improve themselves.

…on the other hand, I understand it fully. It’s just so easy in our modern world to take the path of least resistance. Don’t exercise because “you don’t have time for it”, don’t travel or do interesting stuff because “we have kids and it’s just too difficult”. Don’t study new things because “just don’t have the energy after a full day’s work”. Just go to work, come home, eat unhealthy snacks, lounge on sofa and watch TV no matter what’s on, go to sleep, rinse and repeat until you’re an overweight, vaguely unhappy, colorless “consumer”. You decide to do all the fun stuff “when you have time” or “when you have extra cash” or “when you’ve retired”… then if that mythical time when you have extra time and money actually materializes, you’re just too tired and old to actually do anything much anymore.

And it’s never your fault. You’re seriously overweight and in crappy shape? “Well, I have bad genes and just naturally gain weight, and who has time to go to a gym”. You can’t get a new job because you don’t have skills anymore? “Well, they didn’t teach me all that new stuff at my last job, I can’t be expected to read up to it on my own” Your social circle is tiny? “Well, I don’t have time to meet new people with this hectic job schedule, and most people don’t understand me anyway” You have no idea about other places and cultures? “I don’t need to travel, I watch the news on TV; if I’m wrong it’s the fault of the biased media” And so on and so forth.

It’s always easy to find someone or something else to blame for the things that are wrong in your life.

I’m pretty happy with my life, so I’m not looking for culprits. Yet. Just you wait…

On a semi-serious note, maybe that’s one thing that a youth spent reading Heinlein gave me, a belief in that everyone should take responsibility for their own life and actions, and that the freedoms we tend to have in the modern world should be counterbalanced by responsibilities. It’s a worldview that can be viewed as a bit “conservative”, and maybe it is, but in any case my worldview is a fairly crazy mix of the conservative and the (ultra)liberal. They are not opposing forces, necessarily.

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In other news, next Wednesday our band of stalwart heroes (your truly included) boards a plane bound for Torino, Italy, where we’ll spend the following days playing at the VTES European Championships. Should be a fun trip by all accounts, I haven’t been to an EC before.

I’m still not sure what I’ll play there. I have an Anarch Daughters of Cacophony deck that needs some tuning but could work, it’s fun to play. I also have a weird Laibon Salubri-Antitribu + Harbringers deck, which is fun but needs a lot of work to make it competitive – it lacks focus. I’ll probably build a few other decks, too, and decide what my main deck will be at the last minute. […]

Do the bookshelf shuffle...

Our house still looks halfway like a refugee camp, with Jiivonen having moved in and a lot of stuff being in the transitory state between one shelf and the next. Our lack of proper comfy chairs and sofa adds to the unintended “bohemian” decor.

Anyway, cleanup is proceeding one step at a time. Last week I gathered enough energy to move my RPG books from my attic shelf to the new downstairs game room (under construction). Picture of my current RPG collection in its new home is to the right; what is not shown is the over one meter stack of other roleplaying books that are still on my reading list. Once I manage to read all of them (somewhere in 2010 I suspect), that puny shelf will need some restructuring.

…and also presenting: free books!

As another part of our book organizing crusade, Janka and I finally decided to combine our oceans of books into a single collection (or many single collections, since there’s quite a few books involved). I just got through organizing the fiction books, and as a result we have quite a pile of books that we don’t want to keep anymore – some are duplicate copies (of good books), some are books that aren’t quite good enough in our estimate to keep around, and some (thankfully small percent) are total crap.

These books are going to a secondhand store one of these days unless someone wants one of these. Take a look at the pictures here and here and let us know if you want something, you are more than welcome to any book you want – and yes, you can throw the book away after reading it, we won’t mind. We also have some other book piles in storage, but I’m too lazy to go take pics of them too.

Naturally this only applies to people who are able to pick up the books themselves (or whom we can meet at some point). […]

The artist formerly known as Jane Siberry

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You’re chickening out aren’t you?
You’re bangin’ on the beach like an old tin drum
I can’t wait ‘til you make the whole kingdom come
So i’m leaving

– Jane Siberry, “Love Is Everything”

Past the teeming marketplace and the blur of faces there
Past the silent dockyards and the darkness looming there
Maybe it won’t work this time but that’s the risk you take
(and you want to take it)
and just as long as it feels right doesn’t matter
Just as long as…doesn’t matter
Gotta feel good though you don’t know why

The life is the red wagon rolling along
The life is the red wagon keeps the feet upon the ground
The life is the red…is the red…oh, it’s no big deal
But when the feet are draggin’
You pull me
and I pull for you
You pull me
and I pull for you
The life is the red wagon simple and strong

– Jane Siberry, “The Life is the Red Wagon”

Jane Siberry is strange, I admit that out front. She’s also one of the few people who can write songs that can make me cry, that just mean something. Part of that emotional resonance comes from me living a long, emotionally turbulent time on a soundtrack composed of Siberry, Tori, and some others – many songs are so twisted up with flashbacks to another place and time that I honestly can’t tell what they are like as just songs, objectively; they have so much attached to them – good or bad, sometimes both at the same time.

I have yet to meet anyone else who really likes Jane Siberry, I think she’s just too weird for most people. I find it puzzling that someone can listen to songs like “The Taxi Ride”, “Love Is Everything”, “Red High Heels”, “The Walking (and constantly)” etc without going “wow” and stopping whatever they were doing just to listen, to think… but that’s the way it is. To me, she sings about what life really means, the important bits. To most others, it’s just a strange Canadian chick with artsy music and a quirky voice. C’est la vie.

As this interview from 1999 notes:

“Jane Siberry is not easy. She sings about dogs, God, angels, sex and more in a multi-octave voice unhampered by considerations of gravity. The style of one album seldom has anything to do with that of the next. Even her hair won’t stay the same.”
…
“Yet despite the incredible quality attached to her almost inhuman level of productivity, Siberry is often treated by the media with the sort of respectful annoyance usually reserved for brilliant if slightly-deranged aunts.”

I won’t try to convince anyone that she’s great, or that you should listen to her, that would be an exercise in futility. It either works for you or it doesn’t, simple as that. If you’re interested, check out Sheeba, her (ex)music company, they sell some of her mp3’s with a “pay as much as you want” pricing scheme. Not all of her major-label stuff is there, though, for that you need CDs or iTunes.

What I do want to comment on is the strange and brave thing she just did: this June, she sold her house and all possessions, and dumped the rest in the trash. She also changed her name to ”Issa”. Why? Because it just felt right, because she wanted to get rid of all the clutter in her life, “just because”.

Actually doing something like that is something I admire very much. I’m not sure I could do it myself… or more precisely, if I would do it, I’m pretty sure I could if needs be. I’m not all that materialistic, but I do like having a home full of old books, music and stuff I love. I don’t feel it weighs me down… but if I did, maybe I’d just dump it all. Maybe not. I’ll find out if I need to find out.

So she’s on the road now, touring and living in hotels and with friends. What next? Some new music, probably some new musical styles, whatever works. Whatever makes her happy. And that’s precisely how it should be.

It’s too easy to get caught up, to never stop and think about what you’re doing.

As a side note, a friend once remarked to me (after several drinks, at another friend’s wedding), that “I’ve always admired the way you always do precisely what you want, no matter what people think”. I don’t know if that’s true or not… I wish it was, but I don’t think it strictly is. I think compared to the quite conservative lifestyles and choices of that group of friends (fellow students from TKK), that remark is quite true. I consider it a compliment, though I guess not everyone would. […]

"I do"

Janne and Katja got married on Saturday, hooray! It was a fun and pretty traditional wedding, and we actually slept over at the party place – it was at Nuuksion Urheilumaja, which has lots of room. Friends, good food, more than enough alcohol, sauna, grill… what’s not to like?

As a funny coincidence, this was a civil wedding like ours last year, and the same woman who asked the critical questions from us then did the same for Janne and Katja now. It really is a small world. […]

Share the same space for a minute or two

The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight … say goodnight

Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home - she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place

Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two

– Talking Heads, “This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)”

This Sunday I’ll have been married for a year. To all the people who (seriously or not) told me that “everything changes after you get married” and “have fun now, you won’t have it later”, all I can say is: you married the wrong person, sorry, better luck next time.

…but find your own, this one is mine and I’m keeping her. So there. […]

Car off to the doctor

All right, my poor “won’t start coz I ain’t gettin’ no sparks” car was finally towed off to the repair shop last night – it’s been sitting in the company parking area for 1.5 weeks now, waiting for the repair shop guys to get back from vacation.

The towing process proved to be extremely painless, especially since I got the good suggestion from somebody-I-don’t-remember-who to check if my insurance covers it. Well, what do you know, turns out it does (I even called them to make sure). Funny, I think this is the first time I’ve ever put my car insurance to use. Anyway, the towing company also had the nice option of sending the bill directly to the insurance company, so in the end all I had to do is say “hi!” to the guy in the tow truck and he took it from there – to the extent to dropping the car keys and a printed “fix this” explanation note off at the repair shop. I didn’t need to do anything or pay anything, which is nice. Of course, the repair guys will expect me to actually pay them and to fetch my car, it unfortunately won’t materialize at our home parking spot fully fixed, shining and already paid for. Oh well.

No idea about what’s actually wrong with the thing, except “won’t start”, or more specifically: isn’t giving power to the spark plugs, which quite reasonably then don’t do their thing. Could be a very simple thing, could be something more complicated inside the ignition system – we’ll see. There’s also an older problem with the engine fan (runs all the time, regardless of engine heat) that I asked them to fix at the same time.

Cars. Don’t know how to fix them, can’t easily live without them. […]

Nobody here except us zombies

It’s over, just got home – the rest of the gang headed off toward the restaurant and GoH dinner, I was/am just too tired to go. About 4 hours of sleep last night, bracketed by turns behind the info desk, followed by a Rage tournament, followed by the con shutdown and cleanup stuff… well, let’s just say that my t-shirt says “It’s Alive!” but I consider that to be a gross distortion of the actual truth. So I’m sitting at home reading my email and waiting for the sauna to warm up, and wondering how many hours I’ll manage to stay up before I really have to hit the bunk.

Good con, as pretty much always. It’s a staple of the Finnish rpg scene, and I mean that in a very positive way. Weekend full of games, friends, people-I-like-but-see-too-rarely, semi-strangers, and general weirdness. And coffee. Oh yes.

Hamster! A Dentist! Hard porn! Steven Seagull! […]