After backlash of winter, this weekend is when we can officially announce that summer is back. Nights can still be a bit cold, but the sun is bright, skies blue and there is awful lot of garden work to do. (Had a little birthday tapas dinner out in the garden today.)
Category: personal diary
mostly personal, notes on the road
Futures seminar
(Pictured Marja Tiura, and the neck of Jyrki J.J. Kasvi.)
Today I am participating in a seminar organised by the Futures Committee of Finnish Parliament, focusing on the challenges of urbanisation, globalisation and civilization (Sivistys ja metropolit). I want to remind the participants about the need for comprehensive understanding (deep in thinking about the past, as well as the present and the future), also creating intergenerational and interdisciplinary dialogue that facilitates flexibility and innovation in small as well as in larger scale. Fantasy is one measurement: how much imagination we are willing to accept in our everyday? Arts and crafts is another: do we allow ‘everyman’ (everywoman, everychild) to be creative? Questions for our future…
Doctor Okell's Wondrous Beer Translation
Sometimes the automated translation services produce something useful, and sometimes not. This is actually more of amusement value, so it fits nicely with Vappu celebrations. Reading the back label of my beer bottle, I noticed something a bit odd. E.g.: “Contains Malted Barley” is translated into Finnish as “Hillitä ohra maltalainen” (roughly: “moderating barley that lives in Malta”), “Best before: See bottle Neck” is “Parhaiten aiemmin: Hiippakunta pullottaa halailla” (roughly: “Used to be best: the diocese [sic!] bottles with cuddles”). The little text up right that you probably cannot read from the image says “Brewed in the Isle of Man”, which is translated following the same excellent logic as “Oluenpanija kotona The Isle of Man luona” (roughly: “The beer brewer is at home with The Isle of Man near/with”).
Hilarious — thank you very much, Dr Okell’s!
Not travelling
I have made few somewhat painful personal decisions and radically cut down the amount of international travel I do. Travelling might be something we are told we have to do, that our careers require it, and that internationalisation or globalisation even dictates that we should be flying around the globe all the time, busily collaborating with everyone else. But why? Don’t we really have any communicational tools that we could use to cut down this insane waste of time, energy — both human energy and precious reserves of natural energy, turning it into carbon dioxide? I think we can do better. I was supposed to present game studies papers in two important conferences, CHI 2008 in Italy, and Crossroads conference of cultural studies in Jamaica. It was a real pity, but I decided not to go. Continue reading “Not travelling”
Updating Gamestudiesbook.net
My original plan was to update the companion website of my textbook — Gamestudiesbook.net — daily, until I’d be satisfied of reaching representative coverage of this field. In reality most of the days have been so packed, I have just collapsed to bed (and got up again around 5–6 am). But I have now build a new schedule, where I focus all updates of one week to one evening/morning. That way, I should have my plan fulfilled by the end of this Spring term. Lets see how this works out.
Home music, Heima
Music and dance are those areas of expressive phenomena that have power to address emotions more directly than the conceptual thought, text, or speech.
Images have also wide scope of communicational potential that often escapes any conceptual definition.
Music videos are an area where many of these strengths supposedly come together. Sadly, they seldom reach their true potential.
This weekend I have been watching and listening to Heima, a film by Sigur Rós. A group of Islandic musicians, this documentary relates to the significance Iceland as spiritual, historical and geographical home has to its people. Powerful visual as well as musical experience, the movie manages to touch, move and impress. It stirs emotions and inspires thought.
This is definitely a film that any lover of photography will appreciate. The care it pays to shadow and light, textures on sand, stone, old wall and on human face is impeccable. Some parts actually look like slideshows of images, taken of still life.
The two-disk DVD is of high technical quality, but it is also possible to download a trailer clip that shows some of this material in full HD — amazing! I have been trying to see if this is available in Blue-ray, but so far, no success. You can access the HD trailer here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/guide/hd/heima.html
(Thanks go to John, who mentioned how they had enjoyed watching this film.)
Spring arrives
This week there has been over 10C temperatures in Southern Finland, and the sun has been shining. Downside has been that there has been too much dust and other particles in the air. Our garden is also waking up, as the crocuses (pictured) show.
Pixar exhibition
Today I had a meeting day in Helsinki, and after some episodes ended with an extra hour in my hands. Luckily the Tennispalatsi Art Museum had an open doors day, and they were having a visiting exhibition from Pixar, the makers of digital animated films. I have always wondered and admired the amount of manual labour animations require, and digital cinema is no exception. Available in Finland through an arrangement with the Barbigan centre, London, the Pixar exhibition includes hundreds of drawings, paintings and model sculptures, along with some special exhibits. The Pixar Zoetrope and the Living Landscape made the strongest impression to me. In the former you can follow the wonderful process of still life waking up, as the rotating installation is lighted with the flicker of strobos. In the latter, the long wall in a huge darkened room becomes a window through which we are provided with a trip through digital, animated paintings. An impressive experience!
Stansted
Trying to catch some sleep in an airport hotel: engaged in a curious form of travel, that of airport meetings. I am pushing the use of Skype or videoconferencing instead, but I guess that kind of change of culture still requires some rise in the oil price before it becomes dominant. (Edit: for some reason this message had originally got truncated somewhere on the road between my phone, carrier networks, Flickr and my WordPress server…)
Oulu
During a short Spring break (traditionally there is something called “Skiing Holidays” in Finland) we visited Oulu — a nice town (I have actually born there), but the weather was a bit cold and windy during the weekend. In the picture we are walking around in Sunday morning and trying to find a place where we could get in, to get some warmth, but everything was actually closed until 12 noon. Rauno’s party was though great, and very warm.
frans goes blog 
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