Being a foreigner

It's funny the way people treat you when they realize that you're a foreigner. If you're outside the "basic" countries of your comrade citizens, such as how Canada and Mexico are for yankees and Sweden and Estonia are for Finns. Especially if you're living in a country.

I've always taken the approach of immersion, fully blending to my current environment and survive with the local language and culture. It's fun to measure my knowledge level by testing myself against different barrier thresholds, now I'm in the four-questions barrier in Latvian and getting better all the time. The question barriers are all about the fact how many questions and witty ripostes you can deliver home before one has to switch to a more universal language to tell that I have no idea what that last question meant.

Still, for the issue of being a foreigner. First of all, the locals are friendly towards me, because I'm something special. I'm a red M&M in a bowl of brown ones some neurotic psycho has sorted for his weird fetish nights. This means that when I speak, people tend to listen, because I bring the wisdom of the large world or something. Honestly I have no idea why this reaction should be as it is, of course my background has been playing with kids around the world, so I might have some zany issues with my views. But when I've asked this from other ex-pats, they have told the same story. Cool thing is that I get to meet people I wouldn't usually meet, but now I can - because I'm a friggin' foreigner.

The coolest part however is the fact that now I'm meeting fellow foreigners and natives of my home country and they also have a quirky view of me, they think I'm a god somebody, whilst if I'd live in Finland I would probably just be any man on the street. Being an ex-pat is always a humbling experience, no matter how long you do it. Changing the scene is like changing your brain, it's just weird at start and you can't do anything except wonder why it feels like people are staring at you. It's hard to get by and the worst thing is the relying on others, even though it can be a prolific experience.

On a personal note, if you haven't heard about a band called The Cat Empire and like cool Ska-Jazz-Dub-Rock-Goodfeel-tunes , you're going to love this band. They're an Oz band and totally kick ass. One of the bands of the year for me, they even have super-cool signet rings in their web-shop. The little nerdy music fan within me starts to raise his head when I listen to this music.

Also, there are more and more people reading my writings, it would be pretty cool to actually here something about you. Especially about the contingent on the East Coast in the States, which seems to have taken a massive approach. Spread the word and hit me with a message to know what you think about my stuff, if you even do :) Hate mails are just as appreciated.

Also, I'm thinking of moving my blog to my own server, does anybody have any idea if I can move my old posts there? Of course I can just use Ecto and republish them to Wordpress, but if it could be done any easier, it would be cool. Blogger has made it quite annoying to do any kind of design on the site.

Holla back, aight!

Snow

There are some things which you just need to see to believe. I can't name any now, but I'm sure there are some things. I wanted to rant about global warming and green house effect, but then I realized that every damn winter these days is damp and slushy, like a popsicle in your shoe and to be honest I don't even like the cold. But, being Finnish and all I feel revitalized when I step to a sub-zero temperature, the air is crisp and it even feels that I can see better. But then I'm brought back to reality when I need to face the snow castle built upon my car which I need to remove with a flimsy plastic brush.

Now, weather is something you can talk about always and to anybody, and it might seem like a poor excuse to write a blog entry about weather. You're wrong, because we can take wild tangents and speak how different our perspectives about weather are, especially in Winter. I have a good mate here in Riga, he's Welsh Cornish (and really sensitive about it) and to him, the near-zero temperature last week was "cold" when for me it was annoyingly warm, since most of my winter gear are suited for the polar-bear-slashing-igloo- heating-put-your-tongue-in-a-street-sign-freeze-fests that are Finnish winter, at least the ones you remember.

But if there truly are a few miserable things in the world, such as taxes, hairy women, clubbed baby seals and Microsoft - this pseudo-winter is surely one of them. Why?

1. Everything is wet and it's not clean wetness but this kind of evil goo that spews all around your clothes and car and it just won't go away (until it dries up and you breathe it in the summer).

2. The indecisiveness of it all: Is it gonna rain? Is it gonna snow? Is it gonna spew evil goo, is it gonna change during the day and the clothes I selected in the morning will be totally useless and hot? Let's take a scenario here. It's freezing cold and snowing in the morning - you take a thick padded jacket and long johns, your Mother Russia leather gloves and a Brezhnevian fur hat knowing that you need to carry them around all day, but you won't get nut freeze and you'll be able to conceive children. What do you know, in three hours then sun is shining and there's more water everywhere to make Titanic look like a beach party - you're hot, you're wet and by sweating you're getting even hotter, making you sweat even more. If you should take your coat off, it would instantly freeze again ensuring that you would get a cold.

3. Everybody is grumpy due to aforementioned reasons.

4. Santa Claus can't come on Christmas! Maybe we should have Orange County Choppers make Santa a bad-ass chopper to deliver his message.

5. It's dark, because you don't have the snow reflecting the little light we have. That again results in more expensive electricity bills.

6. It makes people blog about this pseudo-winter.

Right, I think that's enough ranting about snow. Trying to do a radio jingle at the office, it's quite hard to fit stuff in ten seconds that would be not just witty and perfect, but also personal and effective. Still it's way better than looking outside.

Have fun, leave some comments, getting quite a lot of people visiting here. Give me your snow updates!

Doom

Today I finally went to see something that I've been "waiting" for the last ten years, when they first announced the coming movie project based on the legendary first person shooter game, Doom. There are a few things I don't understand when doing a movie based on a book or a game - why reinvent the wheel?

We all know what happens if you select a good product and use its parts to deliver a high-quality movie experience by paying attention towards detail and try to find the best compromise of the original content and the possibilities of cinema. Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is a good example of doing things correctly and literally by the book. They used the characters, the places and the plot - why can't they do it with Doom for example?

Originally, the game Doom is based on Mars (check) and the main character is a marine some cool Acronym Fighter (I think it was Rapid Response Tactical Squad or some other pseudo-militaristic bull) and the gates of hell open and demons break loose and start laying waste to the unsuspecting mortals, where the main character will slaughter his way to the gates of hell alone with a grim attitude and kill the disciples of Lucifer with a different range of weapons there is some crappy plot twist about a failed genetical experiment with an extra chromosome (with a degree in psychology) from a dead Martian civilization who have created some sort of star gate. Then this Acronym-super-trooper-squad of guys (with idiotic aliases such as "Destroyer" and "Reaper" and they even have massive space rifles that can actually check their ownership and call their masters by their name) go through the gate with the basic symptoms of molecular space travel fly their and get their ass kicked and then the good-bad leader turns worse and the bad-good second guy turns better and they fight and guess which one bites the dust?

So, because of this Resident Evil-ish "surprise" of genetical engineering gone wrong forces the movie makers to redesign everything. Even the whole name of the game and movie lose their meaning, since the word "Doom" holds a lot of biblical meaning, easily allowing the original plot from going on. Especially when the biggest fanboys are old-school Doom-players and were naturally expecting to see the pentagrams and inverted crucifixes and the same monsters. Now we saw the same monsters, but they weren't the foot-soldiers of hell, but they were some old doctors turned evil. Great.

So, by having to invent everything again they cannot produce the same quality because they haven't got the resources for it and it is very probable that someone has done it earlier. And by not using the original content, they make sure that their only fans will tell their friends that the movie sucks. Who's producing these things?

Well, I wasn't expecting anything and I had already heard the bad news - so I can't say I was disappointed. But still the overall quality and the lack of common sense is just very hard to understand in this time of quarterly business and requirement for high profits.

Oh yeah, and my thesis proposal was accepted and I got my thesis supervisor. Seems like the end is truly near :)

Homes for the homeless

All right, back in Latvia once again. It was surprising to see that there had been some snow here and the weather seems content in settling to the negatives. Probably it means that winter is actually coming finally, although I'm kind of hoping it would be over already.

Coming to the office this morning I noticed a homeless guy pulling a cart made out of wood and cardboard, he stopped in front of our office building and walked down to the loading area where there are a lot of cardboard boxes. I was joking to my colleague that he found a new house here and we continued inside. Now, three hours later I saw the guy still working out back and he had a massive pile of cardboard on his mobile home, maybe he took my proposition literally and is gathering material for his new home.

There are quite a lot of homeless people in Riga, most of them are old, screwed out of their pensions and safe life when Soviet Union collapsed and the new nations did not (do not) have enough resources to give decent social services for these old folks. That's why you see so many old ladies cleaning the streets around the day. For a person coming from Finland, this is somewhat stressing and strange, but when in Rome ..

Well, at least I hope this guy can set up the finest cardboard castle available in Riga and invite his homeless buddies for a christmas snack.

Back to work.

More Television

Ok, this might sound like the worst thing to do when you have lot of work and a thesis to write, but recently my cable TV operator sent me a letter that they are upgrading their digital system and I'd need to pick up my decoder card from the nearest service center (which is, by the way, in the worst place available considering parking.)

Well, between me picking up the card and them upgrading their system to block all channels I had virtually no channels available, except those Latvian ones but their novelty value has worn off a year ago. Thus, having no channels I had a lot of time, too much it seemed sometimes. I read two books in this time, though this was due to traveling for two weeks in a row.

Last saturday I finally managed to pick up the decoding card after a sobering walk through old town with my friends and when I got home, trembling with excitement I noticed that they had approximately doubled their channel offering - up to about 105 channels.

Of course, most of these channels are the turkish, russian, romanian, italian, spanish and what have you useless channels - but there were a few pearls available.

There's one channel called Arirang, which is a Korean channel filled with news and cool advertisements from local producers. I honestly don't know who the channel is aimed for, maybe Korean ex-pats, but one thing I've noticed - Korean soap operas are cool.

On the pique of elitism is the Wine TV - A channel about wines. Even though I am a well-known wine connoisseur and gastronome extravagant, this channel is filled with something that has a round, bitter, ashy aftertaste and a vibrant and relaxed color. It's filled with sentimental violin music and massive helicopter camera drives over huge chateaus and a deep, masculine voice flagellating on his own ingenuity over whatever topic he's babbling this time.

Also I noticed that now I'm a proud owner of five (5) MTV channels, and yes, they're all Music Television. I've got MTV, MTV Hits (are they showing so many crazy frog commercials series and reality shows these days, that they actually need another channel to actually show hip music videos?), MTV Base (which is a Hip Hop version of MTV, although they play the same music and show the same shows than normal MTV, except there's more "bling".) Then there's MTV 2 (the channel where they save most of the good music and their volume level is about 50% higher than other channels) and MTV Europe, which is MTV with European Crazy Frog commercials (different phone numbers).

To make sure I get my daily dose of music, they also packed German music channel VIVA for two channels and VH-1 also with two channels - so that gives me 9 music channels - and that's just in European languages. There are also Russian music channels, if I ever find myself longing for slavic, sorrowful hip hop.

Oh yeah, next to the always-cool-nerd-channels (Discovery etc.)there is one cool channel, which I respect as a musician. It's called "Performance" and so far what I've seen has been opera, a Paul Simon concert and some really American-looking oldies singer, which was pretty cool. They also have live jazz and all kinds of cool stuff.

Well, enough of that. Leaving the country again on thursday, I should be back on monday morning if everything goes as planned. Enjoy la vie (as we say in the wine channel) until the next one.

Ta ta.

Thesis Time

So far, I've spent the last quarter of my life studying while working full-time, but now it feels that I've come to a point where I actually feel the difference. It's thesis time.

12 hours of classroom life left, drinking stale coffee, eating overly sweet pastries and slowly breaking down surfing in the internet. I think there are a lot of guys in my class, who would've lost their sanity without wireless internet.

1 exam left, no more of spending nights working on a finished exam, just because you need to artificially add literature references, which are a pain in the ass, since you have to spend extra time on trivial matters.

So after I'm finished with those, I'm only left with the thesis. Even though it has been hard to appreciate those annoying tasks and some courses, but at least now I know where to find literature references :).

So the next goal is in February, submitting the first draft of my thesis, hoping that everything will go fine until then.

200 days

Seems like the Gods of Blogging (not you Boing Boing) are mocking my feeble attempts to redeem myself.

It's been nearly 200 days from my last post to Mind Itch and the only think I'm wondering is where all the time went. I know that I've been busy, but 200 days seems like an eternity, especially when you remember your childhood and when two months to christmas felt like years.

Anyway, I've been pretty busy, I know - mainly setting up a new company called Barracuda, nifty little corporation with its personal blog which can be found in http://www.bcuda.com/fish/ - It will feature not only myself, but my partner in crime Ansis Egle and probably a few visiting stars.

Since Mind Itch will not have to be my personal semi-official playground, I can finally release it to be my personal ranting grounds, where I can be more active and I'll still have only one place to think what I'm saying.

It's still crazy warm in Latvia, closer to ten degrees and usually November should be pretty cold.

I'll keep you posted and remember to check Fish out of Water in the abovementioned address.

Cheers.

Resending

I just wrote a new article, but it seems to be lost in the void. Darnit.