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