Better late than never!

I had a good time at the con - again, no RPing, and very little of other sorts of gaming, but still great fun.

As I'm getting older and lazier, I booked a hotel room this year; sleeping in the staff dorms or in a sleeping bag somewhere has its own charm, but a good soft bed, the ability to shower when you like and a very nourishing hotel breakfast trumped it.

As always, I was working for my ticket, both as an info-desk worker and as one of the roving trouble-solvers / security guards. This year's con was unusually quiet and orderly, to the point that I (almost) felt useless at times. It beats having to deal with drunks, people who're having a drug-fueled psychotic break, and folks who illegally park their cars to block the vendors' door, though...

The RPG.net meet went swimmingly; we had a pretty good attendance, with nitessine , krfsm and his mysterious girlfriend (the Baroness), Agamemnon, Ataxerxes, niilopaasivirta , MutieMoe, and possibly some others who I can't remember right now. I'll post the photos I took someday when I've gotten hand of these new-fangled image site things. Afterwars, I went to a sortakinda room party with the Swedes, followed by a good sauna. Very entertaining.

The programs I enjoyed the most were probably the "Speculative Games" panel, where the GoHs elaborated their highly speculative game ideas (such as a Swine Flu LARP, a game of penguin ovocide played on a melting ice board, and a team-building mobile phone game about erotic librarians); a very amusing lecture on conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists, and why they are almost uniformly wacko; and a lecture by a Finnish police officer about the reality of crime scene investigations, and how they differ from CSI:Wherever.

Also, I got myself "Trail of Cthulhu" by the inimitable princeofcairo . Seems really neat; too bad I probably don't have the time to run it.

Whew! Had a good time, but I'm glad it's over now.

The location (Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki) was just big enough for the crowds, since Finncon is also Animecon; there were a million (give or take a few) teenaged anime/manga fans, a lot of whom were cosplaying. I worry about what happens if the trend continues - not because anime fans are somehow corrupting SF/F fandom, but because Finland's starting to run out of venues to hold cons of this size!

I attended a bunch of panels and lectures, including ones about Fat Fantasy and its prevalence; the "best-guess" timeframes for uploading, AI and other transhuman technologies; and the likely near-future develompents in computer gaming. Also, GRRMartin's GoH speech on journeys and SF was impressive.

Not very surprisingly about half of the staff were people I know; Finland's a small country, and the combined RPG / SF / F / anime fandom is thoroughly interconnected. I did also meet nitessine and krfsm , the latter of whom was stopping in Helsinki before flying off to Hong Kong.

Conswag includes: a couple of early Niven books (World of Ptavvs and Protector), Doc Smith's First Lensman, two-thirds of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the complete translated version of GUNNM and an autographed copy of Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns, plus some minor odds-and-ends.

I got together with a bunch of friends for some Midsummer fun & debauchery (very mild debauchery, though). The rainy, cold and grey weather didn't manage to dampen our mood; in retrospect, if the weather had been warmer, nobody would probably have been able to sleep.

Some of the highlights of the weekend:

* Playing Pandemic, a co-operative boardgame where the players are trying to stop several epidemics from sweeping across the world. Nifty game, and especially topical these days.

* Xtreem-ish croquet across the garden, around and through bushes, and up and down some fiendish slopes. After spending twenty strikes at one wicket, the temptation to hurl the mallet at the nearest fragile thing is almost overpowering!

* Truly heroic amounts of barbeque, both in the making and eating. We also had new potatoes, pickled herring and other traditional delicacies.

* Sauna, and lots of it. What do you expect from a bunch of Finnish gamers and students?

And although the days are starting to grow shorter again, at least the weather has warmed nicely. We will have a summer this year, it looks like!

Celebrated the May Day in very fine weather. It's the local spring carneval of sorts, because by this time it's usually warm enough that people can actually have light-hearted fun outdoors. (Not guaranteed by any means; I recall May Days with sleet blowing horizontally in the harsh north wind.)

Had a great time with friends of mine; we dined, wined, went to sauna, gamed some, sang a lot, went on a short bar-hopping tour (with some card playing interspersed) and enjoyed the weather.

The most surreal experience of the day: sitting on a bar terrace, sipping my drink, and listening to someone playing Scooter's "How Much Is the Fish" across the river... on bagpipes.

Today was an absolutely gorgeous spring day - warm and sunny, with a slight wind that was actually warm - so me and a bunch of friends went out to have a barbecue. Sausages, various slices of pork, a bit of chicken breast and marinated corncobs were scorched on the grill, a couple of beers and sodas were quaffed, and a fun time was had by all.

Summer, here we come!

I spent most of yesterday with my friends, first cooking and then eating an early Easter dinner.

The menu consisted of the following courses:
* Green salad (cucumber, two sorts of lettuce, sweet peppers and cantaloupe)
* Ciabatta bread fresh from oven
* Potato wedges w. rosemary and black pepper
* Lamb roast stuffed with garlic and herbs, marinated in herb balsamico and served with mocha sauce and mint jelly

Served with red wine and iced water.

For the dessert (after about an hour of rest), we had:
* Macaronis (light fluffy almond cookies filled with dark chocolate)
* Lime-coconut-white chocolate cheese cake (with a marzipan chibi-Cthulhu on top)
* [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paskha_(meal)]Pasha[/url]

A good time was had by all.

I am: Arthur C. Clarke Well known for nonfiction science writing and for early promotion of the effort toward space travel, his fiction was often grand and visionary.

Which science fiction writer are you?

I'm not sure if I'm surprised or not; I'm definitely proud. :D

Last night I had a dream that presented itself as a new book by Alastair Reynolds.

It involved a female detective, and her jester-like friend, both of whom lived in a civilization of O'Neill habitats around a gas giant. (It was never clear to me whether it was Jupiter, Saturn, or some extrasolar planet.)

First half of the dream plot involved the detective trying to solve a complicated murder case, getting into more and more trouble all the way. As she got more and more evidence together, she started to suspect that her jester friend was somehow involved.

After arranging for some back-up, she confronted the jester, who admitted the murder but explained that he had very good reasons for it. Then he took her to a sealed section of the habitat, where they found a school of sorts, filled with teenage clones of both the detective and the jester, who were being trained and indoctrinated as an army of conquest.

It turned out that the detective and the jester were both second-generation clones of the real villains, who were behind the plan to take over the entire orbital civilization (there were similar clone forces being grown in every habitat), and that the murdered man had been their agent.

The second half of the dream involved the protagonists taking control of the clones in this habitat and using them to bulwark the original habitat government, even as fighting broke out in other habitats. Eventually, they realized that if nothing drastic was done, the villains were either going to win, or come so close to winning that defeating them would be horribly costly.

So they figured out the location of the villains' secret headquarters, inside the world-ocean of one of the iced-over moons, and prepared for an invasion with their own clones, backed up by the ordinary habitat forces. IIRC, their plan was to soften things up a bit by ramming a smaller, rocky moon into the global ice sheet.

Unfortunately, at that point I woke up, so I can't tell you how the plan went.

Good tidings to all interested persons.

Christmastime went nicely; good food, good cheer, lots of relatives, good food, giving and getting some neat gifts (Grimm's fairy tales as imagined by a bunch of comic artists, for example!), good food, and a beautiful, Christmas-appropriate weather, with frost and snow.

Helped my brother to move (a man with a van always has friends, relatives, friends of relatives or relatives of friends who need a hand in a move...), and reaquainted myself a bit with Helsinki. Vltava and Belge are both good places to go if you like beer (Czech or Belgian, respectively) and food that goes well with said beer (Sausage dish with red sauerkraut, and Belgian fries with mustard-mayo, respectively).

New year is looming ahead. Time to take a deep breath, stock up on the fireworks, and plunge right in!

No, I'm not American. :) But we're having municipal elections here in Finland, and today was a good day for doing my civic duty.

It also helps that one of the candidates was an old schoolmate of mine; and even putting that aside, I think he would make a good member of the town council.

Whatever the next election where you're eligible to vote, go for it! The Sleepers' Party has never gotten anything done, so why not try one of the others? :)

Edit:
And woot, he got in!

So, the rainy and cold summer has changed into autumn.

I've been busy, but not as busy as the posting gap here implies. Among other things, I've got some con photos that I really ought to sort out and post sometime soon, while everyone still remembers what happened...

My promise for October: I will read LJ more often, if not necessarily post!

From http://www.neabigread.org/; bolded are books that I've read, striked-through are those that I disliked.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger; does anyone actually like this book?
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis; wait, what? This should be included in #33, above...
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown; what the Hell is this derivative rubbish doing in any list of best books? And why isn't the infinitely superior Foucault's Pendulum that drives the stake through the conspiratorial rubbish of DVC, on this list?
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving; probably my favorite among Irving's books.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck; I just don't like Steinbeck.
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A.S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare; cheating again, as this should go into #14.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

367/97 (discounting the repetitive entries, and Dan Brown who has no right to be on this list), not bad.

It's difficult to come up with something even remotely meaningful to post here, or to convince myself that I should post it, whatever it is.

Still... the June was unusually rainy and cool; the rain was welcome after the unusually dry and warm May, but enough is enough.

The Midsummer passed nicely. I followed the traditions, and spent the holiday with my family, with sauna and traditional summer dishes (smoked salmon, pickled herring, new potatoes, grilled sausages, a variety of salads and, of course, beer and such).

Closer to the present, I attended the wedding of a couple I've been friends with for years. The ceremony was nice, the party afterwards excellent, and generally speaking everything went swimmingly. I'm now determined to refresh my dancing skills as soon as feasible; although I've never been much of a dancer, I used to be passable at waltz, tango, fox and a few others, but the lack of practice has wiped the steps from my muscle memory.

Last night, I went to my ten-year high school (well, the Finnish equivalent) reunion. I've managed to lose touch with most of my old classmates - not purposefully, but more through the combination of laziness, diverging interests and going to study different things at different places - so it was quite interesting to see everyone again.

As it turns out, I did not get to see everyone again; the arrangers had managed to contact most of our class, but only half of us made it to the reunion. No matter; there were enough people, and a wide enough selection of us, that we could get a fairly good idea of what the rest were up to by sharing what we each knew.

In a way, it was both relieving and reassuring. Some of us were married, had children, or both; a few were still studying, either because we had dithered, or changed subjects so many times; everyone had changed a little, but all of us were instantly recognizable. The feeling I got was that we were, after all, ordinary people, and though we had not achieved extraordinary things (well, most of us; one girl is now a highly successful geneticist in Germany), it was all right.

I enjoyed the reunion quite a lot; we heated up a sauna and went swimming, had a dinner outdoors around a fire, and talked about our school days, what we'd been up since, and what our goals were for the future. I think the best term to describe the atmosphere was 'mellow', after the initial awkwardness had passed. There was a bit of wistfulness mixed in, too, as seeing your old friends and classmates again seemed to underline that although we aren't old or even middle-aged yet, neither are we exactly young any more.

We'll see if it takes another ten years before next reunion; I hope not.

No, not the distress signal, but May Day; the feast of spring, the international workers' day, and the biggest holiday in the Finnish student calendar.

Awesome weather this year, warm, clear and calm; I'm sure the police are cursing the weather just as much as everyone else is praising it. The people seemed pretty mellow, however, so perhaps the Men in Blue had an OK night. I know I certainly had fun!

Happy May Day for everyone!

(Hmm. LJ recognizes "drunk" as a mode, but not "hung over". A glaring omission, I think!)

Well, not really. But it is a fairly busy time for me, both socially and in terms of studies. And at the end of the month, the May Day is waiting...

The weather is becoming more spring-like again, after unexpected and frankly unwelcome snow last weekend. I know this is Finland, but come on; no more snow or slush until November or so, please?

After the last couple of days' snowfall, it's very very wintry here. Definitely more snow on the ground than any time before this winter.

I'm not complaining - after the dark, dank, dismal midwinter, the brightness brought by the fresh snow and longer days is very welcome indeed! And looking at the statistics, snowfalls like this happen a couple of times every decade or so, so this isn't exactly unprecedented or freaky weather.

Still, it was unexpected. Ah well, now it's good time to start wondering about what the summer will turn out to be like...

I set out yesterday, with several friends, to cook and eat a good Easter dinner. I'm making a note here: huge success! :)

Main course was lamb, of course; a well-marinated roast with plenty of garlic stuffed into it, served with coffee-and-mint gravy. With it, we served root vegetables - swedes, carrots and parsnip - stewed with rosemary, maple syrup and other spices.

There was also saffron bread and green salad, and red wine to drink. For the dessert, we made a ridiculously huge amount of tiramisu - enough for twelve servings, and there were just six of us! Yet we managed to polish off a lot of that, as well as the peach tart and chocolate eggs.

All in all, an excellent meal and a very enjoyable party. Happy Easter, everyone!

The term "Benderism" has been coined by James Nicoll, if memory serves, and refers to the peculiar fascination all too many SF fans, enviromentalists and other generally smart, educated people have with the idea of sharply reducing the human population - on the order of tens of per cent, or more.

I've been arguing with a Benderist on a webforum, who seems to think that if we were to reduce world population from current six-plus billion to six million, the remaining people could run a perfectly workable modern, technological society without problems as the ratios of people doing things wouldn't change; indeed, the survivors would be even better off, since there would now be a thousand times as much resources available to each.

I'm sure the same person would immediately cry foul if I suggested we could take a local ecosystem and destroy ninety-nine percent of the plants and animals without causing any significant problems, because the ratios would again stay exactly the same; and he'd be perfectly correct about it.

Frankly, I'm baffled and annoyed. I'm hoping that I can get through with the ecology example, but I'm dubious because he, in apparent sincerity, asked if people really think that the genocide of ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of humanity is somehow worse than the extinctions and ecological damage humanity is causing.

Rest in peace, E. Gary Gygax.