Voivod guitarist Denis "Piggy" D'Amour passed away on friday.

Like most things about the band, this went almost unnoticed.

Almost.

The irregularly scheduled batch of things recently popping like the weasel.

• Jason Kottke has seen the light, and moved to embed his links in the flow of the text.
• There are never too many pictures of cats. Even of cats in sinks.
• Second issue of Usva is out.
• Rod Smallwood, Iron Maiden's manager has wise words to say about the San Bernardino debacle.
• The story of the original Macintosh graphing calculator is nothing but amazing in its display of persistence.
• Language policeman has been deployed to improve the use of finnish (and only finnish) in blogs.
• A cruel list of the top cancelled games of all time. A lot of quality has clearly gone down the drain and been replaced by an endless stream of sequels.

Indeed, went ahead and bought new laptop. A 12" iBook to be exact. Of the new generation (with a bigger disk, and slightly faster CPU). Of the generation that's had some supply difficulties - so I'm not exactly in possession of the computer yet. But will, soonest. Or so they reassured me.

Why a mac?

Take your pick of the following, or mix together well in a blender before consumption.

• Had my fill of struggling against Windows in its various guises.
• Desired to try out whether OS X is worth its rep.
• Had my fill of struggling against Linux on desktop.
• Just plain wanted to try out something new.
• I like the design of the macs.
• Wanted a well-designed GUI with a proven CLI.
• Palm has had its day and been replaced with Moleskine.
• It isn't going to be the primary computer of the house anyhow.
• You can use a multibutton mouse.
• ...

I think the nonsense-list of OS X apps will come in very handy.

The old backpack had started to show its years, so it was time to retire it with full honors and upgrade to a new one.

Turned out to be far from trivial effort. There's dozens of variants in the market. Most of a bad shape, lacking a large enough number pockets, plain unergonomic and fragile, or festooned with an unsightly number of straps, clips and drawstrings for some undescribable extremesporting purposes.

Finally settled on yet another Dakine pack. Sturdy, seemingly waterproof and comfortable. A separate laptop-pocket was definite evolution from the previous model, as is a cord port for the ipod. Good backpack, horrendous website - all done in flash, and proudly breaking majority of design rules at it...

Finished Mikko Rimminen's Pussikaljaromaani the other day. It's quite unlike any book I've read in a long time, and as such deserves further examination.

Nothing much happens in the book. People walk and talk, and meet characters even odder than themselves, but in the end it's just another day in the life - nothing spectacular, and clearly nothing to get enthusiastic about.

So it's not the story that makes the book, but the language. And considering that this is the author's first novel, that's quite an accomplishment. The language indeed flows, twisting as it goes - most sentences containing some element that slightly pokes out, but does not annoy. Adjectives are seen in unorthodox places and uses, the colloquial speech is peppered with unnaturally fitting agrarian and academic terms, and nouns are mercilessly verbed to maintain a tone that never gets stuck on an inappropriately chosen word.

Indeed, this is art, and art that could me interested in poetry - if Rimminen can write prose this well, his poems (two collections published thus far) are bound to get out of the left field.

The book was a contender for the annual Finlandia-award, but did not win. It was also overshadowed by another debut of a novel, Helsinki 12, but beats that in comparison by a mile. This is literature, the other merely pulp carefully packaged into a branded wrapping.

Recommended, without hesitation. Translation of the title? Brown-bag novel comes close, but does not fully hit the mark. Pussikalja means beer that's bought from a store and drunk outside (usually in a park or other public location).

Went shopping to buy trousers, but bought a laptop instead.

Stockmann's fault clearly, they do know that it's been '501 - dark indigo - 34"/32"' for at least the last five years.

And yeah, it's an iBook.

And no, this does not happen often.

And hurts even more than the most on-target Dilbert strips.

[ Shamelessly stolen from Russell Beattie, and I agree: Too Much Coffee Man rules. ].

A category 5 hurricane is approaching New Orleans. Leading to mandatory evacuation of the city.

Compared to that threat, the bit of suboptimal weather we're having (the usual rain, with a very unusual small tornado added in) is pretty much a walk in the park.

The outlined worst case scenario is bad indeed. And one that would probably alter the city, if not the entire southern Louisiana beyond recognition.

Unscrupulous merchants have been ripping off mentalwear with plagiarized shirts. Bastards.

So watch where you're buying your straitjackets etc. Some fabulous new arrivals, have to drop in next week, as long as can make it to the unorthodox opening hours.

Did a bit of shopping, being the saturday after payday after all.

No V for Vendetta available in any store. Turns out that an "anniversary edition" will replace the current one. Soon, I hope.

So bought Vertigo's Lovecraft (well-painted and surprisingly previously missed) as well as the Planetary multi-crossover album instead. And fiddled with the first Powers-album, but decided against it for the time being.

Also bought my first ever read-from-the-back-towards-the-front book. Indeed, it's my first manga album (perfect placement of the book - was already at the cashier when noticed this). The subject does not concern doe-eyed schoolgirls in uniform or battles with humongulous robots. No, this is a retelling of the Nightmare Before Christmas. Any good? I'll let you know.

Also bought the first Monsieur Jean-album. It's a pleasantly well-executed slice of life-type comic. At least the first album went down painlessly. And like its teammate (at WSOY, the finnish publisher) Jussi Jänis, the series will extend to four albums this fall.

Another well-known, but not yet confirmed arrival is the new hardcover-collection by Don Rosa (it's an odd-numbered year).

Finished reading Jysäys 2/05, the magazine keeps getting better. Although it seems to be shedding a lot of stories without even approaching their halfway point. Praedor is pleasant, Sillage something nice I haven't been exposed to earlier, but it's Lewis Trondheim's Kaput & Zösky that takes the first prize here. Let's just hope the magazine can reach a regular publication schedule, right now it's thoroughly unpredictable.

The very last album read today was a ~100 pager celebrating the first 75 years of Disney comics. With samples from each decade. Very variable quality, as expected. Barks and Rosa emerge as clear winners among the selection. Kari Korhonen's work (the sample from this decade) is very good also, with Marco Rota handling the art. The most surprising tale is from the fifties - Paul Murry's Mickey Mouse in the south seas has aspects that cause suspicion of suboptimal medication during the creation.

New contender "paha maa torrent" now supersedes "taivas lyö tulta lyrics" as the top term. No I haven't got either. Haven't even seen the former.

Behnford's shop gets at least some hits. And they've now got vanilla and lime variants of diet coke, the equivalent real thing mutations still held up in customs.

Finished watching the 1981 BBC version of Hitchhiker's Guide. Good show, but definitely on the dated side. In a quaint fashion - bad models are always better than bad CGI.

This is in anticipation of the movie, which I still haven't seen. Time to check it out next week.

And here's an answer to a baffling trivia question: David Prowse, the man inside the mask. The question? Ah, which actor has a role in both Star Wars and Hitchhikers...

The 21st century update to the old Infocom classic does not look immediately repulsive either, though new content is confined to graphics I suppose.

And time to grab the original radio series as well as the utterly brilliant finnish version as well on cd. Soon.

A week that's had its slow and fast portions. Not in optimal ratio.

So sighting this guy on the way home was quite appropriate, and yeah, as you can see from his horns - it rains, has rained and will rain.

The picture is not perfect, the 6680-camera is not exactly the best piece of macro photography equipment I've tried.

And while the slug has a yellowish tint to its body, it's unfortunately quite far from these newly recovered priceless gold dollars.

Broke several years abstainment and joined in on the festivites of the annual Helsinki Night of the Arts.

Weather wasn't perfect, but rain very much remained in the background. A complete rainbow formed across the sky during the busride and remained for quite an extended period of time. Unfortunately the phone camera didn't quite capture it right. The sunset on Mannerheimintie turned out better, but there's disconcerting amount of toppling buildings in that one.

Didn't do much downtown. Saw Alamaailman Vasarat on Esplanade Stage. Were in good form, and had appropriately inane raps: "let's all say 'TAIDE' now!" and "is cauliflower, in your opinion, bad?" Could have listened longer to them, despite the drizzling rain. And would definitely have bought a t-shirt, if they'd been available as advertised.

Skipped a visit to the official neppis-competition at Makasiinit due to high cover cost. Eight euros is kinda high for a drop-in visit - right? Especially when the activities all around town were completely gratis in contrast.

Saw the thus far only ladybug this summer. Inside akateeminen kirjakauppa, of all the places. Of the smaller two-spotted species, and not the real thing. Pleasant encounter anyway, and one that proves that summer is far from over. Despite the rapidly accelerating nightfalls.

Took a look (and a Corona) in Stockholm, a new nightclub downtown. Supposedly the opening night, with free drinks - but must have missed them by just minutes. No cover charge, ok prices, excruciatingly loud volume. Don't anticipate a quick return.

Spotted a familiar green face in a very odd place the other day at Stockmann's magazine department. Kermit, on a stamp (on the cover of some provocatively displayed philately magazine).

Being a lifelong Hensonite, had to dig out more information about the subject. And the news is good - they're indeed US stamps and will be released in september. And while Scooter is missing from the list of characters, Beaker is fortuitously present.

And the first season of the eponymous show is now out on dvd - so my previously snubbed chances of finally getting the coveted Alice Cooper episode are definitely increasing...

The constantly improving Escapist-magazine has not one but two extremely interesting articles in its newest issue. One on the current state of interactive fiction, the other on Planescape: Torment, still one of the best-written games there ever has been.

Slashdot (from which the previous was nabbed as well) provides a review of this year's GenCon. However, it's very shallow on content, and a lot of the named games have already been released. The ever-reliable GamingReview provides much better coverage.

Gamespot has a nice, albeit short, review of easter eggs in gaming. Ranging from classic to obscure, via the ego-stroking variant, it's an interesting read. But the attendant forum just fails to work.

Dennis Detwiller's ransomed Insylum is out. And the fund for the next one is open, and progressing towards the goal. The surprising success of the model has evoked a largish thread on the rpg.net fora. To a mixed response: the actual ratio between freeloaders and interested patrons is thus far unresolved. And yeah, I'm a card-carrying pledged member of the latter caste.

Google has gone on a regular release spree lately.

Haven't yet given their desktop a spin, but will at work where the disk (and especially Outlook's myriad folders) are just cluttered with hard-to-find nuggets.

Google Earth is nothing short of fabulous, and an incredible timewaster. Even though I do think that the Golden Gate pylons are upright as opposed to reclining on the surface of the bay...

However, the most immediate impact is felt from their brand-spanking new (and still beta) Google Talk, their interpretation of IM. Eschews bells and whistles and concentrates on what's really useful, talk itself.

Of course, such a closely spaced bunch of releases (though Earth is old news) always raises questions about where the company is heading. Jason Kottke crafted a well-thought out piece on potential future of no less than the entire operating system domain. His analysis preceded the talk-release, but is thought-provoking to say the least. And despite the hopelessly speculative nature of the article, it's an enjoyable read - and a head and shoulders above the site's usual fare. While the remaindered links are interesting - the capacity for thorough analysis on various matters is definitely more to my taste.

And while on topic of these next-gen desktop thingamabobs, I finally got around to checking out konfabulator. And nifty it is indeed. Coding-wise as well, so it's probably time to hoist the sleeves and get cracking. Even though it's in javascript which I don't really like - but the choice of an interpreted language means that any interesting widgets can be dissected to atoms. Which bodes well for shallowing out the learning curve...

The quite awaited V for Vendetta has inexplicably been pushed to a far less appropriate date.

Oh well, I'll still keep hunting for the graphic novel.

And the results are actually worse than the Spinal Tap or Bad News ever were.

Monumental idiocy. And fortunate that no-one was hurt.

While the age of micropayments has not yet arrived, interesting payment models continue to surface.

A recent concept is the use of ransom model. In it a sum is named by the author (around the expected costs to generate the product), and contributions are calculated (with money kept in escrow) until the sum is reached. At that point the product is released for free (under an appropriate license, of course). If the target is not reached within a specified period, the funds contributed thus far are returned.

So what this really means is that the model is actually patronage in a distributed form. Where the distributed part effectively removes "you've got to be this wealthy to take this ride"-requirement, now anyone can contribute.

Meatbot Massacre by Greg Stolze was the first ransomed product that I know of. Was aware, wasn't interested (it's a "tactical miniatures game"), haven't even looked at the final product.

However, with the arrival of Greg's second ransomed game: ...in spaaace!, the model saw a lot of discussion in the rpg.net fora, and Dennis Detwiller jumped into the game. Indeed, Dennis Detwiller, apparently the sole remaining Pagan Publishing guy. And he promptly kicked off not one, but two projects - both related to Delta Green, still one of my favorite shared halluc^W^W game universes. So from my perspective this looks to be a very interesting development indeed.

fundable.org seems to be the biggest player of the game, but by no means very big at all yet.

And for added value, NPR interviewed Greg Stolze (though there's not much more exposure in the interview).

And gaming isn't the only niche for ransom-model, as it's used by at least one novelist as well. And there's been funds and drives in the software industry. Probably the most famous was held for blender in 2002 to raise no less than 100000 euros.

There's no wikipedia article on the topic yet. And in my quite sleep-deprived current state, I'm definitely not going to start one now.

Figured it'd be good sport to buy a firefox t-shirt. Got dissuaded quickly, as the Mozilla Store, is nothing but expensive when it comes to shipping stuff out. The freight charge for a single shirt is a staggering 54 dollars. Luckily, the organization is opening an European location this year. I'll be keeping my money until then.

Seems that Christopher Walken's bid for 2008 presidency is sadly false. Too bad. Compared to the other actors-turned-politicians Walken seems to be head and shoulders above them intellectually. Probably just the reason to be avoiding the DC circuit...

Even more SVG brouhaha. Looks interesting - and with Mozilla browsers moving to include support by default, now's an appropriate time to get familiar with the technology. Proceedings not out for this year's conference, but bound to appear.

New blog on the roll (mine, definitely not quick on the uptake): Life with Alacrity. Quality over quantity.

Greg Costikyan has released Violence under Creative Commons-license. A gag game that applied the "kick in the door and slay the inhabitants"-style with fully automatic weapons and dropped the characters into a housing project. Well-written and laid out, provocative to the extreme, and bound to throw anyone with a conservative mindset into dramatic convulsions. And sure, the Wednesday Emperors will try this out. Once.

Went to two good friends' wedding in Suitia, about 60 kilometers from Helsinki.

The party was hovering on the edge of perfection for 10+ hours:

The resurgence of summer we're currently undergoing hit perfectly. Daytime temperature up to 24, with enough of a breeze and cloud cover thrown in to ease the heat.

The old castlehouse of Suitia, was a truly well-chosen location - high halls, a verdant garden, a patio lit by the evening sun, and a big cellar for the nachspiel.

The ceremony itself was short, pointful and surprisingly touching. Clearly a big margin over the "by the numbers"-occasions so common. Soap bubbles replaced the ubiquitous rice, which was an unexpectedly bright idea.

Food and drink were liberally dished out from a virtual cornucopia.

And most of all, the attendees were in good spirits. This was definitely a warm wedding - where people were loath to depart. Partly due to distance, but the mood was also a big contributor.

Last wedding of the season, it appears. Managed to forget about the tie clip three times out of three, and now's an appropriate time for dry cleaning the suit.

As a surprise sequel to last year's set of ridiculed metalheads, here's a brand spanking new half-a-score.

Apart from the last image the collection is safe for work, consider yourselves warned. Seriously.

Finland gets a traditional suckerpunch. Deservedly.

[Via Shrike.]

As noted by Roklintu, Radiohead's Thom Yorke has started blogging. His production thus far has not included any tidbits of the forthcoming album. Nor any lucid sentences, to tell the truth.

To offset the frighteningly dry previous entry, here's a couple of absinthe-related links thrown in for good measure.

Remember, however, that possession of the wondrous green liquid is still illegal in the states...

And that you can get a variety of stuff almost everywhere else.

As noted below, O'Reilly's conferences are indeed cool. Too bad OSCON Europe in Amsterdam is really really expensive (or am I just being cheap at 825 euros).

Never played around much with Scalable Vector Graphics - the early SVG-enabled mozillas were not paragons of stability, and Adobe's implementation didn't fare much better. The technology seems to have come of age, and future looks interesting.

TheFeature seems to have gone bust during the summer. One of the heralds of the bubble, it survived surprisingly long. Archives are available. Never was a big fan, don't intend to leap in and scrounge for treasure.

MMORPGs are obviously big these days. Never tried one, so am not dissing them outright. Their existence and continuously up-ramping user numbers mean that a lot of changes in the games industry are bound to happen.

Another conference with interesting proceedings is the Linux Audio Conference. The realtime stuff is understandable, the acoustic less so.

And speaking of conferences, I'm horribly behind my original plan of providing a decent travel report from OLS2005. One day (soon) the rest of the event will be covered, till then the entries will stay fallow.

Hockeyblog, a dedicated single-topic entity that started as an extension to a small-press magazine has gone into pure-blog mode.

Stumbled upon Behnford's yesterday. A smallish shop located in the Helsinki WTC, and stocked with a good selection of american foodstuffs. M&M's, Newman's salad dressing, Bacon bits crafted of soya, Jell-O - it's all here.

And while the soda supplies were currently running low, there's promise of getting a steady supply of Vanilla Coke in Helsinki, both diet and regular. And there was much rejoicing.

Went looking for Alan Moore's V for Vendetta on saturday. Didn't find a copy, the publisher must be shooting for getting new stock out to coincide with the release of the movie. Which does look good, but seems to add a lot to the bleak and rather limited world of the original. Or maybe the shops were just short of supplies. Finnish release date is up in the air, but the fifth of november would be much appreciated here as well...

Anyway, couldn't locate a copy, and settled in to read a borrowed copy of Neil Gaiman's 1602. It's an eight issue mini-series that relocates some of Marvel's best-known characters into the Elizabethan age.

Of course, with Gaiman on the helm, it's not your usual "what if" story, but a well-imagined fable of its own. While the slightly renamed characters resemble their future selves, they do have decent stories of their own to tell. Appropriate liberties have been taken with the universe, and it's far more than just the normal marvel-versum with clock turned back a couple of centuries.

Andy Kupert's art is detailed, but far less gustavedorean than the cover images (with their rich engraved style) promise. The coloring is done digitally, and I found it to be definitely too clinical of nature.

The eight issues are gone quickly, the story wrapped up nicely, with enough loose threads left hanging on the final few pages to promise that the barely begun 17th century won't be exactly like our own.

While browsing for an appropriate link for 1602, happened upon Continuity Pages, a huge site that provides annotations to comics. Which came in handy here as well, as I'm not fully versed in golden/silver age stories, from which some of the characters hame been drawn.

As evidenced by half of the top of the pod-list... Not really proud of Chicago or Def Leppard's entry there, they just tend to sneak into getting played. And with content that polished until absolute sheen, it's hard to fault these two "best of" collections.

And I think I'm pretty much the only one cheering for the arrival of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on dvd.

And they say there ain't no such thing as a free lunch...

First up is O'Reilly's conference archive. Which contains tons of presentations from past four years. And the presentations are added immediately after (if not even during) the actual conference. Not dripped when one year has gone by, and even then if somebody remebers to twiddle a bit somewhere (yah, this is dissing USENIX).

The Escapist magazine is a weekly twenty-pager on games. On many kinds of games - be it computer, video, board, role, card or whatever, this is a good home. Layout a bit too flashy, and definitely a magazine to read online only.

Went to the Helsinki 2005 Athletics World Championship Games on their very last day.

Was good, even great. Had excellent seats under roof, but fortunately weather did not act up, the games were finished in clear early autumn evening.

Saw one world record made, and was semi-thrilled by some of the competitions. Women's javelin, where the world record happened, was pretty much a one-woman-show from the first round, and the finns unfortunately did not rise to the challenge in the competition. Tommi Evilä's prize ceremony (bronze, Finland's only medal, which put us in the 33rd spot in the medal statistics) was cunningly the very last event of the evening, thus preventing the domestic attendees from skipping out too early.

Stadium was more than half full, but a lot of the space had been wasted on media seats and an extra video screen. Despite that the noise was at times encouraging, and surprisingly many waves were created. All this despite a severe lack of competing finns. The much-admired Helsinki audience does not get its reputation from nothing, obviously.

The stadium is definitely showing its age - it's incompatible with modern media it seems, and the hallways/toilets/sales area definitely could do with a heavy renovation effort. But that's likely not gonna happen, since the invincible Museum Authority is bound to take a dim view on any that attempt to modernize the crown jewel of functional architecture.

No chaos at all upon dispersal from the stadium, and even got a seat on the bus on the way home. Hardly an expected result, with tens of thousands of attendees. Perhaps I've been badly led astray by experiences in various rock'n'roll-related occasions to expect anything worse. No fireworks which was a pity, would've been a nice addition to the walk in the rapidly darkening Finlandia-park.

Pictures to follow. Only had my phone camera with me, and the computer at home is missing a crucial bluetooth dongle right now.

Cleaned up the left column. Slightly. By ripping out all blogs I read via blogilista.fi - too lazy to set up multiple aggregators, and I don't think the non-domestic blogs would even be available via one. Trivially at least.

Kept a few local blogs that deserve more readers.

And added Allan's, who seems to be back for the third inning.

Noted that this baby has slipped away from valid XHTML, needs to be rectified with next upcoming shakeup. Don't hold your breath waiting, you know it's not safe.

Woohoo! Evilä came through! And took bronze (in finnish only). Attended a wedding yesterday so no idea what kind of a match it was. And no idea whether he abused the powers that be. Hopefully he did. And it was indeed a good wedding, too.

Fixed the setlist of Coop's gig to adhere to the one in Imperiumi (as nudged by Pekka).

Dredged up an imaginative and impressive backlash at current state of blogs, and especially on the ever-growing list of terms used to describe them. I know I'm guilty of some ("some" hopefully equals a very small integer number) of the cardinal sins described therein, and will do better in eliminating them in future. (And yeah, Maddox's site has a big bunch of other very read-worthy articles - updates seldom, updates well).

And this collection of custom arcade tokens is almost enough to wake the latent numismatic within. But getting hold of these would be bound to be hard and expensive, so I'll better stick to the US state quarters for now.

Cheap-o! The fourth instance of the beloved SSX-franchise is on sale for 8 euros in verkkokauppa. And you get a bonus dvd thrown in as well.

Here goes, interesting detritus scraped on the very bottom of the web:

• Doom has been ported onto iPod.
• There are never too many self-defeating oxymorons around.
• An interview with Tim Berners-Lee on blogging (among other things).
• A soothing non-photorealistic driving thing. It's not a game, yet. And would benefit from having a Queens of the Stone Age soundtrack.
• And if "intelligent design" is to be featured in US schools in equal portions to evolution, the least I can do to the flyingspaghettimonster-theory is to include it here.
• Cruel double-hoax involving an escrowed shipment of a powerbook. Character-building stuff.
• Don't know Ruby at all yet, but this definitely looks interesting. Or well-hyped. Without a careful inspection it's hard to say which.
• Fingerprinting paper seems to be a surprisingly robust technology. At least in theory, practical applications and deployment would take ages to implement.
• Gone gaming has gotten off to a good start.
• Complete Inspector Morse, on 33 discs; just requires application of some money, and some more for VAT, but I've got to have this. As soon as the current backlog subsides somewhat.

"All work and no play..." - you know the rest.

First week after vacation is usually bad. And this year's was no exception. Did get a ticket to Motörhead-gig though when the reservations expired. And it also turns out that I'm not thoroughly hopeless at deciphering ebonics, mr. Chappelle - sans subtitles, makes mostly sense.

Hence the lack of entries.

Visited restaurant Mecca, and had a pleasant stay there. Clearly non-classical kitchen, which combines tastes fearlessly. Had cod brûlé with olive oil ice cream for starter which pretty much says how far off the left field the menu really is... Effortlessly functional place, attentive waitresses, and very much on the affordable side (main courses hover around 20 euros). Will be back, but not immediately - though the missed bloodymary-sherbet is definitely on the agenda...

In the mecca-aftermath discussed the finnish athletes' lack of success, and came to the conclusion that if anyone's going to take a medal it'll be Tommi Evilä in the men's long jump. So our brave proclamation was not only that he'll have the bronze medal, but that he'll abuse the finnish sports unions head honchos in post-ceremony interview. Would be good if one of them came through, perfect if both.

It's always good when you hear the thunder before the lightning's afterglow has disappeared from your retina.

No pictures. Too bad, but neither my G3 nor yours truly just isn't fast enough to capture the lightning stroke on the fly. Wasn't the most spectacular thunderstorm I've seen, but comes close to top 5.

The already in quite bad shape ice sculpture (picture from last friday) will be nothing but a puddle after this.

Didn't get wet. Much. The first bout occurred when I was downtown, and the appearance of very wet people and cloud-induced darkness outside was sudden indeed. By the second bout I was already sitting on a glassed-in balcony, ready for the fireworks.

Indeed. Just links.

• 200 household secrets.
• What's wrong with the shuttle.
• *****'s death from Harry Potter, as written by other famous authors (obvious spoiler alert).
• A lengthy interview with Joss Whedon.
• Designer-modded legos, all related to Apple. Limited editions indeed, as every product seems to be sold out...
• mozilla.fi has a blog.
• ScummC-compiler.
• And a lengthy analysis of state of the adventure game-genre to complement the previous.

And a moral bonus point for anyone who picks up the reference in the entry title.

Turns out that going to work after a long vacation, especially early in the morning, is traumatic.

Just plain forgot that Motörhead's 30th anniversary tickets went on sale today. And were quickly sold out thankyouverymuch. Bastards.

Just realized that I played no video games at all during the vacation. Good enough weather and getting stuck in the flight school in San Andreas are to blame. Computer games do not count. And even they were enjoyed in very small amounts: couple of games of civilization and the java-version of Formula De.

Back to San Andreas, definitely. And the demo of FEAR just came out. And all in all, the backlog is frighteningly long.

Five weeks of vacation over. Chanced upon a decent sunset, let this be a good enough cap for the sunny season. It's gonna rain soon. A lot.

I think the first meeting tomorrow is at nine am. But am not bothered enough to check.

Saw Alice Cooper in the Tampere Hockey Arena. On tour to boost the new Dirty Diamonds album.

Supported by Hanoi Rocks, who actually played a full, hour-long gig. Still not enthusiastic about their new material (from Another Hostile Takeover), and neither was the audience, reception was on the quiet side. However, moving to older material brought a lot more noise. Classics like Tragedy, Don't you ever leave me and especially their version of CCR's Up around the bend reminded that there are thousands of people gathered in the building.

Inbetween the bands got stuck in a corridor for ten-ish minutes in a line that was just not moving, and headed back down to the rink. T-shirts were both on the expensive (30 euros) and unattractive side.

Main event began pretty much nine o' sharp. And pulled out all stops with a few classics right off the bat. Played for ~90 minutes, with a very brief pause before the encore. Smaller stage than on Brutal Planet and Dragontown tours meant that the elaborate stageshows were a bit toned down. But the guillotine was there all right, as were the swords, canes and multiple costume changes. And Alice's daughter still played the female roles of the show - Britney Spears had been updated to Paris Hilton, and Nurse Rozetta had been shelved altogether.

Set list was as follows (omissions and 'creative' re-ordering may have occurred - comments and corrections are welcome):

Department Of Youth
No More Mr Nice Guy
Dirty Diamonds
Billion Dollar Babies
Be My Lover
Lost In America
I Never Cry (acoustic)
Woman Of Mass Distraction
Eighteen
Between High School and Old School
What Do You Want From Me?
Is It My Body
Go To Hell
Black Widow (instrumental) 
Drum solo
Gimme
Feed My Frankenstein
Welcome To My Nightmare
Medley containing The Awakening + Steven + Only Women Bleed + 
  Steven (again) + Ballad Of Dwight Fry + Killer
I Love The Dead (backing vocals only)
School's Out
(encore)
Poison
I Wish I Was Born In Beverly Hills
Under My Wheels 

Quite a long list of songs, with some curious omissions. The entire eighties were taken care of by Poison. A lot (a vast majority even) were seventies classics, with some songs from the not so well-received albums thrown in for good measure. Both I never cry and Wish I was born in Beverly Hills were well-executed - and I could certainly have endured a few more acoustic songs in the set.

Despite high hopes, no tag-teaming occurred. None of the Hanoi Rocks guys showed up during Coop's show. Mike Monroe joined Alice on stage on the 2001 show in Helsinki for Under my Wheels, would've been a perfect capstone for the show, but didn't happen.

Noted that it's really hard to get out of Tampere past eleven pm. No trains, no buses. Hung out at Sputnik until the very first coach left around 3 am. Could have been easier, but could have been much worse as well.

At least there's a lot to read, no idea of the individual items' veracity.

And there's no facts where Selänne is going, he seems to be pushed into several directions simultaneously. Counted at least Canadiens, Blues, Hawks and Kings among potential buyers.

A city reborn through flame.

Visited a year ago, and still reckon that the city has been the most humbling I've seen. Entirely rebuilt, of course. Very little remains of the pre-45 days, apart from a rusted dome located at the north end of the peace park. Park whose museum contains shocking artifacts from the bombing, such as the trike thoroughly scorched by the blast.

Time to fold a paper crane, and another on the ninth.

Bought the first season of Dave Chappelle's show on dvd. And have been semi-stumped by the lack of subtitles. The intonation is far from clear, and vocabulary intersects with that of english only occasionally.

Not the hardest show to follow without subtitles, though. The dubious honor remains firmly in the possession of Lock, stock, ... (the show, that is, not the movie). The speech of Jamie's gypsy cousins was downright impossible to decipher - with Chappelle you tend to pick up individual "bitch"es every now and then.

There ought to be a law...

Indeed, the last year's tale of the dysfunctional rock'n'roll-band is now available at very affordable 12.xx euros in Anttila.

Go wild. Has no less than 40 extra scenes, but appears to have no additional live footage. Based on looking at the box, that is.

A decent parody, chuckle-inducing at least, of the life of a green meanie.

Hasn't been updated in a ~week, but the content is pretty much timeless...

The third issue of Aponogeton cf. AW, the free aquarium magazine is available.

And it's good. Noted that I'm not alone trying unsuccessfully to cope with Marsh Pennywort. No articles on fish, but two on setting up reef aquaria, so there's definitely something interesting to read.

From the pages of PVP, comes a handsome shirt bearing truth.

Joss Whedon is now the king. After all, Mr. Lucas did two and a half decent movies (in the Star Wars-continuum), whereas Whedon has put in twelve mainly successful seasons of Buffy/Angel, and two thirds of a season of Firefly.

Where Lucas couldn't sustain a story even within a single movie, Whedon pulled off story arcs that spanned a dozen episodes, and occasionally across seasons or even series.

Where Lucas couldn't write dialogue to convince a willing seven year old, Whedon has had his finger on the snappy-button for the last decade or so. Even the initial Buffy-movie had occasional flashes of brilliance.

Where even Lucas' characters appear to be wooden and two-dimensional, Whedon's have had quality developmental stories.

Indeed, it's interesting how Lucas managed to sink the entire galaxy's worth of stories into the usual "waa, I'm evil 'coz I had NIGHTMARES"-plot, whereas Whedon managed to stretch an idea worth fifteen-minutes "blonde fights nasties" into 200+ hours of quality entertainment.

The Serenity trailer, looks good, but I have my doubts it'll ever materialize on the silver screen here. Unless, of course, it manages to overcome expectations in the box office in the states.

And I'll be buying the regular version of the shirt and not this baby doll one, I case you were wondering and rightfully worried.

And yeah, while scrounging for a definitive link for Buffy, above, happened to note two things: buffyguide has not been updated in a year, and that there's some serious fan fiction-writing going on.

Hooray, part 1: Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys, apparently a sequel of sorts to American Gods, will be out 1st of september.

Hooray, part 2: In addition to a "pure CD" release, an audiobook will be published in MP3-format as well, not downloadable, but on disc. The difference between this and the uncompressed one is quite sizable, 2 vs. 15 discs. And the book will be narrated by Lenny Henry, an old-skool Brit comedian.

Will buy the book - not likely to buy the audiobook, but it's definitely heartening to see that publishers no longer force customers to purchase a score of disks per book, only for them to rip the discs into a more convenient format immediately.

Began my career as a wikipedia-author a couple of weeks back. Or actually an editor. Found a couple of small mistakes and corrected them. So far no-one has corrected them back, so I assume I can carry on...

One of the subjects I touched was Teemu Selänne (in the finnish wiki), and noted that no-one seems to have any idea where he's going to play when the hockey seasons start. Not even to the extent that whether's his team is going to be in NHL, Elitserien or the finnish league. And the NHL looks like it's very much boiling with excitement after the CBA was finally reached. The salary cap and big contracts have turned out to be a bad combination indeed. A lot of prominent players have seen their contracts either being bought out (Derian Hatcher by Detroit) or sold to teams (Forsberg moves to Flyers) with a bit more room under the ceiling. So, it's going to be an interesting season with the balance of power being so severely tilted, and there's no guarantees for any team to suck or rule - the missed year, and now the thorough reshuffling of the deck have seen to that. To ride the rollercoaster all the way to the playoffs, definitely have to set up a proper fantasy league (in yahoo or wherever) with workmates.

A thoroughly mellow summer came to an abrupt end yesterday in the neighborhood. A domestic dispute went completely and permanently wrong, resulting in one fatality and likely a long prison sentence. Happened in the middle of a day, at a wide-open marketplace, in plain sight.

Not the first time this has happened - never ever saw any cops in Vapaala during junior high and high school, but the silence was broken by a triple homicide one evening less than half a kilometer away. Even more a bolt out of the blue than this.

But both of these events were firmly in the "dysfunctional family"-camp, so I'm really not worried about violence spreading out in Haaga. Nah. The area is way too grannified for such.

• Finished the new Harry Potter. One of the relevant wikipedia articles has big spoilers on a key turning point in the book. Avoid, until read.
• Non-traditional globes.
• Maemo, the development environment for Nokia 770 has a blog.
• Paper sculptures that seem to demand a lot of time.
• Apple releases a multi-button mouse at last.
• New boardgame blog has a big array of writers and a lot of expected output (an article a day).
• Greg Ostertag is back in Jazz. So they didn't learn from the first seven years he spent there, pretending to be a useful center. Oh well, he'll play second fiddle to Mehmet Okur anyhow, and should not drag down the team too much.
• A prequel for Alan Moore/Gene Ha's Top-10 has been announced.
• Return to Arkham, a CC'd Lovecraftian comic.
• Elevator blitz. Would be very useful in tall hotels, have to try it out.

Bugger. New iBooks were not for sale yet. At least not outside the applestore in the web.

Noted that fifth season of Sopranos is out, and priced to sell (36 euros for the whole five-disc hog). Didn't buy. Yet. Backlog is way too long at the moment.

Also, when searching the HBO page about info on the next season, stumbled upon Ali G's Harvard commencement speech. Great stuff, but do make sure you're not drinking coffee or anything else monitor-hazardous while reading.

New iBooks are out. Not big improvements over the previous, but looks like it's time to try out the OS X soon: no widescreen display, but integrated bluetooth.