Final Task part 3

Here's a mock-up of the Wiggly website

Here's a "video tour"

There's a few things I will expand on.

The number for the amount of people in an instance - 150 - is sort of arbitrary, but based on an idea by a guy called Dunbar. Based on studies on other primates he made an estimation about a "natural" group size for humans as a species. You can read more about it here: Wikipedia - Dunbar's Number. I didn't do any further research than the wiki page so it might be total bullshit, but I needed some number and this one had at least some merit.

We've touched on this topic a few times in class, but it still puzzles me greatly that there's a thing called "YouTube community". There's literally millions of channels, how the f is that a community? When people say that do they mean the creators who move to LA to pursue a career in entertainment? I watch tons and tons of YouTube videos every day and I've never seen any of these videos on any YouTube rewind compilation. It seems really unlikely to me that I would've?

Is this Jennifer Aniston joining "Instagram community"? No. She had a new TV series premiere two weeks after her first post. Her Instagram presence is an ad. Orlando Bloom, Jennifer Aniston and me are not part of the same community now and I cannot comprehend what the comments and likes are for. Is is a status thing to be seen to have liked this post? Is this like getting an autograph? I don't know.

The internet was different before all the real life famous people and everyone's mom joined in, when it was just nerds and kids and everyone visited different sites. In 2004 if Jennifer Aniston had shown up in some random movie forum no one would've cared because it would've been impossible to verify that it's actually her. Content mattered in a different way.

Reddit is my favourite place because it has a nice sense of several communities about it. Different subreddits have different sorts of culture. One of my favourite internet community art pieces of all time is Place, that was a million pixel canvas where every user could place one pixel every 5 minutes. The canvas was active for 72 hours (although the duration wasn't announced in the beginning and probably not planned on either) and during that time plans were made, factions formed, people would take shifts defending pixels. The final image is a product of hundreds of different groups planning things together by themselves - only in the instance of a conflict on the borders of their plans do they need to discuss and compromise and maybe make pacts with other factions further down the canvas. 

Small communities need to exist to make huge group efforts like this possible.

What I want form Reddit is the feel of a small group without in the group needing to be into some same obscure hobby or interest. In a group of 150 random first year students across three universities, I think the diversity of interests and skills would be very high in a given instance, but the common experience of being a student would tie the group together at first.

What I also had in mind was sort of a fraternity. The people in the group would be in each other's group of online buddies, like neighbours in life, helping each other out when possible.

I think a platform in itself doesn't need to be very exciting or give its users everything they want. I think the users should build themselves a place that suits them. Not being able to leave or ban anyone just because you don't like the content of their messages would mean that you have to communicate and solve problems the old fashioned way. I sincerely believe no one would want to be the one lonely troll in a group of 150 people - if you're ignored, no one else outside the group is ever going to see how much you don't care.

I imagine people would take part and strive to create an interesting culture for themselves, playing games they made themselves, create their own stories, write their own reviews and news, make their own music. Who cares if it wouldn't be the best possible content? It would be their own.

Final Task part 2

I gave my social media the name "wiggly"for several reasons. I wanted something short, pronounceable, and something that wouldn't make you think of anything else. There's a decade old concept for an open-source social media platform that is named Diaspora*, and I think the name's rather unfortunate because it's not neutral enough. I googled "wiggly" and nothing of note came up. wiggly.com has been "coming soon" for the past 10 years so that's out, but wiggly.dog was available and that feels memorable and fun.

One of the core mechanics of the wiggly platform is the weekly cycle of creating, curating and erasing. So like read it -> reddit, weekly -> wiggly. The tilde sign would be used in place of an @ sign to indicate users.

An instance is a group of randomly selected 150 people with tuni e-mail addresses to skew the userbase young and educated, to verify they are actual people and to make the some more local and thus more relevant. For the first 30 000 people, the groups would be all mixed up, but starting from next semester the groups would usually be first year students, just from different campuses and majors.

These groups of 150 would be called instances. You could think of it like a private group on Facebook, or a subreddit.

There's one chatroom for all of the 150 users. Instant messaging is impossible.

Every week, a group of 10 moderators will be chosen from the instance at random. Their mission is to curate content created by the instance users for the newsletter (published at the end of the week), keep the peace and act as support between the users and admins of the whole system, if technical issues come up.

Every user has their own page - like a blog of sorts - where they can post whatever they want. Hashtags are an important part of the site functionality, because the users would in time build their own hashtags for threads that continue from week to week, so everyone can find the people and discussions they want.

Everyone is anonymous every week, their username a random number between 100-999 that changes weekly. You can find a specific users post with searching with the tilde sign, and posts about them with the hashtag. Anyone can use any hashtags they want to mark their posts.

Posts could be tagged to be either meant for public discourse (to be possible included in the newsletter) or for only the instance to see. The moderators would be assumed to respect these hashtags. The chatroom could be used to direct attention to longer posts on the blog.

Every newsletter would have the mod teams chosen content about things that they felt were most relevant to the instance that week. These are all public for everyone, and in their own instances people could and would discuss the things they saw in other groups' newsletters.

Even though everyone has weekly anonymity, the people in the group don't change. Eventually you would probably figure out people in your group - no rules about this would be set, and different instances could form their own culture about it. Maybe some would often meet each other in real life. Maybe some would value their anonymity more highly. Once you've outed yourself, everyone will always know that you are in the group. There is a possibility to request to swap groups with someone though, so no one could ever be certain that someone who was in the group a year ago would still be in it. Swaps would be somehow limited though - maybe one person could leave change a month.

The amount of privacy about separating an online presence from your physical one might feel overboard, but it's mainly a countermeasure to avoid hierarchies, as much as possible. Everyone has the ability to start over every week, and if some week you want to post content that you don't want to tie to yourself, then that's possible.

I'll probably continue this a bit after I get some sleep...

Final Task part 1

I sort of lost focus/ got carried away with my presentation so I'll... try to go over it here.I'll go over some problems I have with current popular forms of social media and think about what sort of social media I'd consider fun to be involved in.

My first idea for a final task was to make an Instagram channel for a dog that doesn't exist. I use a lot of time thinking about social media and Instagram is the one that I use most . I don't post much though, and thought this could work as practice and a study of trying to get followers. I wasn't planning on getting any followers, just going through the motions and pretending that I might have them at some point. Basically playing a character, like everyone else.

Social media causes me anxiety. It's just normal social anxiety, but like, digital. I have a lot of neurotic thinking and in the digital realm it manifests just the same as everywhere else - as fears of destroying my or someone else's life by doing something stupid. It's been hard to post anything for some years because I'm too uncertain to press "send", and every time the machine asks me if I'm sure I want to - I'm never sure.

So what's the worst thing that could happen?

Well, you could be bullied and in danger of losing your job for one completely on-brand tweet. Lindsay Ellis made a speech in XOXO festival about how she was targeted by alt right trolls on Twitter for a year and what sort of effects it had on her personal and professional life. No one can just "go offline" anymore. If your job is online, that's where you've got to be.

I use Reddit as much or even more than I use Instagram, but I don't count it as a social media. It's much closer to a forum, and it's mostly anonymous. It's one of those places that you can actually leave and start over. Sure you'll lose your karma, but following doesn't exist in the same way as in other social medias.

One of my favorite subreddits on Reddit is r/hobbydrama - it contains interesting, long posts on niche subjects that I don't know much about, and it's usually entertaining as well as informative. It brings together everything I love and hate about internet communities and culture. Often the drama involves an online community completely imploding due to some controversy involving one person, people take sides and factions form.

Here's a post that's "2 days ago" today:

That's just the start, it's a long post. So basically some 19-year-old had a lighthearted Tumblr account about fish-related memes that got somewhat successful and now his real name will forever bring up hits about these thousands of people trying to goad him into committing suicide because they heard someone say he's a pedophile. It's an interesting read. The power of a mob is insane, and the mob has no morals, it just wants to be entertained. I understand that. I want to be entertained too. But the sheer injustice and unpredictability of it all is frightening as hell. What did user i-am-a-fish do to inspire all this hate? The going theory is that he wasn't negative enough about asexuals.

Why do people share this sort of information and use hours and hours debating about it? Boredom, I guess. I think at this point it's also fear. If you don't take a firm stand that is later on decided to have been the right one, that will be used against you in the future. You're either with us or against us, so what does it even matter what happens to be the truth, if you don't react in the right way quickly enough, you're on the wrong side.

People can't be reasonable because of the bad faith actors who spread information for the purpose of causing harm. Lindsay Ellis gets nazis because she has leftist views, so it's in their interests to try to deplatform her. So the nazis do everything they can to make something stick, and all those on "Ellis's side" are ready to jump ship on a moment's notice so that they won't get canceled by association.

 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/how-the-retweet-ruined-the-internet

So that would be my problem number one. Information is made instantly available and never taken back, spread in minutes before verified - so no one cares about verification. Constant reacting. Reacting and spreading information gets easier when you don't have to use actual humans for it, so you can build an army of bots to do your bidding. This is also a tactic you can use when you don't care about morals, because there's the idea that this is the "wrong" way to use social media.

 So these are what I think of as "griefer" problems - people making things less fun for others on purpose. I consider many old people griefers because the have all the time in the world to be angry online, but they may lack the desire to learn new things and educate themselves. They'll have an idea of a moment in past that was better, and the only thing they're interested in doing is constantly complaining about others moving on from that point.

Yes, I know. My sun sign is Boomer...

That's The Guardian. The text on yellow is a countermeasure to prevent one of the most common ways of spreading of false news - linking old articles. Periodically all the old news articles about, for example, crimes committed my an immigrant, will start going around again, whenever a vote is needed one way or another. For certain people it doesn't matter why the story is circling again, it's true, after all.

This leads us to my third problem - time. More specifically, time stamps. Time on the internet is pretty hard because everyone's living on a different timezone. The common design decision appears to be to show timestamps as "30 minutes ago". Now the problem I have with this that whenever a screenshot is taken or the post is archived as a picture, it doesn't show accurate time. After a year reddit timestamps have an accuracy of one year - so a post made in in December and April of 2018 will show show up the same way. You can see the accurate time on posts by hovering over the stamp with a mouse but that doesn't work on many, many third party apps. Why is this a problem? Well I HATE IT. I want to know when something happened, because the exact moment it was written in matters a lot.

Tumblr is the worst offender because by default they don't show timestamps AT ALL. That's insane! 

 

Here's a picture from Tumblr's announcement that they're changing the design of how reblogs look like, in 2015. Before that everything was atrocious and impossible to comprehend. (Could be that my unwillingness to join makes it look more confusing to me because I never learned the mechanics from within - but time moves forward, people will forget - and in a few years that picture on the left will be very puzzling to many people.)

And pictures will be all we have at some point, because it's completely opposite from what we were warned about as kids - everything on the internet will disappear forever. The Internet Archive is amazing for saving some of it for now, but it doesn't take much to destroy one non-profit. When Internet Archive and Wikipedia are taken over it's probably time to go off the grid.

So, time! But because timezones fuck things up a bit, we're committing to just the one. Finland time for everyone!

Now - the last few important things that I want my social media to have. I want fun, and I want relevance, and I want to have trust that users will engage with each other in good faith. There has to be a level of privacy between completely open for everyone, and completely private just for you. (In the current media landscape no one can assume that the things they share only with a chosen group of people will stay within that group of people - it only needs one of those people to disagree with you for all of your secrets to be out.)
 
People have to be free to be creative without worrying about things like copyright or if their content is "on brand". Also - not everything in the world needs to be turned into money the moment people like it. Liking can be measured by simply what becomes common culture and what doesn't.

Any sort of "liking", voting to curate content, is just a way to solve a problem of communities getting too big to be curated by hand. A community doesn't NEED to be too big for someone to be able to read everything. A larger community doesn't mean better diversity or quality of content - for example, the biggest subreddits are always rife with reposts, because there's always new people coming in who haven't already seen everything a hundred times. This is how time gets murky, everything mixes up into this disgusting paste of nowness, where everything is always new and old at the same time, everything is news and everything's always been the same.

In next post I'll go over the basic mechanisms of my social media and an idea of how I would want the user experience to be.

Some research goes absolutely nowhere

Thoughts on Breakup Movies

In one class we talked about the movies Her and Lost in Translation*, how they are sort of letters from ex lovers to each other. I was reminded of those movies again while watching the movie Marriage Story on Netflix. I feel like every time I google Scarlett Johansson's age she's younger than before, and I joked to my boyfriend that by her next movie I'll be older than her. She's 35 now and in 2003 when Lost In Translation came out she was 17 years old. I saw the movie in theaters and as a teenager assumed she was an adult. After all, her character was married!

Like those aforementioned Scarlett Johansson movies, Marriage Story seems like it was probably largely inspired by a personal experience of the person who wrote and directed the movie. I mean, the divorcing couple are an actress and a director - how could it not be? If you manage to write something that rings this true, maybe you have to mix in a lot of truth about how you yourself are in the world.

In Marriage Story the best thing, I think, is how both of these characters seem like whole people, and they do decisions that make sense for themselves. Neither is the bad guy. They're both extremely frustrating but understandable and lovable, and their relationship makes sense as much as their break up does.

There's a TVTropes page called "Most Writers Are Writers", because... yeah. Basically if everyone wrote about what they know, all stories would have writers in them. (Out of Stephen King's 300 stories maybe a fifth have author characters, and a fifth of those authors have substance abuse problems.) There's also a truth about writers and directors in Hollywood, that Sofia Coppola is an exception - most writers and directors are men, so usually it's just one side of the story we get to hear and it's his.

La La Land, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Her, 500 Days of Summer, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Before Midnight come to mind when thinking about movies about break ups. Incidentally all of them feature an artistic man (often even a writer), in a relationship with some extraordinary woman who dumps them to pursue her own goals. (In Before Midnight they don't actually break up, although they discuss it extensively and it's Celine's dissatisfaction with the current state of their relationship that is causing all the drama.)

Marriage Story is the one that states it plainly in the dialogue in the scene where the main characters try to one last time settle their separation between themselves. 

Charlie: We had a great theater company, and a great life where we were.
Nicole: You call that a great life?
Charlie: You know what I mean. I don’t mean we had a great marriage. I mean, life in Brooklyn. Professionally. I don’t know. Honestly, I never considered anything different.
Nicole: Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I mean, I was your wife. You should’ve considered my happiness too.
Charlie: Come on, you were happy. You’ve just decided you weren’t now.
Nicole: The only reason we didn’t live here is because you can’t imagine desires other than your own, unless they’re forced on you.

In real life it's also women who usually instigate break ups. Always after these movies, you could ask "why didn't she stay" - and I'm over here screaming with frustration - "why didn't he just change for her?" He always ends up changing after she dumps him, anyway. She tried! She waited! And still she should've waited and tried some more.

*
I re-watched Lost In Translation some time ago and it hit me just how stupid it is. "Oh when I was in my twenties I was sort of lost, you know. I was absurdly famous and rich and didn't really know what to do with all of this massive amount of resources and talent and connections that I had." We're supposed to feel for Sofia Scarlett Johansson's character, who has everything anyone who could ever dream of and her whole life ahead of her. We're supposed to feel for Bill Murray's character and his middle age crisis while he hits on a teenager and cheats on his wife, as if he didn't have all the choice in the world about how his life has gone and what to do with it from now on. I used to think these characters were so cool.

Wins

On Friday evening I went to the center to get something and noticed that there were a few thousand people gathered at the square, staring at huge screens. I didn't know what was going on and went to see what was on the screen - football, apparently. The very minute I was there, Finland scored their first goal against Liechenstein in the UEFA Championship qualifications, and the crowd cheered. 

I'm what you might call a bandwagoner. If someone is doing exceptionally well, well enough to become a meme or news outside of it's main audience, then I'll care for a short while. I didn't stay to watch the game, but on the bus on the way home I listened to the radio broadcast of the game anyway, and I thought how nice it would be for all those people at the square if Finland won. If I hadn't seen all those people be so excited, I wouldn't have known about the whole thing or cared at all.

This is generally considered to be the wrong way to care. You're supposed to earn the wins by sticking with your team through the hard times, disappointments and losses. A bandwagoner is only there for the wins.

I'm interested in good stories and seeing what makes people excited and interested, but I don't have teams that I follow. I don't care about sports or competitions if I don't personally know someone playing or if I'm not playing myself. I didn't have any normal sports hobbies when I was a child so that might explain part of it. (The voluntary fire brigade and folk dancing are both surprisingly competitive but so niche that it's hard to follow as just spectator sport.)

Despite all that, here are some games / battles / wins that I remember seeing on TV and for a very short while intensely caring about the outcome of it just because of the story. (Not included are elections that have actually meant something to me.)

Hockey Championship -95
Of course; where it all starts. I was 5 years old and it was past my bedtime. I had to go to bed but I didn't want to fall asleep before the game ended. I could hear the TV in the living room, excited voices. My mom came to the door to whisper that we won. I was so happy!

Mika Häkkinen wins his first Formula 1 race in -97
My dad has always been a Formula 1 fan, he watches all the races every time. It's the only "sport" anyone in my childhood family was ever interested in. Many weekends as a child were spent watching the qualifications and races, and the rivalry between Mika Häkkinen and Michael Schumacher was the stuff of legends. It was obvious to me then that Schumacher was the bad guy and Häkkinen was the good guy.
Formula 1 is the weirdest competition, because the drivers compete in pairs and some cars are so much worse than others that with the equipment available it's impossible to win a race anyway, let alone a whole Grand Prix. Behind this win there's actually a lot of controversy because a crash with Villeneuve disqualified Schumacher from the whole season and a whole conspiracy between the teams of McLaren (Häkkinen, Coulthart) and Williams (Villeneuve, Frentzen) to help each other went unpunished.

Tarja Halonen wins the Presidential Election in 2000
I remember watching the counting of the votes of the second round with my parents. I asked them who they think should win, but I didn't get a clear answer. My dad told me that it's a secret and against the law to tell who you voted for, so I had to make up my own mind.
The historical significance of electing the first female president was totally lost to me and I didn't yet know anything about political parties, so I picked my favourite mainly on looks. I chose Esko Aho because he had very sad eyes and I didn't want him to get any sadder. Unfortunately I couldn't find any of this on Youtube but here's some footage on Yle Areena:

Yle Elävä Arkisto - Suomi sai ensimmäisen naispresidenttinsä

Tatu and Eeka in Far Out(2001-2002) Season 2
Far Out was a Finnish reality show that lasted for two seasons and was a bit like Amazing Race but maybe more of a youth program, where competitors traveled in different cities doing small assignments and the audience would vote for who they wanted to stay on the show. Two friends called Tatu and Eeka became pretty famous for their funny antics. I found this clip and was sort of shocked at the casual racism against the romani in it! It was indeed a different time. Tatu Ferchen is nowadays the CEO of the Finnish branch of multinational media monstrosity Banijay Group that's responsible for all the shittiest and most watched programs on TV, like Temptation Island and Vain Elämää. It's pretty crazy that he got all the way there and it all started from this - the network offered these guys their own TV show solely based on them being so well liked by the audience in this program.
Honestly, at the time I didn't really get what was so great about them. I mostly pretended to understand because everyone at school seemed to love them.

Lordi wins Eurovision Song Contest in 2006
It used to be that "when Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest" was a saying that was used when talking about something extremely unlikely that would never, ever happen. It was used right alongside "when Hell freezes over" and "when pigs fly". In 2006 I watched the contest during a training weekend with my folk dance group in some camping center in the middle of nowhere. When it was certain that Lordi was going to win, we all went outside to see if there were any flying pigs.
For several years afterwards, the Finnish media always thought that the chances to win were pretty good, and they were always shocked the next day when we did as horribly as ever. The chances to win were the same before and after Lordi - not very good. The way probabilities work though is that something that has a 99% chance of failing still succeeds one time out of a hundred. This was that one time.

Finland wins Hockey World Championship in 2011 and 2019
In 2011 I didn't watch the game, but through the walls I heard my neighbours shouting on all sides. I had Uutisikkuna on and it said that 10 000 people were gathered at the central square, so we went outside to see people swimming in the fountain. It was madness! In 2019 I lived a biking distance away and went by myself to see the celebrations again, because a bit of anarchy on a Sunday night is always fun to witness. I had this weird feeling while there that most people were there like me - rather to "see the celebration" than to celebrate themselves. Maybe it hasn't been long enough since the last time, so winning is just not as noteworthy anymore. How many times are we all gonna go torille until it gets old?

FIFA World Cup 2014
In the summer of 2014 I spent so much time depressed and unwilling to move from the sofa that I almost accidentally got invested in the World Cup, much to the detriment of my sports-adverse spouse. I tried to care about something and tried pickinga a team and rooting for them through the whole competition. My team of choice was Italy with old man Pirlo and hothead Balotelli, based on their 2-1 win against England. Italy sadly didn't even make it out of the group stage. I kept watching anyway, because the more interesting story turned out to be the tournament as a whole. How important the event was to Brazil as a football country, the sheer weirdness of the venues being built in the tropics just to be used a couple of times and controversies surrounding their construction and the cost of the event, and to top it all off the home team was not playing very well. Brazil managed to somehow limp to the semifinals but it wasn't considered much of an achievement, and they were absolutely crushed by Germany in an unprecedented 7 - 1 loss, ending in 4th place over all. It was amazing TV because it seemed like even the German team was feeling sorry for the Brazilians.

The International 2014
I can't even remember how this came about. I don't play or have ever played Dota 2 nor do I know anyone who does. I generally don't care about esports any more than any other sort of sports and I don't follow anything or anyone. However, for some reason, I remember being intensely invested in how a Chinese team called DK and especially a player called BurNIng fared in a yearly Dota 2 tournament called The International. Maybe I saw a trending clip on Reddit or something? Anyway. I watched all the games they were in, they didn't win, and I forgot all about them and the game they play.

Iceland in UEFA Euro 2016
Like who the hell wasn't on this bandwagon. It was great! 10% of a whole country traveled somewhere just to see a part time dentist kick a ball and then we all clapped!

England vs Colombia penalty shootouts in 2018
I've found myself rooting against England so many times on this list so here's finally one where they win something.

Graphic Design Is My Passion

You've probably all heard about this, but the world is sort of ending. It's pretty fucked up and sad but there we are.

One of the main things I thought of when I thought about if I would accept this study place or not was if I could deal with the absolute pointlessness of still pursuing a career in making pretty pictures on a screen. Sure, I can think that I'll be the one to make graphics for some epic game that will be an instant classic, with true artistic value, meaningful themes and an over all positive impact on the world and its adoring fanbase. But it's unlikely.

If I had to name the second most inane thing to devote your life to right now it would be either brand design for MLM schemes or anything to do with mobile games. (Anything having to do with design, sales and manufacturing jet skis always wins). On worse days I'm just horrified by video games in general, even the "good ones" seeming like this massive waste of resources that won't leave anything of value behind. But free-to-play mobile games are the absolute bane of my existence. Terrarium:Garden Idle is everything wrong with the world. Growing actual plants is a much more idle activity that you'll get long lasting satisfaction from.

I tried just living without wasting resources, but I'm too neurotic to live like that. Like sure, I can not eat meat - but it's impossible to live without consuming anything. For me, right now, trying to have as small an impact as possible is incompatible with living a good life. What is the use of giving up all of the internet because it wastes electricity? Is the minuscule positive impact on the environment worth the loneliness and seclusion?

There's a server somewhere running, a physical machine using electricity, storing all this, storing everything forever. All of this digital trash. This blog!

I'm not smart enough to become anything useful like a scientist, and on the other hand I'm not going to clean things and take care of old people until I have to - I'll know how to do all that when it's time. I've done this... this creative thing for some time now. Used resources for this.

So I don't know. I guess I'll just march on like everyone else. Learn to compartmentalize like an adult. Be actually interested in current web design trends, announcements for new strategy games, how to shade nice hair, write a scene, see new Pixar films, what's on TV today and hey are they still working on that Google Glass thing?

For anyone experiencing similar existential tread, extinction sadness and a sense of futility, I recommend medication. Like basic lowish daily dose of an SSRI or SNRI should do the trick.

Just to mellow things out a bit.

"Osamu Tezuka - God of Manga" Exhibition

There's currently a Osamu Tezuka exhibition at the Tampere Art Museum. I went to see it with a friend of mine who's much more knowledgeable of Tezuka's work and more of a fan. I just recognized the name as the creator of Astro Boy but didn't really know more about it. I'm really glad I went, the exhibition was very interesting!

It turns out, Tezuka was a crazy prolific and accomplished creator, and his life's work is really humbling to think about and witness. Like he really got things done! At 18 he'd already published a comic that sold 400,000 copies, been through a war and a few years later finished his studies to become a doctor. All this time and through his life he continued to churn out comics and at the time of his death in 1989 at 60 years old his works comprised of over 700 titles and 170 000 pages. His last words were: "I'm begging you, let me work!", spoken to a nurse who had tried to take away his drawing equipment. (Wikipedia)

The exhibition has around 200 of those original comic pages drawn by him. I recommend this exhibition to everyone, but especially people who DRAW. It's so different to see the pages by yourself, seeing the lines and the strokes, the pale shadow of a sketch underneath, the correction fluid covering the mistakes. I've linked pictures underneath but of course it's just not the same.

The exhibition is open until 5.1.2020. The admission for students is 5 euros and there's information for everything in English, too.

There were also many pages from the comic Kimba the White Lion, which is widely known as "the work that Lion King ripped off". It's obvious though that the influences travelled both ways!

Oh yeah, there's also some Silver Fang originals downstairs!

Downstairs also has some more general manga stuff, which we didn't go through all that thoroughly. The best part was some crappy felt pens and a pre-printed outline for your own manga portrait. Here's my friend Esko displaying his amazing drawing skillz.

My Favourite Couch Co-op - Kingdom: Two Crowns

Build, expand, defend. 

Confession - I wrote this for the Week 3 post-task assignment but it got sort of longish so I’m putting it up here. If a one- or two-player chill resource-management strategy game with beautiful pixel graphics and nice sound design sounds good to you, I recommend you skip this ‘review’/narrative analysis, just pick this game up and don’t read too much about it. The fun part of the game is finding new things and discovering what they are. Be warned though, there's some bugs.

Thinking about this now, if you’re not interested in such a game, then this write up probably doesn't do much for you either. So, uh... read on if you’re intrigued but too poor to buy games. Or you're Chris and it's like, your job. Hi!

Kingdom: Two Crowns (2018) developed by Thomas van den Berg and Coatsink is a game where you’re the Monarch of your own empire and travel from island to island, building forts and expanding your kingdom while battling monsters. The game is continuation to the games Kingdom (2015) and Kingdom: New Lands (2016).

The game is extremely 2D – your character – or rather, your steed -  can walk or run left or right. You are a royal, anyway, and a royal doesn’t walk around and they certainly don’t jump.

Except when riding on Prongs. Bounce for your life my child!!

On an island - which there are five of – you expand your empire outwards, with the heart of your operations, the campfire and the castle, always in the middle of the island. On the other end there’s a monster cave, on the other a harbour. Every island has multiple camps where peasants spawn – you recruit them by dropping coins on the ground, their rags magically transform into people-clothes and they walk into the city to labour away for your cause. 

Buildings spring up and you spend coin on tools, and the peasants become builders, archers, spearmen, knights and farmers. You get coins from different operations your workers do, to recruit more workers to build more buildings and make more money. You slowly build an army powerful enough to defeat the monster portals and the cave of the monsters on the far side of the island, while also defending your fort against the nightly attacks and keeping your economy in shape. That's basically it.

You also throw money at repairs of your wrecked ship, to expand to a different island – to maybe find diamonds, or unlock better technologies.  

The amount of money you have is always uncertain, because the coins are held in a pouch by ‘gravity’. Often you’ll run through workers throwing money at you and the bag overflows, and money drops into the river. I think it's a fun mechanic.

The player character is randomised in the beginning, and can be either a King or Queen of varying skin colours and wardrobes. One other character in the game is The Ghost; a past ruler who acts as a floating tutorial and gives you financial advice that you didn’t ask for. All of the villagers are basically faceless, stocky dudes without much personality – so there’s plenty of room for imagination. 

The narrative of the game is of a ruthless leader who travels from island to island killing the native population, destroying the forests and killing wild animals. If we assume that the monsters are evil by nature – and they do attack without cause other than their island being settled by others, so fair enough – then it’s a story of a power hungry leader throwing countless soldiers at a pointless war against monsters. The game does say, after the monsters are killed, that the ‘kingdom is saved’ - but there’s no reason to expand on any further islands after you’ve managed to kill all the monsters on one! Except maybe, destiny... and curiosity and boredom, of course. The game must go on, after all! 

Come at me bro

Alright, mostly kidding. So the monsters - called Greed - are obviously alien and evil; you want money for nice shit like griffons and unicorns and they want to take it so they must be destroyed. 

And no reason to feel bad for the soldiers either – your troops don’t really die; the monsters just steal their coins and tools, reverting them back to peasants that you have to spend money to equip again. The monsters might kidnap your dog but if you blow up their cave you’ll get her back.  

The game is quite casual, which is why I like it. It’s beautiful to look at and sounds nice. If you lose, if your crown gets stolen, it’s nearly always because you overreached or fucked up somehow – you attacked a portal too near to sunset, you ran too far from the safety of your walls, you accidentally built a fence in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes though the Red Moon brings an ungodly army of evil at your doorstep, your defences just break down completely and your game is completely screwed. So it helps to have a friend!

Could you run and collect the peasants, dear? It's getting late.

The most (and many argue, only) noteworthy feature in this game compared to the previous one is local co-op. The game's the same, whether you play it by yourself or together; you can share tasks and explore different directions, but you're on the same island, building the same Kingdom. If the other person wants to go out and party, they can just leave their character standing around in the fort or exit the game and the other can continue he same game by themselves.

The game's lovely and all, but one obvious con that has to be mentioned is that some frustrating bugs remain after almost a year from launch. Some are just mildly annoying, like NPC's acting slightly weird - I'm not sure if the way The Ghost keeps nagging me about saving my money is a bug or a feature - but some are honestly game-breaking. I've had the save file get corrupted twice, losing hours of gameplay. I'm not one to really care and I'm happy to start again, but I understand how someone might be annoyed. That really ought to get fixed.

Also, because the game doesn't really help you all that much, on a first play-through you can easily fuck up your game, when things you haven't known to prepare for take you by surprise. Case in point: winter! At the beginning, the easiest way to get money is to train archers to hunt rabbits, which disappear in the winter. The game has a rotation of four equally long seasons, so if you end up having no income at all, it's a really long and boring time to sit around and wait for the spring to come.

My favourite part of the game are the different steeds. My favourite is the lizard. It's the awesomest.

Burn, motherfucker! Burn!

Images lifted from the game's Steam page, copyrights belong to the makers of the game.

The 100 Greatest Music Videos Of All Time

Sometime around 2004 I downloaded a file called "100 greatest music videos of all time". It was an endeavor that probably lasted several days, and I was extremely pleased that the content turned out to be just what it said on the tin.

This one specific torrent file introduced me to a lot of great artists I hadn't known about, and many cool videos (most of them, it seemed, directed by either Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry). I had the videos saved on my computer for a long time, and I would watch my favourites often and show them to others.

This was, of course,  many years and computers ago, and the videos are long gone.

Once every few years a wave of nostalgia hits me and I try to look up some of these videos, the ones I can still remember. The one up top is R.E.M.'s Imitation Of Life. It's a creatively made video, consisting of a short clip of footage of a big, lively scene, the video playing forwards and backwards and zooming in on different parts of the view, following different characters. The video is on YouTube but the quality is pretty bad - sure, it doesn't help that the original video is also mostly (digitally?) zoomed in, but it had to have been better than this! 19 million views on this pixelated mess.

I try to google this list. Torrent sites have come and gone but maybe somewhere it's still up, if I just find the right magic words? I'm not sure what I want, anyway. Just to have the complete list? Just to know where it's from? To remember something, and know I remember it? I'm too lawful lazy to torrent anything, anyway.
  
It wasn't quite the same list as this one, but probably influenced by it. I couldn't find any music video lists by Rolling Stone or NME from around that time.

Maybe someone in this thread made a list of their own, an improved version? Although it's just a coincidence that this site is still up, of all the forums of that time. Of course they're suggesting the same videos. I keep looking in vain for this specific list or a memory of a file from 2004 for a while, and then I give up again, to try again in a few years.

I often find myself on useless google quests like this, looking online to find something in my head, like a feeling or a memory of a past self. It's hard to consume information or create it, because it's hard to let go of anything. It might be useful one day, it might have some value.

Anyway, here's what I remember of it.

(the 20 songs that I probably most liked in 2004 because I still remember these from the list of)  
100 Greatest Music Videos of All Time
(compiled by anonymous online person)

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army
The White Stripes - Fell In Love With A Girl
The White Stripes - The Hardest Button To Button
R.E.M. - Imitation Of Life
Daft Punk - Around The World
Cibo Matto - Sugar Water
Björk - All Is Full Of Love
George Harrison - When We Was Fab
Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun
Korn - Freak On A Leash
Fiona Apple - Across the Universe
The Chemical Brothers - Let Forever Be
Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice
Fatboy Slim - Praise You
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
Gorillaz - 19-2000
Weezer - Buddy Holly
Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues
A-Ha - Take On Me
Röyksopp - Remind Me
The Cardigans - My Favorite Game
Massive Attack - Butterfly Caught

Some Thoughts on ASMR

I’m sure a lot has been written about ASMR, but there doesn’t yet seem to be a consensus on what it is, precisely. The name, for one, is just pure nonsense - “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”. I highly recommend this NYT article about ASMR from April 2019 that goes more into detail about the history and present of these videos, and gives us this lovely quote:

”The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.”

Many ASMR videos have millions and millions of views. I’m sure a lot of people play them while they sleep, so not everyone actually watches while the video plays. ASMR videos don’t make me sleepy, but I use them as sort of colourful, unpredictable background noise when trying to get something visual done, music feels too distracting and I can’t quite focus on listening to a podcast. I usually put on something ”slurpy” like this one:  

 

There’s different subgenres of videos. Some common ones are mouth-sound and whispering videos, roleplays, videos of just tapping and crinkling different objects (videos where only the person’s hands are in view) and videos of some kind of relaxing treatment done to someone else. The roleplays are usually videos of a situation where another person pays intense attention to you, the viewer. Different sort of nurse’s examinations and spa treatments and such are common.

It’s not that long ago though that there was a stigma about the whole thing. It was considered supremely cringy and embarrassing, and people would enjoy the videos in secret. In recent years the genre has achieved more of a mainstream status. There’s ASMR ads and celebrity interviews. Many people, like Gibi, actually make their living on YouTube by producing a steady stream of content. Apparently there's some Finnish 'ASMRtists' too but that just sounds way too distracting for me to listen to.

I think there’s a few different things to be taken from ASMR videos. Many ASMR videos tap on to some kind of primal need to be noticed and taken care of. I don’t know if it’s a sad state of affairs that people are now going to online videos to get the grooming we used to provide for each other, or if it’s a good thing that such needs are noticed to be important and taken care of in some way. Emotional labor of young women gets finally paid for - in ad revenue. Yay, another win for capitalism?

It’s still weird, somewhat cringy and embarrassing. I guess that’s a part of what makes the whole thing interesting to me. What is too intimate, what is too personal? A person wouldn’t blog about their porn viewing habits out of a sense of common decency, but there’s a lot about it that’s pretty similar… like the part about trying to put into words what sort of weird shit you want the Internet to show you next, then skipping through the video to see what sort of triggers it has to see if something works for you.

Is any need to physically feel good just as shameful as the need to get off? Should watching weird tingly videos of people tapping on different surfaces be left as a personal sort of guilty pleasure, only to be viewed and appreciated in private? Should we redefine the words ’social porn’? Is this degeneracy and unabashed hedonism a sign of the end times and approaching apocalypse? Is the Internet making everyone sad and lonely and unable to find comfort, love and meaningful relationships with real, physical, imperfect people? Is this the part where this blog post turns into yet another rant about how social media is ruining everything despite it having little to do with the subject matter?

 Shrug emoji.



Some random extrathoughts to maybe expand on later:

- how the word ’porn’ has taken on the meaning of ’high quality images’ at reddit, where weird little subreddits such as r/skyporn, r/ruralporn or even r/animalporn and r/humanporn contain high quality images (and absolutely no sex of any kind)

- parasocial relationships to creators

- now that ironic detachment has fallen out of style, what does ’guilty pleasure’ even mean anyway?

Some Thoughts on Comic Zines

Spread from J.Oldén's zine Memes (2019)

From Wikipedia: 

A zine (/ziːn/ ZEEN; short for magazine or fanzine) is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via photocopier. Zines are the product of either a single person or of a very small group, and are popularly photocopied into physical prints for circulation.

 

Last weekend, 7. - 8.9., I attended Helsinki Zine Fest that was held as a part of Helsinki Comics Festival at Suvilahti. I had a table with a few friends, and we all had some zines for sale. I met a bunch of lovely people, old aqcuintances and new, and had a lot of fun. I also acquired a bunch of new comics. I also witnessed a magical moment when a friend got approached to be published because her zine was seen by the right person - definitely a highlight.

I love comic zines. Even the shitty ones – sometimes, especially the shitty ones. I love zines as a form of publishing and I love comics. There’s just something amazing about one person making something completely on their own – to make a comic, you really only need a pencil and a piece of paper. You don’t even have to know how to draw or write very well, you just have to have something you want to say. 

Some people, if they can afford it, print their zines at an actual printing house. The cheaper way is to make photocopies by yourself at the local library - or better yet, at school, if you happen to attend one. Nowadays though because so many people have access to all sorts of graphic design software and color printers it's really easy to make something professional looking by yourself, and the black-and-white photocopied DIY leaflet is more and more of an aesthetic choice than a necessity. 

Anyway, even if you get your printing done for next to nothing, pretty much no one is going to pay their bills just by selling zines. It’s a labour of love.

 

Page from Esko Heikkilä's zine Missä sinä olet - sivuja luonnoslehtiöistä 2014 & 2015

Not that “actual, published” comic artists in Finland are usually swimming in money, either, mind you. Many people get published and still make and sell their own little zines. It's a lovely culture, and zines can be a good way for "trying out" new material, or making more unpolished content.

Part of the culture of making and buying zines is also exchanging them. Every festival I go with my backpack full of my zines, and I leave with a bunch of different ones - there's often not a lot of money involved. Almost everyone who makes zines likes to read them, too. Common themes are LGBT, anti-capitalist and mental health issues, and personal diary comics. Sketch book zines are also a staple, as are zines that are basically just a collection of illustrations (like Inktober collections).

I see a bright future for the comic zine culture in Finland. It’s true that in these days of "konmari" and all the talk of uncluttering your life, fewer and fewer people want to buy physical media of any sort. I still think that as with music and vinyls, the people who care will keep it alive. As Internet and social media platforms keep getting scarier and scarier, it’s good to hold on to some alternative forms of circulating content.

Page from my zine Sarjispäivis - päiväkirjasarjiksia ja sketsejä maaliskuu - syyskuu 2019