Everyone is usually so cheerful about the coming spring that very few get nostalgic about the ice melting and snow going away. I like summer, but actually it is the transitions I like best — the movement from one state to another. “Liminality” is a nice catch-all-phrase, but I wonder can we really pin it down so easily. In the cultural and religious history fields, one can point towards change of seasons being the symbolic and concrete moment when we see in action the change where our lives are fundamentally just one part. In media studies it is not so typical to think along these lines, and in science and technology studies almost certainly not. But I would like to see us taking more seriously our urge to create multiple layers of reality, all on the top of each other, and ask what is so inherently enjoyable finally in these transitions, overlays, and complexities related to them.
Category: personal diary
mostly personal, notes on the road
bad Maku
This could be consired as a warning: this soda, “Maku” (‘taste’ in Finnish) tastes absolutely horrible. 🙂 There was a recent news story about poisonous chemicals being generated in diet sodas; I am sure “Maku” is particularly strong in benzene…
spa
Time to soak and swim. www.naantalispa.fi
carcassonne easter
Carcassonne start into Easter: four different expansion packs and a nice dinner with Johanna and Heikki. I must confess that I prefer a game with a bit simpler rules: two hours of preparation before the game can even start is too much. But it is so nice to have a break and some free time. 🙂
siilinkari winter walk
There is a tradition to walk to the small Siilinkari island over the Näsijärvi ice in Tampere in March. This time Aamulehti had organised some music and other programme for a family-oriented Sunday in March 12. I was there with Laura, and some of these (long overdue) photos are now in Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/search/tags:siilinkari/ – and all in my own server: http://unet.fi/pics/2006-03-12/
joensuu
Yesterday in Helsinki, today in Joensuu, eastern Finland. All this would be fine, except for the flu – and that there is still no working mobile communications from Elisa. And my car broke down. So I take a taxi from the airport to the office to access my email. Bumps in the road to the mobile information society, I guess.
home sweet home
Very late last night, after multiple connecting flights, I arrived home again. Finnair, British Airways or American Airlines lost my luggage though. It is not optimum to be made to travel from Helsinki airport to Tampere in middle of the night, in well-below-freezing temperatures in your California-optimized travel clothing (my all winter clothes were in the lost luggage of course). I think I caught cold. No sight of the luggage so far. But: the functionality, security and familiar beauty of Finland make this clearly the place for me. Home is the best place. 🙂
LA chilli
More hours on the road than I care to think about. Pretty jetlagged. But it is hard not to like California: it is warm, tolerant, multi-cultural in the American way. And that chilli bowl really hit the spot. I’d just love to see more LA some day than just the airport.
international study of games cultures
I woke up in snowy Espoo today, feeling slightly gnomish. The Finnish Cultural Fund granted support to our new initiative, International Study of Games Cultures in their annual Gala yesterday. This work will start this summer, initially looking at similarities and differences between Finnish, Korean and American games cultures. Cool!
time for science, fiction?
I took two days of holiday this week, starting tomorrow. This is to do some work, as every day that I am at “work”, will be spent on meetings, seminars, teaching or various administrative tasks, which need to be done, but which I do not consider proper work, in that deeper, more qualitative sense of the word. So, I have to get some holidays to focus on the creative aspect of science and scholarship. Perverse? Maybe, yes.
There will be a session on the relationship between science and science fiction in our university’s science fair “Tieteen iltapäivä ja yö” this year that I will be hosting. We have three professors, from different backgrounds, and from different angles, discussing the role of creativity in their work, and how they perceive fictional speculation from their own position. That should be fun enough — there should be interesting examples and discussions coming up. I just spend some wishful minutes in updating my Amazon.com Wish List to include some novels and short story collections from Neal Asher, Charles Stross, Richard K. Morgan and Dan Simmons that I wish I would have some time to immerse with.
GDC 2006 is also coming up. There will be two tutorial days (seminars) where I will be participating as one of the speakers, but happy to be in a minor role in both of them: The Social Dimensions of Gaming (DiGRA & IGDA co-operation) is coordinated by T.L.Taylor, Bart Simon and friends and will “bring together expert social scientists doing research on game design, play and culture to work with designers in generating useful vocabularies for making sense of the social dimensions of digital games”. There. And then there is the Game Curriculum Workshop, coordinated by Katie Salen and Katherine Isbister, which “brings together some of the best and brightest developers, scholars, and students to take an in-depth look at game curricula — now, and in the future”. Welcome to drop in and participate, if your road takes you either to Tampere campus, or to San Jose this year.
frans goes blog 
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