Hollywoodland is gone from Helsinki after a minimalistic period in theatres. Was looking forward to that one (after the more than slight letdown that was Black Dahlia). Oh well, time to catch this on dvd. Sooner or later.

Far better news item is the fact that David Fincher's Zodiac has a release date - it'll be on the silver screen on the 18th of may.

But it seems that Darren Aronofsky's newest, the variably received Fountain will be a straight to dvd release here. Seems that non-mainstream science fiction has a very hard time breaking through the barrier of entry (cf. Serenity back in late 2005).

And as a genuine query (and not, contrary to appearances, a cry for help): could someone more savvy in the porcine entertainment explain what exactly is Homer doing to the jolly pig in the waning moments of the trailer.

Avenue Q is worth every penny, go see the iconoclastic play in its last two weeks in Savoy.

The show deftly combines Muppet Show esthetics with the attitude of South Park. Meaning that there's a plethora of foul-mouthed puppets on stage.

The script has not been localised at all, and some elements (such as "who's this Gary Coleman guy") are explained with throwaway lines). But the script flows well, there's no elements that feel too forced.

The puppets fit the play, and after an initial shock of their presence is past, they don't really stand out as odd elements. Despite the fact that there's characters both with and without adjoining puppets and some characters that are nothing but puppets.

Was good, indeed, and I definitely plan on seeing an english version sooner or later. And picking up the soundtrack (this being a musical and all) doesn't sound like a bad idea at all either.

Dropped in to see the second (not first as I mistakenly thought) Placid Frenzy gig in Itäkeskus afterwards. Better than I expected, with pleasantly variable songs and with way less bass-dominated mix than what 69 Eyes had the other day.

Ok, so there is proper commentary as well...

But somehow my digibox chose to broadcast the alternative instead by default.

Finland - Ukraine seems not to be a very good hockey game. But the first games in championships rarely are.

Saw 69 Eyes in Tavastia yesterday.

Missed most of the warm-up band's gig, but what I saw of Maryslim was on the mostly pleasant side. Swedish glam-ish rock with occasionally entertaining songs.

The main event started pretty much 2330 sharp, and the merihaka goths played for a good 80+ minutes. The new album was rather prominently shown, but the old songs formed the backbone of the gig - mainly off Blessed Be and Devils. The sound was not exactly optimal, guitar kept disappearing into distortion.

Decent show, but nothing really special. Pretty much the same evaluation applies to Angels, the new album.

Sivuraide, a magazine on peculiar literature has been kicked off.

Not with the first issue, but rather with a website. But that's a decent start, and the proposed contents seem interesting indeed. And it's always strange to learn completely new terms - slipstream is something I haven't run into before.

Q: Man, how further out of it could the commentators be?

A: Not much, really. Without resorting to recreational drugs, that is.

When it rains, it pours.

Avenue Q at Savoy, Ojos de Brujo at April Jazz, and the very first gig of Placid Frenzy.

Can make two out of three, but not all of them, so hiphop flamenkillo remains to be experienced on a later date.

This week's photo thursday challenge subject is no.

My take on the subject is the attached image, which pretty much screams out: "No! Do not touch."

The subjects are a really venomous fish and a moderately venomous fish. Both species (stonefish and lionfish, respectively) are actually cousins taxonomically despite the vastly different looks.

And nope, never got near fish this dangerous in the sea - the photograph is from New England Aquarium in Boston.

(As usual, the full-size photograph is available by clicking the attached image.)

Spinal Tap, the greatest and loudest of bands returns to stage in the Live Earth concert on july seventh.

Waking up is no longer as hard as it used to be in the bleakest days of winter, but it's rarely pleasant.

An alarm clock that prods you awake with Stephen Fry's verbalics from the classic Jeeves and Wooster series would be appreciated no matter what the season is.

Charles Stross has released Missile Gap, his Locus-shortlisted recent novella on the web to celebrate the International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

And there was much rejoicing.

The dead trees-version is published by the Subterranean Press, whose books tend to be on the expensive side. And this one is no exception, 35$ for a hundered page book is by no means cheap.

So the free version is appreciated even more than that of the often blogged about Accelerando.

A couple of blogs that have broken the interest barrier recently:

• I have no idea what a stint pig actually is, but the porcine author writes well.
• ThreeDimensionalPeople, on a web-enabled immediate future.
• Despite appearances, we are headed for the summer. Jäätelökesä takes care of analysing the new arrivals of the ice cream scene.
• Teknokekko, since truth is often stranger than fiction.
• Kaiken pelitys - recent subjects of games, doom metal, movies and more games are all quite near to my heart.

Saw Mr. Bean's Holiday, the sequel to the original Bean movie from ten years ago. And quite a horrible little movie it is, and not really recommended to anybody. Even the most inveterate Rowan Atkinson-fanboys will be disappointed by how thin the movie actually is.

Do not let the first five minutes lull you into a false sense of security. After that, the movie will take a long and painful nosedive into a borefest of cosmic proportions, from which it only very momentarily and occasionally manages to tear itself out of before falling back in.

The script is criminally thin, scenes are very drawn out and with a couple of exceptions, not really funny. Rowan Atkinson mugs it up as the protagonist, but looking at his wonderfully rubbery face gets old fast.

Sure, there are a couple of good moments (the busking/miming scene shines), but there are alse bad stretches of twenty minutes to compensate. Amongst the worst is the oyster/scampi-consumption scene in a restaurant in Paris. Thematically equal to Mr. Bean's encounter with tartare back in the original series, but executed far worse (and taking its good time in plodding towards an inevitable conclusion).

Willem Dafoe's character is pretty much the only developed one in the movie, and through him the barbs thrown at the film industry do stick. But that's a small consolation in comparison to ninety minutes of mindnumbing adventure through France.

The product placement is the most blatant captured on film, but fortunately it's confined to just a single object.

Grim disappointment. In a word: avoid!

Otto beat me to the punch in Katuoja, celebrating the 100th issue of Tähtivaeltaja, the best science fiction magazine in Finland (and probably ranking very high in the entire solar system).

Indeed, Toni Jerrman's Tähtivaeltaja has now published a grand total of hundred issues. At the rate of four per year, that's a very, very respectable quarter of a century we're talking here.

My earliest exposure to the paper was back in mid-eighties, when the issues were first available in Akateeminen Kirjakauppa. The effect of Pekka Manninen's provocative comics was to browse the magazine further. Finland back then was pretty much a wasteland when publishing sci-fi was concerned, so reviews were a bit thin on the ground. But the method of the editorial content was pretty much clear - it exhibited a reverse bell curve: everything was either divinely good or worthless crap.

The next encounter with Tähtivaeltaja was in '89 when I got my awakening on two key concepts via it: splatter movies and the literary output of Philip K. Dick. An equally important factoid was the improving graphical layout - the hooking of Petri Hiltunen as an almost continuously featured artist upgraded the looks significantly.

I've been a reader since then (and picking up older issues occasionally). The magazine is pretty much an invaluable resource in keeping up what's going on in comics and movies (and these days the coverage in literature is very good as well). The annual review of comic books is a very comfortable fifteen or so pages that easily serves as a shopping list for months to come. Reviews are as iconoclastic as they've used to be, and the wider cadre of reviewers hasn't toned down the scale much. The rebirth of hard science fiction was annouced in Tähtivaeltaja - discovering the books of messrs. Stross, Baxter and Reynolds has been one of the latest happy moments as a reader.

Indeed. There have been many of those moments through the fifteen-plus years I've been a reader. Here's hoping for a long and successful road ahead. And thanks for the enlightenment, I'm certain I'd be an uncultured bore if this magazine hadn't pointed me in certain directions during the two decades.

Seems that the newest installment of the McClane vs. the world saga gets a Really Stupid Name [tm] in Finland.

Whoever cooked the idea of calling this baby Die Hard 4.0 is due an extra clue. Or two. They're pretty small, and easy to swallow.

Yeah, like everybody (and their cousins) have already reported, Leopard, the next OS X release, is delayed.

Officially until october, but who knows, if the iPhone proves to be a bitch to test and debug - this may sap a lot more resources than originally expected.

Even though Formula 1 races have devolved into snooze-inducing borefests, I'd been meaning to drop by the exhibition centred on the subject in the Helsinki Design Museum.

"Been meaning" for a long time, and was forced to act this weekend on account of the exhibition being torn down on sunday.

Skipped the other galleries (the other touring exhibit was about Maisa ja Kaarina, a chick-comic).

The exhibit had cars from all the decades (the Lotus in the picture is from seventies) - they certainly have evolved in the fifty-odd years, from tubular metal objects that radiate potential danger to weirdly angular vehicles that are barely recognizable as cars. The show centered on the design and asthetics of the cars, and as such the drivers were in an oddly decreased role - though many were mentioned by name, the cars were the stars of the exhibition.

Spotted link to an imaginatively set up bowling trick shot in linko.

But the one above, while a great shot, pales in comparison to picking up a spare on two lanes with a single ball.

And less said about this, the better off we all are. I dimly recall bowling against a team with similar kind of strategy back in the day at the U, though the trajectories of the opponents were not as pronounced...

Youtube's idea of a top-shelf bowling video snippet seems to be centred on hitting a 300 game in WiiSports. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but compared to the real deal, they really are outmatched.

Saw Apulanta yesterday at Tavastia.

Despite the band's 10+ years of history and ubiquitous presence on tour, I'd never seen an entire concert before.

The club was sold out (on two consecutive nights), and pretty much packed. And unlike the fans at metal gigs, it seemed that there were a lot of tourists in the audience - misbehaviour was the order of the day. Avoided (barely) a few spilled drinks and coudln't really care less about occasional shoving.

I only own two early Apulanta records, and as such anything recorded in the 21st century wasn't that familiar. Recognized the most played songs, quite a few went unidentified. Expected Anna Mulle Piiskaa as the last encore, but it never materialized.

The raps from the band, mainly from the vocalist, were unusually long and didn't feel like snippets from the Ye Olde Rockstar's Handbook at all, but natural ramblatives.

Not bad at all: started early enough (pretty much 2330 sharp), played long (75 minutes) and not loud enough to shatter eardrums (I seemed to be in a minority with earplugs). And I'll definitely keep an eye out for a couple of their recent albums - some of the new material sounded worthy indeed.

HBO kicks out the last season of Deadwood, the finest western/drama show ever, on dvd to the curbside.

Release date is 12.6. Of the region 1 product that is, can't abandon the original releases for the locals. That have far uglier boxes anyway. Not to mention a severe lack of extra material.

Ended up second in the Yahoo's fantasy basketball league 186942.

The final game was tight at 4-5, but the margin in any of the categories lost was comfortable enough to prevent second guessing. And anyway, a lot of the teams rested their biggest guns, meaning that a lot of the players had rows of zeroes in the last few games.

This week's photo thursday challenge subject is microcosmos.

My take on the subject is the attached image, a close-up on an aging fencepost, weathered by the years in the sun. Sadly, the tiniest of tiny lizard (of an unknown species) that was hunting for even tinier insects on top of the post skulked away into the cracked post when I approached with the camera, and would not dare to peek out.

(As usual, the full-size photograph is available by clicking the attached image.)

Watched Sunshine, Danny Boyle's brand-new sci-fi movie on sunday evening.

It's not a perfect movie, as evidenced by the four star rating, but a pretty good semi-hard-science fiction film all right.

The back story weighs in in the top class of hokeyness: sun is dying, and the detonation of a big-ass atomic bomb at its core is the only way to retain life on earth. Certainly, the main plot is not amongst the best of them, but the film is otherwise executed pretty well.

It deftly combines bits from a selection of classic movies - Alien, Event Horizon and 2001 amongst the easiest to recognize. The ship is a claustrophobic and lonely place, and there's definitely something fishy going on with the mission.

Amongst the actors Cillian Murphy (seemingly a Boyle favorite) is spookily distant as the protagonist with his blue eyes as piercing as they have been in previous roles. Took me a long, long while to recognize the botanist - the others rang no bells worth mentioning.

The ship is a work of art - well-lit and dark at the same time, just a few degrees off from behind the heatshield to utter annihilation in the ground-zero sunlight. It's a functionally ugly ship, but one that is actually somewhat believable, built for a single task only.

The film starts off a bit on the slow side, but quickly picks up a breathless pace that almost unerringly carries it to the very end. There isn't much exposition and the reason of the sun's plight is never really explained.

Quite a bunch of trailers before the main event: apart from Shrek 3, the third parts of the biggest franchises were shown. Neither Spiderman nor Pirates of the Caribbean looked bad at all. And it seems that the former saga will dive to rather bleak depths in its third installment. The new Philip K. Dick-filmatisation, Nextdidn't look as worthy as Linklater's mighty rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly.

Nine Inch Nails comes back to Finland almost immediately after their second ever gig, this time as headliners at the Ankkarock.

The rock'n'roll summer just got one notch more interesting.

Skrubu's weekly five this week is on haircuts - of the concrete kind.

1. When did you last visit a barber/hairdresser?

Five weeks ago. Give or take a week.

2. Do you have a regular barber, or do you flit from flower to flower? Why?

Yeah, I keep using the same. Just because they have a free chair most of the time.

3. Do you maintain the same haistyle consistently, or does your style change every time you visit the barber?

Style?

4. How long does the act usually take? And what's done to your hair

Ten - fifteen minutes. Just a cut. Taken a dye job a couple of times.

5. Do you think the haircut prices are right?

They're a bit high, but when the all rental/equipment/salary/whatever costs are factored in, they're no longer sky-high.

No major disasters occurred yesterday, but two events today pounced back images of bad luck.

When retrieving a piece of fallen clothing, almost broke the mirror cabinet in the bathroom by bumping if off the wall. With my head. Caught the offending piece of furniture mid-air, and escaped with just somewhat hurt pride.

The second incident was of a more serious nature. The external filter of my trusty slice of Amazon in the living room corner failed to hold its water following a regular cleaning operation. Managed to stem the mini-flood after a few moments, but not before a couple of gallons had to be soaked in from the wooden floor. Unfortunately the filter's malfunction seems to be permanent, so the fish will have to do without it for the rest of the weekend.

Visited the tenth Helsinki Beer Festival in Kaapelitehdas yesterday.

Unlike the last few occasions, this time there was no underlying theme for the offerings, rather just a collection of good brews from around the world.

The highlight of the show, surprisingly, was not a beer (and neither it was the bunnygirls visiting from the old ice hall). Nope, it was the usually not for sale seven year old vintage of Laphroaig that was easily head and shoulders above the competition. Got the importer's contact information, and will attempt to obtain a bottle or two. Of the beers the improbably named Närke Mörker stood out.

The musical program alternated between melancholic rock'n'roll (the Orders) and Tuomari Nurmio, this time without the backing from Alamaailman Vasarat. Didn't pay enough attention to the former, but caught most of the latter's 50 minute (or thereabouts) set - classic songs played with accompaniment from Honey B. and the T-Bones.

Perhaps it was just the presence of the Judge that drew people in, but the hall was definitely more packed than last year.

The final game is underway.

And while the game thus far has been even, the news are not uniformly good: Mike Miller is out for the season (with the Grizzlies out of the playoffs, it's time to start healing), the consistently over-achieving Josh Smith got suspended for two games for arguing with his coach and Jamaal Tinsley's hurt again.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest authors passed away yesterday.

And the world took a turn for the painfully conventional and predictable.

So it goes.

Watched Gremlins, Joe Dante's classic horror-comedy the other day.

The sequel was the featured article on wikipedia, and noted that I'd never seen it. As a feeder to watching it, decided to re-watch the original.

And the movie hasn't deteriorated much in the intervening decades. It's still a very decent movie. Back in 1984 it was released concurrently with Ghostbusters, and they pretty much split the box office booty.

The actors are pretty much no-names, recognized only Phoebe Cates and Judge Reinhold. But this isn't really a movie to watch for the human actors, it's the gremlin puppets. And they've aged well, and their antics look much more convicing than the garden variety CGI-critters.

Next on the list in the 80s movies: Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Three interesting articles on interactive fiction popped up this week:

Peter Nepstad kicked off a contest on creating a game based on H.P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, a collection of story fragments. The story fragments are short - might be an opportune time to dust off the compiler and give this a shot. Not for the contest part, but to have a first decent programming project in a long long while. And woo, on the double, looks like Manifesto Games is picking up the distribution on 1893.

Textfyre is a phenomenally bad name for the latest company trying to make it in the less-than-obvious niche of commercial interactive fiction (last known successes: Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls). But they've signed up the author of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry for the first games. Which means that I'll certainly give the first product a shot.

Gamasutra ran an interview with Emily Short the co-author of Inform 7 and a bunch of good games.

This week's photo thursday challenge subject is growth.

My take on the subject is the attached image, of a path being rapidly overgrown with verdant plants on both sides.

(As usual, the full-size photograph is available by clicking the attached image.)

Saw Nine Inch Nails in the Old Ice Hall yesterday.

Missed the warm-up act, Ladytron, and the first few seconds of the main event.

The new album is out only in a couple of weeks, and thus this concert wasn't a promotional event for the forthcoming Year Zero. Hence the setlist contained a lot of their back catalog (Starfuckers Inc. was the most prominent omission).

The stage show was pretty simple: smoke, lights and swinging lamps. Smoke was very prevalent in the beginning of the concert, but thinned down and disappeared as the songs processed - only to intermittently reappear later. A simple set of lights sliced through the smoke effectively, with a prominent bank of vertical bars a static background. The only really dynamic part was a collection of hanging lamps, pushed to swing several times throughout the gig.

As this was the last gig of the tour, the selection of shirts was on the low side, with both sizes and styles absent from the salesbooths. Pricing was on the reasonable side at 25 euros a t-shirt.

Skrubu's weekly five, this time on current topics.

1. Formula 1... Did you watch the race? Why / why not? If you are a keen follower, where do you seek additional information?

Nope. Haven't paid for the ability. And won't. The races have been boring for years - the presence of three finns on the track is not likely to alter my opinion...

2. What do you think about MTV3's decision to broadcast the races live on pay-per-view channel only?

As the holders of broadcasting rights, that's entirely their prerogative.

3. Whether you follow the races or not, do you think that Kimi Räikkönen will win the championship this year? Or will it be someone else that takes the glory? Arguments, please.

It's very possible. Or it might be Alonso instead, just to spite Kimi who moved from McLaren in the opposite direction.

4. Easter. How many chocolate eggs did you eat? Or did you do without altogether? Why, if so?

Four kinder eggs, all with pretty lame things inside.

5. About easter in general... A culinary delight, just a chilled-out long weekend or something else entirely?

A combination of the two alternatives - a pleasantly long weekend with some excellent food attached.

Last week's issue of Aku Ankka celebrated Mikael Agricola, the founder of finnish language. This year marks the 450th anniversary of his death.

A story in the issue is written in Ye Olde Finnish, and the effect of the language is strange. It's not just the very unconventional dialogue that jumps out, but the necessity to invent names for things that did not exist back in the mid-16th century. The story is available in plain finnish on the web. And language is indeed one of the reasons why people keep coming back for more - instead of using simple slang, the translators keep pushing themselves for a complicated alternative. Sometimes complicated enough to move into the realm of pompous and uncredible, but for the most part remaining interesting enough to read.

Aku Ankka is on a roll right now - it's by far the most popular weekly magazine in the country, and as a periodical it loses only to the biggest newspaper of the country: Helsingin Sanomat.

And it's not just the magazine that is on top of the sales: the regular hardback editions of Carl Barks' Don Rosa's (and other Duck-auteurs') stories keep selling year after year. And the recently begun collectors edition of the entire Carl Barks' output has received positive reviews across the board.

Step 1: kvaak.fi, the premier finnish comics site puts up a dubious news item about the Renny Harlin getting to direct Wolverine vs. Batman film. The facts are all there, including a carefully selected release date (july fourth 2009).

Step 2: Suomen Kuvalehti, a honestly old-school weekly prints the story as a fact in their easter issue.

Step 3: Somebody gets verbally spanked in the next editorial meeting.

Congratulations on a good trick, and let's hope that the rapidly deflating finnish director gets nowhere near these two still credible superheroes.

Watched 300 Zack Snyder's film of Frank Miller's classic graphic novel

Like the previous Miller filmatization, Sin City, this is a bluescreen fiesta, with most of the scenery added on digitally in post-production. Where Sin City aimed for a maximally noir appearance, here the color scheme is purposefully muted and oversaturated - usually towards a brownish tint.

Violence is one of the main graphical elements - splatters of digital blood are shown in bullet-timed fights, action stopping momentarily to admire a vicious thrust of the spear, or an unstoppable swing of a sword. Severed limbs are a regular sight in the fights, and the effects house seems to be very much in love with the concept of a clean decapitation.

Plot is vintage Miller, with a superhuman protagonist at odds with a world that does not understand him. The pathos is dished out with a bucket-sized spoon, and the film dangerously crosses into accidentally humorous-territory several times in the initial minutes. And with the arrival of persians (decked out with more piercings than a mid-sized rock festival) any credibility is lost as images of cave trolls (borrowed from Peter Jackson), huffing darthvader-clones and a guy with lobster claws for arms are marched onto the silver screen. The elephants and rhinos I can understand and even approve, but the guy with lobster claws - that's where my suspenders of disbelief finally snapped.

Acting-wise, there isn't that much on offer. Gerard Butler as the doomed King Leonidas is victim of the dialogue, which is VERY SHOUTY and apart from rage (seething or unrestrained) his role has little room for emotion. The rest of the 300 men are pretty much just a collection of interchangeable testosterone-fuelled containers of sixpacks, weapons and gloomy faces. Dominic West (yeah, McNulty from Wire) is pretty much the only bright spot among the cast as a scheming spartan politician. And the narrator looks too much like Paavo Arhinmäki for comfort.

I expected to like 300 a lot more, but have to concur with Ilja Rautsi's review: the simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic imagery just isn't that good a movie. Pompous digitally enhanced display of male flesh slaughtering and getting slaughtered isn't enough to retain interest for two hours.

The credits have a great visualization going on throughout the first few minutes - worth sticking around in the theatre. Too bad finnkino decided to slap on the lights immediately when the movie ended, and the finnish mania to reach the exit as soon as possible manifested itself.

And I'm not going to touch the political aspects with a ten foot pole razor-sharp spear. Parallels to current affairs are easy to draw, and the dialogue strays several times into uncomfortable territory (like in the very end when Leoniads commends his troops in the fight “against mysticism and tyranny.”)

At least there's no potential for a sequel here. But a video game (or several) is bound to follow - the case for simplistic violence is just too great for the opportunistic publishers to miss.

Squeaked into the final of the Fantasy NBA on Yahoo!. Bit of a consolation after the less-than-optimal football and hockey seasons. Of which the football was a lot more painful loss, the hockey started going downhill pretty much from the draft.

The man of the hour was Dwyane Wade from Miami Heat. He returned from a six-week injury leave and scored the necessary eight points I needed to qualify from the semifinals. May small children and even smaller birds sing his glory in Miami forevermore.

Not all is well in the team after the return of the prodigal guard - Mike Miller the 3-point machine is ailing, and pretty much half the team (the more productive half, sadly) has paid extended visits to the infirmary recently.

I'm really glad that the final game is against a proper team - the losing team in the other semifinal pulled a dirty trade on the deadline. In a rare bout of poetic justice, the deities of basketball deemed the act unsavory and despite acquiring a trio of triple-A players for an equal number of deadweights, he failed to qualify.

Game on!

This week's photo thursday challenge subject is grace. Or clemency or mercy, as the finnish word armo has many translations.

My take on the subject is the attached image, of crepuscular rays breaking through the dark clouds. The impending storm deflated quickly after the picture was taken. Yet another day in the summer of 2006 when it didn't rain.

The HQ experienced a sewerial hiccup today.

The plumbing just plain refused to co-operate, and repeated flushings produced a minor flooding from the drain in the floor.

Pretty much a small occasion when compared to the previous bout eight months ago, but annoying nonetheless.

The procedure is pretty much standardized now: notice flooding - swear profusely - call the maintenance guy. The plumber arrived rapidly despite this being the easter weekend, and with several extensions of the rotorooter cleared up the pipes somewhere in the nether regions of the house.

Damage was merely cosmetic (and aftermath consisted of showering the bathroom with hot water), but the uncomfortably repeating failure is definitely pushing me towards exploring options of getting a flat in a more functional house.

Had no serious plans for the evening, but the event scuttled the possibility of seeing the very shouty Frank Miller filmatisation of 300 today.

Slight hangover clearly lowers the barrier to buy.

With the arrival of the third season of The Wire on dvd, the shops had tactically lowered the price of the second. I was sucked in, and bought both annals of the struggle between the Baltimore's finest and their opponents. If this continues to be as good as the first season was, there'll be some long sessions in the near future.

Guitar Hero II arrived on the Xbox 360 today, and was available at a considerable cost (hovering just below a hundred euros). Fortunately the EB Games shop (they have no web presence as far as I can tell) had a killer deal - bring in three old games, and get the shredding sequel for 90 cents. Yes, Virginia: that's ninety cents. Took me less than a minute to pick the disposable ones out of the collection (finished the new Tomb Raider, never got started with the second-hand King Kong and just plain was incompatible with Madden 07).

The second issue of the Monocle seems to be out pretty much all over town - so either the distributor got a bigger shipment, or the new 'zine mania has died down. And I certainly expect the things to remain this way with future issues as well.

Hosted the quarterly shindig of Keskiviikon Keisarit yesterday, and came off with no damage worth mentioning.

Foodwise, the theme of the evening was Fiftieth Anniversary of the European Coal and Steel Union, meaning that the menu was organized around offerings from the six original EU members. Or five, actually, since no culinary item from Luxembourg seemed to be available. Weisswurst accompanied with mashed potatoes, sauerkraut and official Bavarian mustard was the main course - supplemented with an imposing selection of cheeses for dessert.

In addition to sizable amounts of food and drink the evening consisted of games:

Munchkin Cthulhu was released last week, and we took it out on a longish spin. A single game lasted much longer than expected, and ended with a tight race to the 10th level. Thematically it's weaker than the original - basically, you do NOT loot Cthuloid entities and remain sane (or alive). But it's still a decent game, with great illustrations by John Kovalic, and horrible in-jokes and puns on the subject.

Warioware: Smooth Moves sadly has no multi-player capability off the bat, and I had no time to finish the single-player event before the party commenced (had surprising issues with a couple of tasks). Happily this shortcoming was overcome in an intense hour of passing the wiimote around, and then the game started in earnest. With great fun evenly distributed among the participants.

The other borrowed game was the scandinavian localized edition of Entertainment Trivial Pursuit. Difficulty level was traditionally very uneven, and complicated a lot by many questions of unknown celebrities. Especially the "recognize a person based on his/her mouth"-bit proved hard - and none of us has been diagnosed with prosopagnosia thus far. The dvd adds a lot to the game, but seemed to be suboptimally used - should be used for music, images and movie clips as opposed to static multiple-choice tasks.

It's been a year since the last venture to the wide world outside from these occasions, and last night was no exception. Kept replaying the five-second wonders of Wario to the wee hours in the morning instead of bailing out.

Impressive: Canal+ is showing the sixth season of Shield pretty much at the same pace it's broadcast in the states.

Indeed, there's just two days of lead time between the original and the scandinavian premiere. That's nothing less than impressive, and good value for money for the fans of Vic Mackey's crew. Canal+ has been stepping up its ante a lot recently - both Heroes and the third season of House, M.D. are shown with just a small lag to the original. Quite a different approach than what the finnish channels are used to, where being a season behind is the norm.

Missed the last three episodes of the fifth season (misprogrammed the dvr during vacation last fall), so the score is not exactly clear. But I'm betting that the first episode kicks off with a decent "previously on the Shield"-bit.

The prime finnish pop-punk band Ne Luumäet is indeed back after half a decade's absence.

As shown in the sign-sheet for Ruisrock, the Ramo-punkers are back in business. And not just for a single gig, since they are scheduled to play in Tavastia on the 17th of may.

Interesting. What next? New album?

Easter = four days of rest.

Four pretty chilly days if the forecast is to be believed.

Come back miss Spring - I didn't mean to take you so for granted!

Good interview with Jeff Minter on Gamasutra.

Bring on Space Giraffe, one of the first XBLA games I promise to buy. And hey, while we're on the subject: a version of Tempest 2000 c ertainly would perk up the Live Arcade offerings. Or even better, the extremely rarely seen Tempest 3000, which saw little daylight as a on-board game on the badly received Nuon dvd-technology (the Tsunami 2010 remake just hit the list of things to be checked out).

Been quite, quite impressed with Heroes, a brand-new television show on canal+.

On surface it's a simple show - superheroes out to save the world. But scratch even a little, and the complexity shows itself.

Like Lost, it's an ensemble show, with a wide selection of characters. But in Heroes the characters are scattered across the United States, and their relationships both develop and are revealed through the episodes.

The protagonists of the show are not spandex-clad vigilantes, but common folks whose abilities have suddenly manifested. The heroes are all in stealth-mode, even with some with rather visible abilities. The selection covers ground from simple fliers to teleporters, via a regular Jekyll/Hyde-character.

The show is not an easy one to watch - the plot (which I'm only assuming to cover the season) is on the complex side, and new characters and interactions between them get added into the mix.

Like Lost, Twin Peaks and others where the twisting storyline is really the main character of the show, spoilage is a problem - hence I've pretty much avoided browsing related websites.

There's been no release date for the inevitable dvd release, but in the light of the show's popularity, it's bound to be a big event in the fall.

April fool's is gone again - wikipedia again collected the tricks, the links below are pure - no fooling of readers here.

• Jeff Minter, the last of the bedroom coders, has a blog.
• Cute Animals, part x: two sea otters holding hands. Video taken in Vancouver Aquarium - visited it back in 2003, and found these playful critters pleasant to watch.
• Bagophily, for the barf bag fanciers.
• Web typography is limited, that's a fact. A SXSW presentation explains how to make it suck less.
• Supermarket2.0.
• Firefox OS - is a cross-platform browser really rendering conventional applications obsolete. No, definitely not, even for casual desktop users.

A response to skrubu's weekly five after a hiatus of a few weeks.

1. How many blogs do you follow and how do you do that? Domestic? Foreign? Tell us all, and something more.

A few dozen. Quite a few only peripherally, only some seriously. Domestic blogs mainly via blogilista.fi. Ones missing from there via google reader or plain old bookmarks.

2. There's, like, 151 days left to the end of the analogue television in Finland. Are you prepared for the digital era? What do you think about the whole digi-tv thing? And do you have any clue on Finland's hurry to go all digital?

Sure. I have a digital video recorder, and am quite happy with it. I find the finnish insistence on being the first country to dispose of analogue broadcasting very puzzling. The technology is immature, and the finnish broadcasters choice of heavy bundling of channels leads to rather blocky images - which will no douby be even worse in high definition television.

3. Norwegian consumer organization has put up a campaign against Apple, and got the support of other such organizations in other European countries. They oppose the fact that music bought from iTunes is playable only on iPods. Is there any sense in this? And shouldn't these organizations fight regional coding of dvds or cds broken by design (also known as copy-protection)?

Spot on. Leave Apple be (especially after they seem to be moving towards abolition of DRM), and concentrate on the consortiums that seem intent in making consumption of media as painful and inconvenient as possible.

4. It's spring. Or so it seems. Does it annoy you? Is this due to the acts of man? Are we guilty of rising temperatures and longer summers? And of floods and such. There's some folks that it's not our fault. Who should we believe?

Well, it was spring, until yesterday - today the wind is chilly, and the summer a lot more distant than last week.

The human factor in the global warming is heavy, but the natural cycles cannot be discounted either. I'm an early summer person - the emerald green season is the best of the bunch. And last summer's dry heat yellowed out the lawns too soon.

5. "I can say 'thank you' in ten languages" says a song. Do so. Line 'em up. Try it out at least. And no googling.

Kiitos. Tack. Takk. Danke schön. Merci. Thank you. Gracias. Grazie. Arigato. Spasiba.

Ten. That's a take.

The trailer for the next installment of the Grand Theft Auto saga is out.

The fourth part will be released in october on the current generation consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3), and it looks mighty mighty fine.

Though it must be said that very little of the graphics are necessarily in-game scenes. And it may well be that the water effects are less impressive live.

Watched Joel Schumacher's The Number 23 yesterday. Despite the almost uniform dislike of the movie, I quite liked it.

It's a mind-twisting movie of sorts, but one which explains it all by the time the credits roll in, leaving few if any mysteries to be pondered later. So, in comparison to masterpieces like Fight Club and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this is a far easier film to watch and understand.

The story starts with Jim Carrey, the protagonist, in firm Ace Ventura-mode - but things take a few left turns and the plot starts turning dark. Carrey carries the movie in a dual role, and pretty much completely avoids his common mannerisms.

Paranoia mixed with numerology is a fine starting position, but the film never expands much beyond the immediately personal - the far-reaching conspiracies hinted at in the starting titles are not reached.

So, while the film fails to achieve its potential, it's by no means a bad movie. I'm pretty sure that the overwhelmingly negative response is partially explained by a dislike of Joel Schumacher (who still hasn't atoned for the horrible Batman & Robin). Jim Carrey has probably shed his king of slapstick mantle, his turn towards a tragic figure in Cable Guy was not much apppreciated.

23, obviously, is a number with hefty numerological significance, and my birthday as well.

Had the pseudo-monthly gamenight yesterday.

Was impressed by the host's new television and the graphical quality exhibited by the PlayStation 3.

Indeed, had my first hands-on encounter with Sony's new console, and was pleasantly surprised. The graphical pizazz of Motorstorm was dazzling to watch, and pleasant to play. Didn't sample the other big launch title: Resistance: the Fall of Man, but spent quite a bit of time with demos. The probably quite far in the future Gran Turismo featured a single track and pleasant handling - the challenge of driving all eight cars available was too much to resist. The newest Ridge Racer-installment, on the other hand, felt way too soft when it came to the handling - the car spun out of control way too regularly. Good show for the newest console on the market, but not yet enough to entice me to spend the requisite 700 euros (and the cost of a new television). The sixaxis-controller seemed like the anorectic cousin of PS2's dual-shock - very light due to missing the rumble-functionality - easy to get to grips with, but somehow lacking substance.

The regularest of events - a round-robin 2-on-2 Pro Evolution Soccer was played on the X360 this time around. Quite a few of the games were almost scoreless affairs filled with misfired passes and even more haphazard shooting. Occasionally, though, the play resembled football, and occcasionally devolved into slowdown-plagued chaos without control.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter proved too complex in the later stages, our quartet wasn't really able to put any kind of dent into the rebels' activities. I never really got the hang of Perfect Dark Zero - hovering steadily at the bottom of the scoresheet. And less said about the killer instinct failing to manifest but occasionally in Dead or Alive 4, the better...

Sucked at pinball, as has been the case for a while. To my great shame, neither Addams Family nor Twilight Zone yielded to casual play, and the only decent score was attained in Attack from Mars (and even that was but a fraction from the replay-score).