Lavonardo

Visited the S60 marketing event in the Nokia flagship store on Aleksanterikatu.

The catering side of things was good - decent red wine and plentiful nibbles, but the devices side was a bit underwhelming - apart from the new gen communicator (E90), no funky new gadgets were shown.

Talked with the designated Vertu sales guy for a while, and was surprised how well the world’s only luxury phone is selling. Especially considering the difficulty of bringing anything non-vanilla in the jantelov-dominated Scandinavia.

Pimped my brand new n95 (yes, syvä luumu was delivered exactly on schedule) with a screensaver, but more about the phone when experiences warrant some discussion. The screen is pretty, keyboard a bit fiddly (with convex keys, that’s only to be expected) and the GPS-functionality untried.

This week’s photo thursday challenge subject is sound.

My take on the subject is the attached image, a didgeridoo playing aborigine on the Circular Quay. The amplified sound nicely reverberates throughout the area, and around noon the soundscape was free of dance-oriented external elements that crept into it after dark.

(As usual, the full-size photograph is available by clicking the attached image.)

I’ve been a participant in the weekly photo thursday for thirty-odd weeks now.

The web is full of photography show-n-tells, but like the DPChallenge the rules tend to be on the harsh side (photo must be taken after the challenge is announced), and the crop is usually very good.

The discovery of Photo Friday last week (from benrope’s blog) provides a second location where to exhibit, without the spectre of too much competition or too restrictive rules.

No picture leaps out off the albums that screams “Purity”, the topic of this week’s challenge, so the first participation has to wait a little.

Words cannnot do justice to Obelia Medusa, a tenacious modelmaker who has built an amazing doll house.

And not just another doll house, but one that takes its inspiration from messieurs Tolkien and Jackson: a doll house from the Shire.

Click the link and scroll the distance, the images are worth the effort.

Watched Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino’s half of this summer’s grindhouse double feature. And while it’s easily dismissed as a homage to the low budget/high speed flicks of the seventies, it turns out to be a pretty decent movie on its own.

That is, if the viewer is not bothered by a simplistic script, profuse swearing, cardboard characters and bouts of ultraviolence. Fortunately, that’s not all there is, since the characters end up being a lot more than the initially apparent set of paper dolls, and camouflaging amongst the regularly repeated seven words you cannot say on television there’s long stretches of pleasant dialogue. The script doesn’t really get any better, and the violence is an integral part of the film.

So yeah, this is a simple film, and that is by no means a cause to disrespect it. Just tone down the expectations from a Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction- level masterpiece, and all’s well.

But despite it being simple, it’s very much on the enjoyable side. It’s like a steak properly served in a posh restaurant - without garnish. There’s the main plot, and nothing else. And the plot servers a good ride - so a penchant for car chases should be added as a criterion, since they form a good slice of the movie.

The movie neatly simulates an old, badly worn copy. There are scratches and hairs on the film, color balance is a tad unstable, and missing frames are used as an excuse for not bridging scenes.

Apart from Kurt Russell as the badass stuntman, there are no major league stars in the cast. Of whom a lot seem to be present in the second half of the set, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. Which, unfortunately, doesn’t premiere here until late july.

And an even worse omission is the fact that the set of fake trailers for further grindhouse-mayhem shown inbetween the movies will most likely not see the silver screen in Finland.

And I so need to see Vanishing Point, referred to multiple times in the dialogue.

Gave up on xemacs ages ago (TextWrangler and TextMate superseded it), and haven’t bothered to install the full selection of xscreensaver eye candy.

And I certainly am not a regular reader of Jamie Zawinski’s rants, but occasionally he hits the nail head on, and thankfully the message is spread far and wide.

Like when coining the term wikigroaning, the despair you feel when noticing that a perfectly sane term (like Wall Street crash of 1929) has way less attention than a completely insignificant event or topic (say, the video game crash of 1983).

The WWDC is upon us, and it means that St. Steve of Jobs will appear on stage to preach to the choir. Some of whom carry means to convey the message almost live. (Yeah, many other sites do pretty good coverage, as well, I picked engadget, sue me).

While the apparent return of Macintosh as a decent game platform probably raised quite a few eyebrows, it’s the next incarnation of OS X, Leopard, that’s the most interesting topic of the presentation.

We’ve got a basic version that will cost $129,
we’ve got a Premium Version which will cost $129…
We’ve got a business version! $129.
Ultimate version! We’re throwing everything into it, it’s $129.

Steve Jobs

Yes. Unlike Vista, with its half a dozen different versions, buying Leopard is simple. The official release date is stated to be “in october”.

But it looks like the company is going to be able to keep the iPhone’s imminent launch on the 29th. So the fears of cascading delays pushing it back ought to be on the unwarranted side.

Taunon Systeemi, the best (and only) finnish System of a Down-cover band has expanded their domain from myspace to a proper website.

And vastly expanded their song repertoire as well. Including my personal favorite: Old School Hollywood Oulun Halutuin Veistos.

Picking two clues from katuoja: two worthwhile webcomics. Both with ingrown limitations to narrow down the audience.

Sarasvatin Hiekkaa is a graphic adaptation of Risto Isomäki’s Finlandia-nominee novel from 2005. The ecologically minded sci-fi story is done on a page-per-week- basis in Aamulehti, with a collected edition looming in the horizon (it’s a pretty thick book). Based on the first few episodes the art looks pleasant indeed, and the necessary exposition is woven into the story without seams that are too visible. Verdict: to be read on a weekly basis (and hope it doesn’t get cancelled befor its time).

DM of the Rings, on the other hand, has less-ambitious goals. It’s a comic that shows what kind of a roleplaying campaign could have been hidden behind Tolkien’s masterpiece. Or Peter Jackson’s, actually, since it’s based on captures from the movie trilogy. It’s filled with obvious in-jokes (which may open to a slightly wider audience) and references that wallow in gaming cliches (this, probably, is where most of the readers end up leaving, scratching their heads). But for long-time victims of the genre this is mandatory reading - with grin-inducing “I’ve so been there”-moments copiously sown into the panels. Tolkien-fundamentalists may find the proceedings too iconoclastic for comfort. Verdict: read ‘em all (and stay on board to the finish).

Two notable entities decided that time is now ripe to abandon ship.

Nyt Pelittää, the game-blog of hesari quotes lack of audience as the main reason to quit. True, the nine-strong writer corps never found their voices - but amongs the long gaps inbetween entries and occasionally missing points there were some worthwhile articles. The same cannot, obviously, be said of a large segment of the whole blogistan. Time out, hopefully, and not a full-scale rout from covering games.

Perplex City, probably the largest alternate reality game right now has indefinitely postponed the launch of the second season of the game. Of course the situation is not as clear-cut as the announcements would lead to believe - the second season cards have been for sale for quite a while, so the reception among players has not been uniformly positive to say the least.

The former had a long slide into obscurity - with increasingly stretching intervals between articles, so the decision to pull the plug was pretty much expected. The latter was a surprise, especially considering how much revenue the first season generated (though the company’s decision to abandon bookkeeping after the gig was over was a bit odd). Bought a couple of packs of cards and quite liked the varied selection of puzzles. With just a few dozen solved cards had no clue about the big picture, obviously.

Spent a good chunk of the evening in the Sauna Open Air festival in Tampere.

Walked into the area in the middle of Timo Rautiainen’s set. Heard the last two songs. Not bad, very much in the form of his previous output, and thus nothing to entice an immediate purchase.

Stam1na, on the other hand, immediately put in a one-two punch of angry thrash - varied enough to be interesting beyond the first three songs, yet consistently powerful. This was the first time I ever saw the band, and was very convinced. The world needs this kind of pissed-off metallers, and I clearly need to pay a visit to a convenient record store.

The main event was Megadeth. Megadeth as in “was a hasbeen, disbanded for two years and put out a surprisingly good album”. Clearly the hiatus and a bunch of new musicians has done Dave Mustaine good - this was an excellent gig. The raps between songs were cut to a minimum, the band was playing against a hard deadline, the show was to be over at ten sharp, and it was - with a set of convincingly humble thanks on top. Somehow Dave comes off as way more believable speaker than Metallica’s James Hetfield, whose words seem to be stiffly repeated night after night. The finnish audience was profusely thanked for pushing the new album to #2, the highest chart position in the world thus far (”and without this Parkin Link we would have been the number one here”).

The set list was great, classic song upon classic song - with surprisingly little material from the United Abominations thrown in. Mechanix (better known as Four Horsemen) was my personal highlight of the evening, but many songs off Rust in Peace and Peace Sells came close, very close.

Set list is off the air - one song remains unrecognized:

Sleepwalker
Take no prisoners
Set the world afire
Skin o' my teeth
Devil's island
Gears of war
Wake up dead
Hangar 18
Kick the chair
She-wolf
Tornado of souls
In my darkest hour
Washington is next
Reckoning day
Mechanix
Peace sells
//
Symphony of destruction
Holy wars

The rest of the bands in the three day festival have their hands full trying to top this. And this also sets the bar nicely high for Metallica’s visit to Helsinki in july.

: Added missing songs - TWO, not one. And corrected spelling errors of the ones previously remembered.

The Ducks did it, beating Ottawa Senators 4-1 in the Stanley Cup finals, and have thus brought the hockey glory to Anaheim.

The team did not have an auspicious start. After all, having the team named after a Disney flick did not exactly pump up the cred.

But like with so many non-obvious teams in the NHL (Tampa Bay, anyone?), the team slowly grew and prospered. And with the introduction of new rules in the league, a couple of key players and a healthy amount of luck, the team is now the top dog.

Congrats, again, and remember that the top of the heap is a hard place to be.

This week’s photo thursday challenge subject is machine.

My take on the subject is the attached image, a glass-cabin elevator. From an acrophobic perspective, the ride up to the 30th floor was interesting.

(As usual, the full-size photograph is available by clicking the attached image.

Out of the 25 best movies I supposedly haven’t seen my score isn’t that high: three and a half movies (gave up in the middle of Spike Lee’s Girl 6).

Some omissions are on the grave side (Heavenly Creatures alone strips several layers of street cred), and I seriously need to see Buckaroo Banzai sooner or later (had no idea Peter Weller starred in it). Bubble Boy too.

Munchkin Cthulhu must have been an immediate hit, since Steve Jackson Games has already come up with a sequel: Call of Cowthulhu.

Which, based on the first images and words, attempts to combine the Lovecraftian mythos with an unhealthy dose of rusticity.

Inspector Morse, the greatest of the british detective shows is back on finnish television.

Episodes are to be broadcast weekly, and I aim to catch a few to see whether the old magic is still left - and if so (as I very much suspect), go ahead and purchase the whole series on dvd.

Morse hit unexpectedly hard back in the early nineties. The episodes were long enough to give room for serious plot development, the characters anything but carved from cardboard, and the pervasively melancholic mood the last straw.

While not every episode was up to the standard set by those penned by Colin Dexter, the quality never sank to a level to cause worry. And even then, the irritable yet gifted inspector and his sidekick Lewis (Kevin Whately, fresh off Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) very rarely strayed from their prime spots.

As noted in Nono as well, the protagonist was indeed a piece of work not often seen in as complex package as this: on one side a cultivated art lover - on the other a jaded police officer who has seen it all, a vulnerable borderline alcoholic with serious emotional baggage and a serious tendency for biting cynicism. Thus obviously a character that’s easy to mock as the Hale & Pace sketch of Inspector Morose proves.

The 33 televised episodes have been available on dvd for ages, but I wasn’t aware that the spin-off series centered on Lewis, and dated five years after the Morse finale, has been released as well (though without subtitles, it would seem).

Something off the side of the trawler.

• Yes, the whole american nation feels the pain of the wrong guy nearing Hank Aaron’s home run record.
• World Domination 201, a surprisingly lucid document from the lately very frothy keyboard of ESR.
• Songbird, an open source love child of iTunes and Firefox.
• Climate change accelerating evolution - sounds fishy, but apart from some clever accounting, the Smithsonian guys aren’t exactly the lowest-regarded scientists on the globe.
• Worst lyrics of all time - turns out that I had always mentally shuffled War Pigs lyrics to a more sensible direction, this tautology is terrible…
• A very upmarket moleskine jacket. I’m happy with mine as-is, though the spine does exhibit worrisome tendency to age less than optimally.
• Launch cost back in the boom: 5M$ and up,
  launch cost now: 12K and change. Things have changed. For the better, obviously.
• Social networking and the chasm.

Peter Nepstad’s self-published interactive fiction game, 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery just extended its audience by a large chunk.

A download version off Manifesto Games site sure makes things easier than dealing with a non-traditional web shop (which seems to have been replaced by the common Paypal lately).

Definitely something tasty for the inevitable not so optimal summer days.

Got summoned to watch the european cup qualifier against Serbia in the recently renovated Sports Academy yesterday.

The most striking thing about the game was not Finland’s loss (2-0) that pretty much guarantees yet another non-entry to the cup itself. No, it was the prevalence of guys whose surnames ended in “ic” in the opposing team - of the starting eleven, no less than ten players had a corresponding name.

Yeah, we lost - two defensive errors cost a lot, and Serbia’s defense proved its worth against the hapless finnish offense. The lack of playing time by the two strikers was obvious - missed passes, bad positioning and altogether lack of scoring was consistently dismaying.

I quit passive smoking two days ago (with some help from the government, of course), and it was indeed pleasing not to be forced to toss all clothing in the laundry hamper upon getting home. I’m certain some bars do have to do some remodelling once the clientele notices the reek previously conveniently camouflaged by smoke.

If it only had been this easy back in the day… The margin to reality as it was at the end on ninth grade is close to two points. Two full points.

Of the grades, the one on music is the most bogus - as anybody who’s ever had the misfortune of being standing within hearing range in an inspring concert can testify.