mostly personal, notes on the road
Two house-warming parties today. Sanna and Kimmo (my sister and her partner) recently bought a house in Espoo – very idyllic. Ruksu and Mirka will celebrate theirs later today in Pirkkala. Makes you think what kind of home to make; particularly in that kind of dreamy, sky-is-the-limit kind of way. A totally peaceful house, next to a lake and a sauna, with all modernities, a combo of nature, culture, and hi-tech. A very Finnish dream, I suppose.:-)
 |
We all would definitely do well with a little more colour; me too. Decided to do two things: change the template for this blog, and take a walk with my camera in the evening sun. Well… I am still not certain about this colour scheme, and like these
video clips prove, there is probably much more to movie making than a tiny Ixus camera which can record some bouncing pixels.
On the marketing research corner, eMarketer recently put together some data to claim that about one-fourth of video game players watched less television last year, and the trend seems to be continuing. “Game Over for TV” is their title, but I would not go so far. Rather, we will just see more and more of mixed media forms. A virtual telly night with you favourite in-game buddies, anyone?
After installing the new Google Desktop Search (Version 2 Beta) to my “mediaserver” machine at home (that is, the one with the better display and larger hard drives) today, I was served by the Sidebar application. It is one of those “all-in-one” applications that might be useful, or then they just take extra desktop space and you end up deleting them fast. I am not sure which camp this one belongs to; by default it displays a slideshow of all my image files (and others from the web), and the Weather part only gives you US locations, which is pretty lame. At the same time, there are several “Advanced Features” that are promising — and also a bit spooky. It monitors the pages I surf, the newscasts, RSS/Atom feeds I subscribe to, and displays new titles automatically in the sidebar. Well, we’ll see — have to test this more. One thing is sure: this is symptom of us being now in the always-connected, broadband age and era. One can also become addicted and just stare at this, semi-adapted stuff endlessly being refreshed from the wells (and junkyards) of the net.
The first “What’s Hot” recommendation I clicked and viewed was this Aeon Flux SF movie trailer. Nice; more futuristic Kung Fu action and recycled storylines? But right on target: I might go and see the flick.
Rainy. Still eating antibiotics. I used some time this Sunday to update my web pages, put couple of articles (one on horror fiction in Finnish, the gameplay experience paper from DiGRA-05 with Laura, in English) available into my university home page, then updated the links in the photo album page (in Finnish; you can also go directly into my server pics-folder with mostly uncommented stuff).
While going through all those materials, I started thinking whether I should have some “selected few” pictures collection somewhere. So, I went back to my old flickr account, and put a few of my favourites there. Hope you like them, too – and find them this way more easily accessible than in the larger achive folders.
Participating in a Finnish Future Studies Society’s seminar, I’ve been presenting my tentative view on future-oriented game studies (keyword: game cultures), and getting a nice mix on the seminar themes, marginality and centrality. The trick, of course is, how to identify those marginal phenomena which are somehow symptomatic, or “weak signals” telling about our future. What is your current favourite future?
 |
There was another electricity power cut in our area early this morning – my UPS woke me up with its pitiable beeping. The power was away perhaps for an hour, don’t know for sure (fell asleep again). These things are real pain, particularly as my ADSL box (Zyxel) is not linked to UPS (a compatibility problem with the AC adaptor power connectors), and after waking up, Zyxel decided to assign my server a new internal IP address. Nice, I only had to reassign all my NAT conversions and firewall settings, after I had figured out something was wrong in the first place.
There must be a more stable world coming up for our multi-server, connected homes – someday?
Saw the Spielberg-Cruise War of the Worlds yesterday, btw. I rather enjoyed it: it succeeds in bringing a sci-fi war into the realistically chaotic street-level, rather than giving the classic “president, scientists, army and other heroes” serving. But but. I suppose there are only so many Tom Cruise films the universe can hold. We are probably getting near the End of Days.
My return to work, and the busy autumn term preparations, were interrupted by a tiny virus, a semi-living organism (no, lets say, a chemical) that has now held me inside these walls for four days in a row. While flu or mild influenza is sort of ridiculous disease in its non-seriousness, it can put you mood for thinking. If we are deprived of the control of our body, if our consciousness is clouded by pain, what we are? Where are we? Is there time any more? What about sense, direction?
Is there a self, someone to carry and continue the significance, any more?
Silence. Detached from all our contacts, there are no longer contours for our existence, and nothing to feed thoughts and passions into the space, flow of action, that used to be us. A release of a sorts, viruses can be perhaps thought of as little wise men, those teachers of being and nothingness. Nanoscale Zen masters.
I actually rather like autumn. It is an introverted season, one that allows you to turn inside, fall silent and rethink your direction. I even finally managed to clean my office table (excavation through the piles of evidence from the last two-three years incessant march of projects and meetings. Soul healing.
Now sauna. Went for a walk before that (carried my phone and took a clip of rain falling into Tohloppi – now this is a video blog, if you can access the file: sataaropisee_050804.3gp). While walking I thought about the networks, connections between bits, people, concepts. Connections provide us with the resonance of meaning, yet their prerequisite is the distance at the heart of it all. No distance, no possibility for connections. The aching certainty of separation and loss at every insight, touch and knowing smile.
Hah, the familiar fall melancholy. Lets play some more music from years gone, and look at old photographs.
After couple of days, I have got most of the Provencal photos edited, and have some kind of online gallery available, here. I tested Flickr service while setting up this, to see whether that would be better than hosting them on my own server. But I did not realise they had a 20 meg monthly bandwidth limit, and while testing with couple of my high-resolution originals, I blew my entire quota for this month. Oh well, I think I will stick with my own server, even if I am then limited to whatever code I am able to set up and maintain there. Currently, I am tweaking with JAlbum, and trying to find the most informative and best-designed skin among the offerings. (Unfortunately, I do not have time to script and design one of my own liking.) Attached are some of the photos available in this archive:
 |
 |
 |
 |
Driving here can be really exhausting. The traffic culture is very different, roads are often very narrow, and routes marked differently. The sum total for a Nordic visitor can create the dizzying feeling of riding in a deadly carousel. Today we visited a “Village des Tortues” (a turtle conservation park), and drove back to Cte d’Azur. Juan les Pins appears to be a typical combination of beach and tourist hotels. Early into bed, for tomorrow.
 |
frans goes blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.