Itching Mind

Nar-nee-aa. I actually never intended to have so much movie stuff going on in the blog, but since people seem to read it and I enjoy writing it - what the hell, hasn't killed anybody. I won't ponder long with the whole Narnia issue, just to make the point that it was pretty good, visually awesome but lacked in few small things:

1. Too many scenes directly copied from LOTR (weapon smithing, anyone? Only thing missing was good music and Saruman)
2. Rushing the scenes (in the book & TV series the death of **cough** takes a long time, now it flies by in 20 seconds)

Also, some sort of announcement. Mind Itch will develop in the coming year, we will expand our writer base and move to a more permanent home, update our graphics, internationalize our crew and try to become interesting. Sort of a collective you see, because I think my mates are bloody funny. And they're always funny when they're bleeding (har har).

Nerve-wrecking waiting on the whole issue of starting the next year, waiting to hear whether I get a job here before I head back to the Soviet Bloc, I'm optimistic. Would be really nice though.

Also, due to my return to the motherland, we're starting up new band and we are actively looking for the following visionaries in the capital area:

1 x Drummist
1 x Bass Slasher
1 x Guitareer
1 x Keyboardist
3 x Hornist (Saxophonist, Trumpetist and Trombonist or mixed combo platter)

Anyway, if you know or are an artist interested in some groovy jamming with some cool dudes, let us know.

Well, I'll hit you with some updates as soon as I hear where my life is going. Nerve-wrecking, it is.

Peace out.

March of the Pigs

Ham.

Nightmares.

The Pigs take up resistance, barricade themselves to the slaughterhouse.

Chaos ensues.

This Christmas was rather nice actually, even though we had to drive quite a bit to meet all family members, but it's just that easy when you have the right company with you. And not just Christmas, there have been quite a few other changes in my life - although more on the mental side. Due to the fact that I'm getting married next summer, I will move back to Finland for at least a few years and I realized that there's no point to keep delaying the inevitable. Can't say that I'm thrilled of the prospect of returning to Finland per se, but the external reasons override my personal preferences.

The Chronic(-What?-)cles of Narnia has also come to the cinemas, meaning that we definitely need to go see it. It's funny how few people actually know about the old classic. My generation saw the TV series, which rocked and I'm expecting quite a bit from the movie. At least the theme song rules.

I could bitch about the car taxation of Finland, probably leading me to sell my car before returning as I would have to pay over 20 grand of taxes, which I think I'll pass and get the bus pass.

Later boyos and girlies!

Ham-boy

Skype, Wikipedia and a world of ignorance

Seems like I'll never get to my Christmas ranting, but I promise it's on its way.

Hello from Finland! Just arrived last night and after a cold beer, sauna and some traditional Finnish food (tacos) I got to bed and spent a lot of time watching the good ol' Superman (the Gene Hackman-bad-hairdo-version) and damn it was boring. Anyways, after a well-slept night I saw the morning paper's weekend extra (Nyt) having Skype as its cover story. Somehow the life of a nerd doesn't feel so far away.

The article was the basic non-tech-person-writing-about-the-second- coming-of-Jesus-Christ-that-is-called-Skype, but there are two things that bugs me when people are writing about Skype - they make it sound like Skype invented audio conferences over the net - which they didn't, even MSN Messenger offered audio conferencing before Skype was a mere glimpse in the Swedes' eyes. True, Skype managed to do two things well: Market themselves as first movers and - this is second point that bugs me - market Skype as being free.

Free. Skype is not free as in free beer or as in free speech. First of all the technology is proprietary, meaning that
the chat function cannot be used through multi-account IM clients and basically people can't develop it freely - so much for free. Same thing with the calls, it's not free to call to a phone somewhere and you always have costs from your broadband etc. It's the same thing as if a mobile carrier would advertise that "EVERYBODY CALLS FOR FREE! (You just need to pay for those calls which are not toll-free numbers.)"

But in general, Skype is doing a lot of good things for the industry as a whole and who am I kidding here, marketing is all about hypocrisy.

I was approached by a mate from Sweden regarding the credibility on Wikipedia and he did this just before Nature magazine's article on the topic came out. Seems like Wikipedia is almost as reliable as the stalwart that is Encyclopaedia Britannica (sic), with Wikipedia having 4 factual errors per 3 errors of EB - but we have to take note that Wikipedias articles are way longer, so that should give Wikipedia some serious credibility. It's the only encyclopedia I use these days and I suggest you do the same and bring your effort to improve it.

The fun thing has been that the Wikipedia issue has been in many magazines and news portals, so it seems like the free encyclopedia is gaining some serious credibility even from the press.

You know what's creepy? Your mom sending you funny pictures through internet :|

King Kong

Oh my, oh my.

Unlike Doom, there are some movies that I have a lot of expectations about. King Kong is a classic, there's no denying that. Its strength lies behind a great story, that cannot be spoiled no matter how poor the movie would look. But this something Peter Jackson has done for King Kong is just something magnificent. When the first King Kong came out, it awed people by its progressive technologies and shocking animation - it showed a world before unknown to people and that's what kept people tied to the great story.

PJ's King Kong truly gave this same experience, not only did the movie look unbelievably good, but it was mesmerizing. There was more action in three hours than Steven Seagal's career put together, there were more emotions than all the crappy Christmas movies Hollywood produces every year and there were more CGI than in George Lucas' wet dreams. Just when you thought that the heroes got out of trouble, there was something else waiting just around the corner.

It just feels like everything in the movie just clicked together, the cast was very good - seeing excellent performances from Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts, not forgetting Jack Black who was actually acting really well and he didn't even need to do that thing with his eyes, but his transformation of an aspiring movie producer to a raving lunatic was done admirably well.

Then there's Kong, the towering colossus. From the start, the soundscape and the image of Kong were breathtaking. They portrayed a powerful, yet graceful image of the great ape. And to make sure people understood how much he kicked ass, he took on THREE (3) T-Rexes, while carrying the blonde heroine in his hand, or leg. It was really, really cool.

The movie had the basic three parts, a beginning (introduction to characters and setting), a middle (jungle wars 3000) and the end, which begun after Kong kicked some Jurassic ass just before he was captured. I was mainly crying the last hour of the movie, since somehow PJ managed to create a bond between myself and Kong and because I knew what would happen, it just made it worse.

The credits revealed that Andy Serkis (Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) was Kong, and maybe Serkis is just that good or he knows what PJ means when he says something, but the final acting of Kong on Empire State Building was excellent, thus increasing the sadness of his ultimate fate.

It also looked like Peter Jackson was trying out some concepts for maybe another Tolkien film, the dinosaurs were excellent practice for Smaug and the portrayal of strength is something that's needed. In my opinion King Kong has proven that Peter Jackson can take a good story, keep it and make it look good - which is exactly what the Hobbit will need. (Except that in this one, Glamdring NEEDS to glow like Sting did in LOTR). Of course it's not only PJ that's doing all the work - he has good writers with him, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh and the crews from WETA workshop and Wingnut.

I can't wait.

Oh yeah, leaving to Finland tomorrow to spend the Christmas with my bride and our families, might be a small lag in writing here, but I should I'll have some juice in cursing Christmas.

More Doom and ranting

Continuing on the topic of Doom - no, not the crap disloyal movie, but the original classic and especially its music. I was asked to perform on a few songs on the Doom 2 remix project, and since usually remixes are pretty crappy similar to the loyalty of the movies I went out to check out the backgrounds of these dudes making the remakes of the classics. It seems like they have already done the same treatment for the first Doom and boy do the songs kick ass.

Check them out here, use the torrent file to save their bandwidth, please: http://doom.ocremix.org/

Doom was something what was über-hot when we were kids, fragging classmates with a 14.4k modem (which are now called dial-ups, because you need to go through the internet ;)) and even though I usually got my ass kicked, I have fond memories of those days. I royally suck in multiplayer FPS games, and I've actually never even specially liked multiplayer games in general.

I don't know about most people, but for me games are like books, they have a story and sometimes you even have the possibility to change it, although this trait seems to be endangered these days. I can't recall any new game where you could get so lost that you couldn't find your way back, unlike in oh so many adventure games of the mid-90's. Of course you can't get lost in a book, but when the games I like are similar to books (Sci-fi, Fantasy, Adventure, Strategy) - It's just stupid to play them head-to-head, since that would be like reading a book where people would constantly change what you're reading.

Speaking of good games - about a month ago I spent a weekend playing old Lucasarts' classics (by using SCUMMVM) and finished Sam&Max, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Fate of Atlantis. It was crazy how difficult some of the puzzles were and I was seriously wondering how the hell could I have played them through when I was a kid. Also it was pretty surprising to see how short and linear the games were - when they felt huge as a kid. But if they would have been books, they probably would have felt huge also. As the games I like are like books, it means that some games are also like good books, you can read them over and over again over a decent interval - such as the classics I just mentioned.

Still, there are some good games coming out once in a while. I just finished Splinter Cell - which was basically Thief in a modern environment and it was a really pleasant surprise, as was Halo. And yes, I'm pretty damn skeptical about new games, especially if they're made for the console.

But that's how it goes. By the way, Open Transport Tycoon kicks ass, but there just one bad thing, tool tips are missing. Quite annoying when being so used to them.

Until the next time, I think I'll be ranting about Christmas.

Go out once in a while!

Do you remember when we were kids and our parents told us to go out because we were spending too much time with the computer? (I'm guessing that those kids like me and my friends are also the ones reading blogs.) Little they knew, that we would more or less be making our money by using computers. I think that this trend has been always existing, before computers the kids watched too much videos, before that too much television, before that it was probably too much books. Probably in the stone age there was a kid, who wanted to stay in the cave and just paint cave paintings and his parents were grunting him to go out and practice mammoth killing.

I'm sure that we will be just the same. But because it seems like computers are here to stay and most of the people I know are using computers several hours per day. I - being a nerd, am using my Powerbook constantly. It's my morning news paper and my source of TV series, it's my work horse and it's my communications tool, it's my gaming machine and a tool for creativity. Seeing as my bride is also fluent with computers, I see us using computers quite a lot in a possible future where we have children - meaning that we would be quite hypocritical to send our kids out in the blizzard outside. Although, now that I think about it, my parents were watching just as much TV as I was when I was a kid, and they still pushed me outside :).

Of course, I spent my youth playing basketball 5-6 times a week, meaning that I was usually pretty tired and didn't have much interest in doing any extra exercising and now I can say thank god I spent a lot of time with computers.

Well, let's see what the future holds.