Ninja Skill: Acquired!

Current Matters, personal

I went bouldering for the first time in my life. This is the practice of climbing (in this case) walls with artificial holds, arranged to put up problems of most physical in nature. Since the climbs are only up to 5 metres tall, theres no safet equipment involved apart from common sense and cushions. To my surprise it’s not my arms that were the most to suffer but my hands. The skin in my hands and fingertips feels quite tender at the moment.

There’s always the problem of how much abuse are you going to subject yourself to when you are trying something physically demanding the first time. I think I did well. I expect to find myself a bit difficult to fist my hands in the morning and probably also my wrists will feel tense but probably nothing too bad to avoid me from operating a mouse.

Now I’ll just have to get to know the lingo involved.

Complete Peanuts

Nostalgia, personal

Every now and then, some things happen that make you take note and remember when you have one of those why-does-everything-always-not-go-well -moments. Fantagraphics books are printing all the Peanuts comics in the existence. They have been for a few years actually, but only last year those books started to appear in Finnish. The pace is two books per year, with each book containing two years of comics. Even at this pace it will take 10 years to reprint them all. This pace is much more moderate in Finnish though, one book last year and so far, one book this year. Impatient as I am, I have opted to collect the originals.

I have been a friend of the Peanuts for a long time. At some point I noticed that the pocket books they were printing here in Finland didn’t contain all of the strips, not to mention none of the Sundays either. The existence of which I didn’t come to learn until much later.

Therefore I find it a priviledge to get to read all of the strips in order, to get to see Snoopys transformation from a yipping dog to an “internationally renowned hockey-player” and “the first beagle on the moon”. Not to mention how ‘the bird’ turns into ‘Woodstock’ and how Lucy cultivates her bitchness and how the whole universe of Peanuts builds up. I also enjoy reading about Charles M. Schultz himself.

There’s far too little of Complete anything in the universe. Especially in comics. The works of Carl Barks are re-printed in dozens of different packages and when they do reprint the whole of it, the print is limited. But as I implied at first, I feel I am lucky to exist in the same universe as the Complete Peanuts.

Friday Night Ramblings

Comparison, Concepts, Social

It has been far too long since I’ve rambled in my blog, which is a shame. This is a shame from the point of view of the Dinosaur media who consider Blogs the primary media for rambling. It is not the same thing to be accusing the, if I pick a random Finnish media, Helsingin sanomat for rambling, even if their editorials bare no names and are mostly collections of sentences of the form:”Every intelligent person knows that…” and “It is a well-known fact” etc.

It is not the same thing, I want to stress this well-known fact.

Blogs are a slimy medium. They resonate and interact with each other, making it, at one side, a highly un-predictable concoction and on the other side a highly-predictable entity. It is very difficult to say what will become famous for example. On the other hand, there’s the Streisand effect. There are well-known examples of this in the Finnish blogosphere. It is no suprise that something like this puzzles those who were brought up in a totally different system of conveying ideas for people.

Because the blogs form a system so big and complex, it is impossible to understand and crasp its workings. Even a well-read blog reader can only skim a small amount of everything that gets written. It is exactly this that makes it also easy to trivialize and also to rationalize the apparent unimportance of blogs. How can you understand the impact of something that you can at any given moment see only a fraction of a fraction? Why would blogs make a difference when only a handful of them get any decent amount of readership? Because theres thousands of them, millions of them, linking to each other and any and all resources you can attach a wire to, piling, adding up, slowly and continuosly re-organizing itself and most of all, being read by much more people than write them.

This is only relating to the nature of the medium. I haven’t even touched the quality of writing…

Saving the God-Damn Planet

Comparison, Inquiry, personal

Just over a week ago some kind soul relieved me from the pain of owning a bicyclelamp. Forgetting the effect this incident have had on my attitude toward my fellow creatures, I have been involved with the process of choosing what kind of light-inducing solution will I mount to my bicycle from now on.

I have considered a hub-dynamo, which would provide light whenever I’m in motion, without having to worry about changing batteries or the lamp getting stolen. Stealing would have to include the whole front wheel in that case. Only thing that I’ve wondered is that why there aren’t any LED -based solution with hub-dynamos? Ok, not a bad solution, a bit expensive (including not just the lamp and dynamo but the wheel as well), but probably well-worth its prize in the future.

Petzl is somewhat legendary spelunker and famous for head-mounted lamps carrying his name. One sly sales-man introduced me to this choice, making the case for a model that has a retractable string allowing an easy mounting to almost everywhere, from your wrist, to your head and bicycles handlebar as well. It requires batteries though, but three small batteries would last for 120 hours, that would probably be enough for one winter. Expensive, but a quality product.

Yet, my solution was one which has 3 leds and get this, gets it’s charge from a fucking crank! Thats right, no batteries, 1 minute of cranking produces, supposedly, 40 minutes of light. The whole thing costed me 10€ and I’m left wondering whats wrong with this choice. It seems too good to be true. Will the built-in battery explode if its over-charged? Will it’s capacity wain in a year? What?

Internets, this is a mission for you. Dig up any and all bad sides this solution might have and report it here. You have time only up till eternity or the heat-death of the universe to complete this task. Your time begins now.

My Very First Game Console

Computer Games

I have been involved in a long process to buy some furniture to my appartment. I have cherished the thought to be, finally, able to have all my books and comics in relative order and realizing the quality of neat. This process has involved numerous trips to local flea-markets and what-nots. Last Saturday I found a perfect pair of book shelves but didn’t have the money to buy the upfront.

Today I went to get my business finished and happened to take a glance around the shop. There it was, innocently lieing on a bare shelf, a Super Nintendo box. Priced at 15€, I made an unusually quick buying decision for me.

Previously I haven’t seen much sense in owning the hardware of an old console itself. If one wishes to play old games, it is much convenient to run them on an emulator. Granted, this case existed when I had no extra money to put on frivolities such as concrete objects. Collecting consoles has always belonged in the when-I’m-rich -situation, which I guess I’m slowly advancing toward.

SNES it is.

Happy Birthday To Me

Current Matters, personal

I turn 34 ugly ones today. I’m a year shy from being middle-aged. Damn.

How I spent this glorious day? In the morning I attended an Aikido practice conducted by Bruno Gonzalez (5.dan Aikikai) which with the practice from last night left me quite well-done. Since Helsinki is having an annual serial arts festival I felt it my duty to at least go and take a look at it.

I was too tired to get interested in any of it. I bought me some comics and headed up to coffee and some light shopping. I bought myself a DVD box of the Black Books -series, one of the funniest comedies ever. Then I came home, got me some chinese take away and watched two movies. Now I’m off to bed. Fascinating, isn’t it?

The Dark Night

Current Matters, personal

I went to see the new Batman movie, enticingly named close to one of the modern classics of serial arts (The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Returns respectively). I didn’t like the movie. I didn’t have much anticipation for it so I don’t think I was let down in anyway.

I’m left wondering WHY I didn’t like the film. There was nothing wrong with the film. It wasn’t bland. It wasn’t boring or alienating. An idea of an explanation came to me later. The film was somehow malignant, there was something deeply black about it. The film was in short depressing. There was something about the worldview of the film that rubbed me the wrong way, but my analysis stops there. I’m not interested in digging deeper into why that is. I can only suggest you to go and see the film itself.

It’s a very rare occasion when a film or any other kind of piece of art has almost a physical effect on me. Supposedly it happening verifies that I’m still alive?

The Big Triple-8 Entry

Current Matters

This entry exists on the sole merit of the date it’s posted on. This entry wouldn’t have been tomorrow because it would be too late!

I’m left wondering why I feel compelled to do something just to get it done on a nice symmetrical date. I’d say there aren’t enough of magic numbers people use to celebrate things. For example, when you turn 32 you turn 100000 also. In binary. I’m sure there are suggestions too and I dare my readership to post them for me. Come on! There’s enough bots among you that at least one of you has reached self-awareness!

It all makes sense!

An Objective (and Authoritative) Comparison of Digg, Reddit and Slashdot

Comparison, personal

DISCLAIMER: I’m a long-time reader of Slashdot but am not registered. I’ve been reading Reddit for a bit over a year and I’ve been a registered user for a few months. I’ve been reading Digg almost since it’s inception and registered used pretty much the same time. Nowadays I frequent to Digg less and less often.

Digg, Reddit and Slashdot are websites that carry links to “stuff that matters”, “whats new on-line” and stuff. They also contain discussions on those links and the material behind them. They have distinct approaches to this same idea and I’ll compare them from my personal and objective perspective.

Slashdot is a venerable nerd-site. The discussion on Slashdot is by far the best of the three. There really isn’t a subject that half-a-million nerds couldn’t empty. There is always someone who has worked on the issue for 20 years or was the student of the person in question or lives next-door to that spammer in the article. The discussion is infact so good that I rarely read the actual articles themselves. This is so common that is in fact a running joke among slashdotters. “I didn’t RTFM” is probably the most common excuse for quick replies.

Reddit is the newest addition to my regularly visited sites. Everyone can post links to it and vote on those links. The highest voted (and popular) links get to the main page. The stuff on Reddit is fast to renew itself and the discussion is second of the lot. The comments are mostly short and endless pun-threads litter almost any discussion. There is a notable drop in the level of the discussion in the past few months (and some say in the past few years).

Digg was probably one of the first “submit your own story and vote them yourself” -websites. It is also the one with the lousiest discussions, containing mostly just one-liners and (dis)agreement with the subject without anything substantial to add.

Slashdots commenting system is probably the most complex having moderation and meta-moderation allowing you to moderate other peoples moderation. All the comments have a rating from -1 to +5 in several categories, containing funny, insightful and troll. It is probably thanks to this long-evolved system that keeps the level of discussion so good. Uninteresting stuff quickly falls out of radar for most people, although all the comments are readable to anyone so wishing. Well-scoring comments gives you karma, which can be used to moderate other peoples comments. Also the range of -1 to +5 easily gives you an idea of how good the comment is according to the masses. Reddits and Diggs commenting systems’ allows the comments to have much bigger values in both direction, which can be confusing since the score depends greatly on the popularity of the discussion-thread itself. Also the qualitative moderation of Slashdot gives you a quick idea what the comment is like. This means that people make the effort of keeping the funny comments apart from the insightful ones.

You can post your stories to Slashdot but they have a bunch of half-illiterate editors making the pick. This means that the blurps that accompany the posted links often contain a number of typos (obvious ones too), mis-guiding wording and all the bad argumentation you can read. Diggs and Reddits article submissions contain only one link and in Reddit the text of the link is all the submitter can submit with the link itself. In Digg in addition, there is a short description too. This doesn’t keep Digg or Reddit free from mis-guiding wording or submitters from taking some liberties with naming those link-texts. It is indeed a skill of its own to come up with a good, concise link-texts. At least in Reddit, same links often get submitted with different texts and usually just one makes it to the first page.

There being a layer of editors in Slashdot keeps it mostly free from some of the stuff that burdens Digg and Reddit. There is usually at least 5 links to pictures on the front page of Digg and Reddit and while some of them are fun and even interesting, they can be rather boring and the discussions about them mostly aren’t interesting in any way. There is also certain pictures that come up every now and then.

There is certain USA-centricity to all the sites mentioned. This is probably most pronounced in Reddit where the realization that petrol costs $4 per gallon has produced endless links to articles explaining why this is, why it’s going to get better/worse, how it was in the seventies, what alternatives there are for petrol-running cars and so on. Politics is one clear example of this, which shows in Slashdot and Reddit. I am probably more aware of the political situation in USA than I am of Finland because of this.

Personally, my preference of this sites goes in reversed order of the headline. Slashdots discussions gives me such a well-rounded and thorough handling of subjects that I think is practical, thanks to its long history, it also sports a number of nerd-luminaries in its users. Reddit provides light-entertainment and sometimes gold-nuggets worth keeping. Digg is usually good for checking out if you’re bored and exhausted all the other options.

When You have a Week to Spare on Low Budget and Lousy Finnish Weather

Current Matters, personal, Weather

Greetings from the finnish backwaters. I’m currently spending first half of my summer leave in the Savo region, in the north-eastern part of Finland. So far most of my trip has been according to my plans, apart from the weather-malfunction which is always something you shouldn’t bet around these parts anyway. I have cycled two 60km trips and seen my first ever traditional, finnish summer theater plays.

The play was everything I expected, set in a nostalgic rural setting, in the 50’s with some romantic interests and general hope flying around, with some light entertainment in the form of some swearing and rude sayings. I’ve also painted a shed, demolished some wall and heard unruly stories about life in the finnish countryside. It took a bit of leg-work but finally I found a spot with some wifi so I could deliver this fascinating piece of summery information.