Der Übergeek

Summer. No schoolwork to be done, since I turned in the essay for Anglo-American Science Fiction over a week ago, and the English translation of the Stalker RPG five days before that. One article and a short story I am sort of prodding at, but I'm not sure if there is anything I can add to the first or anything I can get out of the latter. Probably not.

So, I've been reading. A lot. Last week, I finished A Game of Thrones. I first read it sometime back in high school, which may throw it as far back as ten years. Disliked it back then, didn't get much out of it. On reread, it's quite an excellent fantasy novel. Martin has a way with words, and I like how the novel takes you inside the characters' heads. It is interesting, for example, how Sansa's blind acceptance of every lie that gets fed to her manages to bring across the duplicity of the other characters even more than Eddard's natural suspicion.

After that, I finished Consider Phlebas, the first of Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. I'd previously read Use of Weapons, which is a small masterpiece. Consider Phlebas... was not. Not a bad novel by any means, but not nearly up to the standard or expectations set by Use of Weapons. It does have a most impressive special effects budget, though. Huge scale, lots of explosions.

After that, it was Sharpe's Rifles. Not much to comment on that. I've been reading them for the past year or so. They're immensely unsurprising, but they're fun, light reading, and in a few novels of the series, there's Sergeant Hakeswill, who makes it into my top ten of the most disgusting villains of all time.

After that, Changes, the newest novel of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files (until Ghost Story comes out later this month). Excellent stuff, like all Dresden Files. Not much else to say, lest I spoil something. Butcher still has his finger on the pulse of the geek, and his characters quote not only Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but also Princess Bride.

Now, reading Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, the first part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen. The book comes strongly recommended, but 100 pages in, I'm not yet convinced. For one thing, it has pretty much all possible warning signs there are - the book starts with 36 pages of preface, maps, middling poetry and a six-page Dramatis Personae before getting into the actual novel, and there's a nine-page glossary at the back to supplement those. There are eleven books in the series and they're all big, fat bastards. This one is about 730 pages. Oh, and it's based on the writer's old roleplaying game setting. It hasn't yet grabbed me, but I will soldier on until I meet the back cover and pass final judgment then.

At least the series is finished so we know he's not gonna pull a Jordan on us.

In all honesty, I shouldn't hold it against the novel that it's inspired by roleplaying games. I mean, George R.R. Martin's work has been inspired by RPGs, too (the Wild Cards series is based on an old campaign of his). Jim Butcher probably still plays. His characters play. Charles Stross designed monsters for the original Fiend Folio. Neal Stephenson had roleplaying games as a plot point in Cryptonomicon. China Miéville hasn't been gaming for some time, but he still buys monster books for RPGs just because he loves monsters. They all write good stuff. Excellent stuff, even. Some of the best stuff out there.

I'm just not yet convinced that Erikson does. We'll see.

I've been watching the new Game of Thrones TV series from HBO. Five episodes in, it's most nifty.

The series is based on the fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin. I read the first two books some ten years ago, but they didn't hook me. Now, though, I've started rereading the first one, A Game of Thrones, trying to keep pace with the series and reading this as I go on. It's a couple of bloggers reading the books and commenting their thoughts on each chapter. They're only 26 chapters into the first book, though, and I think the series caught up with them a week or two ago, and I'm not far behind either.

Rereading the book has been interesting. I was sixteen or something when I first read the two first books, and I missed pretty much every intricacy of the plot and detail of characterization, not to mention Martin's skilful use of the language and evocative descriptions.

Aaanyway, the TV show.

It's very different from what you'd expect from a fantasy show. Like, it's good. It's pretty much what you would expect from HBO, though - lavish sets, technical proficiency, a bare breast here and there, and no skimping on the blood when the situation calls for it.

It does that, occasionally, but not as much as could be imagined. There's combat and violence, but overall, the series is much more like Rome than, say, Xena. It's about intrigue and the plots of noble families - like it says in the title, the game of thrones. Who gets the throne, wins. It's debatable whether there are such things as good guys and bad guys, even though Sean Bean's Eddard Stark gets presented to us as the hero.

Sean Bean... there's another point, there. The casting is sublime, as it would need to be for a series that is carried by its characters. I do here declare that the series has the best casting I have ever seen. Yes, I claim it is better than The West Wing's casting. While there are some minor missteps (Renly Baratheon springs to mind), most of the actors carry their roles with poise and verve, and deliver incredible performances. Hell, there are three child actors, none of whom are annoying (okay, Joffrey is, but that's the character). There are some true masters at work here, such as Peter Dinklage, who plays the dwarf (not the Gimli kind) Tyrion Lannister and steals every scene he's in. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is equally awesome as his brother Jaime. Mark Addy, known for comedic roles, surprised everyone by being awesome as King Robert Baratheon.

The series intro is also tremendously well done. In addition to featuring good music and looking pretty, it serves a narrative purpose - the camera visits all the different places in the world that the episode features. It is fast replacing John Adams' intro as my favourite.

Ah, magnificent stuff. I cannot wait for the DVD set to become available.

I got the first draft of my BA thesis done on Wednesday. It's a good 500 words short of what it should be and lacks a conclusion, but I don't think that matters since it's likely crap anyway. We'll be poring over it on Tuesday.

That should be an interesting experience, since what I've got is a descriptive treatise on the character of Solomon Kane in Robert E. Howard's stories, with lots of big quotation blocks from the stories. While this is mostly to illustrate my points, I must admit to going a bit quote-happy because Howard's prose is just so vivid and powerful that it's fun to quote. Robert Weinberg, who I didn't manage to include in the bibliography, put it well when he said that Howard reads well aloud. It's red-blooded, strong text about barbarians, revenge, and death. "It has fallen on me, time and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives."

The most popular topic in the group was African-American feminism. The contrast should provoke interesting reactions.

It's the time of Tampere kuplii now, the local comics festival. True to form, I managed to get myself chained to a table, doing PR for Ropecon. Raising awareness and all that rot.

Last night, after the Fingerporijazz event ended at Plevna, we crawled onwards to other bars. One of these was Laterna, where we caught the tail end of the evening party for the Feminist Culture Days, or whatever that one was. When we ascended the stairs, the first thing we saw was a bunch of young women at the bar, who turned to look at us and giggled. Half of them were bald.

It was the most estranging bar experience I've ever had. We drank our six-euro Karjalas swiftly and beat a hasty retreat.

Eeeh.

There has been a long silence. Months. Probably the longest silent period I've had here, since I started blogging back in 2003 or thereabouts.

Mostly, there hasn't been all that much to write about. Well, that's inaccurate. There's been loads to write about, the problem's rather been that I was unwilling to write about it, let alone publish it.

Anyway, there was a girl. She was French. Still is, to my knowledge. We dated, and it ended with her breaking my heart, and I'm still not entirely over it. At this time, the details are irrelevant.

Apart from that, it's now the spring term. It's started off pretty weird. I figured a couple of days ago that I have a shitload of stuff to read for school, but all the really mandatory stuff is either science fiction, science fiction criticism, or sword & sorcery fantasy.

This spring is mostly about doing my BA thesis, and completing the course Anglo American Science Fiction. For the former, I'm studying Solomon Kane stories, and for the latter... well, that one went weird. I'll be discussing that in a future entry. For now, suffice it to say that the teacher bowed out of the course and left us to our own devices.

Also, when I started writing this post, I found a post from months ago, a discussion of the Alter Ego anniversary party back in... October or November or something. I thought my computer crashing had eaten the post, but now that it's been found again, I'm happy to reproduce the draft down below.

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So, I've got two weeks off school.

Technically, it's only one week, the period break week, but next week there's the Helsinki Book Fair and my parents are heading off to London for a few days and it's more convenient if I'm around in Espoo to keep an eye on the house and water the plants. So, two weeks. This involves some e-mails to some lecturers, but they're my first absences of the year and I doubt I'll get kicked out quite yet.

So, I've been hanging out with the Alter Ego folks at their events, lazily doing some schoolwork, went to see Inception with a nice girl who stalked me off Facebook (As opposed to the girl who stalked me off LiveJournal, but that was a few years ago. I seem to have a stalkable quality.). Got devoured by Cthugha in Arkham Horror yesterday and some genestealers in Death Angel on Saturday. For some reason, games are always more fun when there's a chance to get your head bitten off by something indescribably horrible.

November approaches. NaNoWriMo is close. The IRC channel gets new users, and there's this cloud of angst that starts to form when people get anxious about what to write. The channel has been there since 2004 or thereabouts and some of the regulars don't even participate in NaNoWriMo anymore, but the place is like a second home to them.

We'll see if I'll be writing anything this year. I have no plot, no plans and no concrete ideas. I'm feeling some social pressure to participate, though, so I can't quite yet say that I'm sitting this one out.

TYR, the Tampere University RPG Club, turned 15 yesterday. There was a party.

Dagen efter, I had five people sleeping in my apartment, a metre-long drinking horn in my living room and a mild headache. From this, we can deduce it was an excellent party. I also ran into dugih, who did not remember we had actually met in person, at the Bill Bridges fan meetup a day before Ropecon some years ago. The equivalent celebration in Helsinki is in two weeks.

This offers an interesting opportunity to observe cultural differences. For instance, Alter Ego throws an anniversary party every year - their membership is active and fairly large and surprisingly tight-knit. I assume this is because they have a clubroom of their own, while TYR has to do with the library at O'Connell's Irish Pub. By contrast, TYR only celebrates every five years.

Also, TYR - and really, pretty much the Tampere University as a whole - has no song culture, while AE's songbook is going into its second printing. I was at the song workshop a week ago to work on new material for the new edition, and one of the songs we wrote together is pretty much the worst thing I have done in my life. I am delighted to reproduce it beneath the cut, though the non-Finns will likely get exceptionally little out of it.

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In other news, the lecturer for the British Historical Fiction course I mentioned in my last update did accept "The Shadow of the Vulture" for the course. We're covering it next Thursday, and I have to introduce the text. Hilarity shall ensue. I think I'll bring a Red Sonya album for use as a visual aid.

IT HAAAAAAAAAAAAS BEGUN!

it's a week into the autumn semester and all the courses have started. My weekly schedule looks strangely empty, with only ten hours of classes on it, in four different courses, but then you realize that each one of those represents five or six points of study credit, with a proportional amount of work. There will be essays, analysis, reading and actual work involved.

It's fun work, though. There's courses like Shakespeare, where we read Twelfth Night, Henry IV, Part I, The Winter's Tale and that Scottish play, and watch them, and analyze them. I have this perverse idea for an essay on that last one where I'd never actually name the play but refer to it in increasingly outrageous euphemisms.

There's British Historical Fiction, where a recommended reading list includes not only Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series, but also Horatio Hornblower and Harry Paget Flashman. In addition, we get to make suggestions for a couple of texts and perhaps a movie. It's just a pity that Howard's "Shadow of the Vulture" is probably too long. And, well, not all that British. I can try, though. As for film, Kingdom of Heaven's Director's Cut is really way too long, and the theatrical cut is useful mostly as a coaster. Rob Roy, perhaps, a curiosity for being based on the same historical character as Sir Walter Scott's novel, while not being based on the novel itself. Scott, of course, is generally regarded as the first writer of historical novels, and our first text for the course is a story from Chronicles of the Canongate.

Then there's Theory and Methodology, or Theory & Meth, as we tend to call it, with the implicit suggestion of the recreational habits of some of the writers we read. A very popular course, though I figure the flunk rates are relatively high. I'm only on reserve, and it's not yet certain I can even get in. We shall see on Monday.

Finally, a history course on ancient Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages. I may have mentioned it before, which is because I took the same damn course last year and sorta never got around to taking the exam. This year the damned thing is during the bloody Helsinki Book Fair! On top of that, one of the lecturers recognized me from last year, which was mildly... embarrassing.

I actually welcome the chance to do some actual schoolwork for a change. Dealing with annoying books is far easier than dealing with annoying people. Getting the hell out of town to air myself out in an entirely different social circle might also be a good idea.

Helsinki Comics Festival today. I'm so there.

The autumn semester is beginning on next Wednesday. The two weeks preceding it are probably busier than when the classes start. Due to some strange mental impairment I signed up as a tutor for the second year running, and have been organizing and attending different events for the first-years with the other tutors.

With the other tutors, that is, because the first-years are mostly keeping away. I understand they often have valid reasons, such as being stuck in Kajaani or Lapland, or still working, but thus far, I've only met seven of the fourteen students in my tutor group. Last Wednesday, we had a kyykkä event between three tutor groups. Between us nine tutors, we have forty-four first-years to guide and advise and entertain. A grand total of four showed up.

Then, it did rain. We never played, but instead slipped off to O'Connell's for the pub quiz. True to form, by my final calculation our points were 12++, while the third place team got 12++++ (The plus points are given for certain questions if the team can provide extra data, such as with a question of "What film did Martin Scorsese win his first Best Director Oscar for?", there could be a plus point for remembering the year. They're used as tiebreakers in the final tally.). We always seem to almost, but not quite, place. Once, we even got an even tie with the third place but then failed the tiebreaker question.

At least, there seem to be 21 people signed up for the party at my apartment on Tuesday. Only eleven are tutors. Possibly for the better if this place isn't crowded too much. While I have completely ridiculous amounts of space for a lone student, we do not wish to breach the More the Merrier Barrier, which is the point where the party's population starts to have an adverse effect on the fun, in the form of noise or other issues. Also, I'm the one who has to clean up the day after.

Fortunately, English-language students tend to be a well-behaved lot and I don't have to fear anyone urinating off the balconies or barfing into my cactus. Hopefully.

This journal has been a bit dead for a while, now. It's what you get when there's so much going on in your life you don't have time to tell anyone about it. The con season has really kicked off now and I have even less time, but occasionally one must take a moment off from proofreading and game schedules, lest insanity ensue.

We had Tracon two weeks ago in Tampere. I spoke at a panel there and made a terrible hash of it, but then, there were six of us in a 40-minute time slot, so I didn't have all that much airtime to babble incoherently. Tracon is changing in interesting ways. The venue is bigger than before and moving the event to the summer is more friendly to the cosplay crowd, who dress for looks, not for weather. This, in turn, drives off the gamer audience.

Me, I've noticed that I've become blind to the cosplayers. I was walking through the Tampere House with a less experienced friend who kept gawking and going "WTF?", while I didn't even notice any of the outfits that so shocked him. I guess that enough Ropecons and Finncon/Animecons can have that effect.

I wrote a more detailed report of Tracon to the other blog - Audiences of Seven, Maid RPG and the Heat of a Thousand Suns.

Next up is Finncon in Jyväskylä, starting on Friday. At last, a Finncon without an Animecon, where we can focus on the stuff that matters - ray guns and giant lizards! I'm crashing at skiriki.

A week after Finncon is the big one, the devourer of my free time and eater of my sanity - Ropecon 2010, at the Dipoli Conference Centre in Espoo. Game Master signup is now closed and the bits of the weekend I'm not up to my ears in science fiction I'll be working on scheduling them and assigning them tables.

So, that's what I've been up to.

Though it may at times look like this journal has been abandoned, this is not so, and I still follow the Friend List. I'm trying to pick up the pace a bit here, perhaps starting to review books, or something.

We love our conventions in Finland. We have roleplaying game conventions, we have board game conventions, LARP conventions, science fiction conventions, anime conventions, we even have goddamn Japanese rock conventions. Our love of cons is so overwhelming that it was only a matter of time before a little event I attended yesterday would have come to pass: Concon, the convention convention.

Basically, it was seven hours of talks and workshops about aspects of organising a volunteer con and the trials and tribulations that come with it - the care and feeding of your guests of honour and so forth.

After hearing from the anime and J-rock crowd about their GoHs, I am even happier about how low-maintenance the Ropecon guests of honour are in comparison. They all speak English and don't need an interpreter, nobody has a manager they want to bring along or riders we need to sign. At the worst, they'll get drunk and try to pick a fight with Tony Halme in a bar.

So, there we were, some 60-70 organisers and adminstrators from different conventions. If one would've wanted to shut down all Finnish RPG, anime and sci-fi conventions plus the big LAN party events, they would've blown up Hervanta yesterday.

Conklaavi would've survived, because it happened to be scheduled on the same weekend.

After the program was done, we filed down to the sauna for the less formal bit of getting soused and making new friends.

Then, I get a text message from the guy responsible for organising our trip to the National Meeting of English Students, telling that he'd blown the deadline by two weeks. Oops. Last year was awesome, and I was really looking forward to this. I'd even translated Electric Six's "Gay Bar" into bad Old English for our performance. In all, this was the kind of news that result in bloody murder, fire and death.

My response was to first turn off the sound on my mobile phone. Then, I turned it off entirely. Then, I took it to my backpack and buried it deep. Then, I cracked another beer.

A couple of beers and few hours of intense steam cooking in the sauna later, I had quite forgotten about it and was happily toasting the generals and battles of the Napoleonic Wars with fellow con organisers.

Thus, I dub this the General Sandels Method of Anger Management.