The AG Communal Diary: Vol. 3 (now with graphics!)
 

http://www.pankration.homestead.com/...cago_night.jpg

3/2/04, Monday, 12.21am

I finally moved back into the city. Chicago, my crib, metropolis, geographical center of my universe. It is not the city that has changed, it is I. Or rather, my period of isolation had re-rendered me in a way that I felt removed, from living in the cornfields, from living in the city. I suppose this was by choice. I was merely existing in the cornfields for the past three years, my physical being taking up space in my brother’s house. My spirit, however, became hermetic and unreachable, the world couldn’t touch me, even as I surveyed it from the clinical glassed view of the Internet, on which I spent huge amounts of time while holed up in my room. And I let it be. I wasn’t trying to escape from the reality outside the front door by doing this, no. More accurately, I adapted digital reality over the reality outside the front door because it was the only thing to do. Isolation and the sense of dislocation presented me with no choice, ‘living’ on the Internet was my only defense against the kind of death that rural existence issues. That and temporarily severing ties from my friends, all of whom live in the city and all the culture and spiritual amenities it has to offer. I found myself visiting downtown Chicago less and less, and now I realize why: the more I go and ride the hour long train in, the more cut off and distant I’d feel. ‘Doing the town’ for a day every few weeks wouldn’t alleviate my sense of dislocation and isolation, it would exacerbate it.

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but this move, however ardently I looked forward to it, felt like a milestone and yet at the same time felt like nothing at all. Which doesn’t necessarily denude it of value. It means the whole world to me at this moment, but also there’s a sense of continuity, as if it’s perfectly natural for me to get on with myself, pick up from the day I had to relocate to the ‘burbs three years back, without missing a beat. I feel now that I can take my time with the city this time, and because of this it will open up to me in ways it never had when I was younger, when I was more materialistic, when I was on the verge of falling in love, when I was full of ideals.

And as I write this and wait for my chamomile tea to steep and cool down, I look out the window at the pristine nighttime metropolis, the silhouetted skyline of downtown Chicago, black but peppered with tiny lights, it seems at once calm and volatile, perfectly still and unpredictable, and I feel at home in a rhythmic storm. That’s fine, because perfect weather can be so fucking boring.

I haven't vacuumed my room for three weeks.

OK, so to be honest, that's pretty common. What is uncommon is that my desk looks like a mess, and so does the floor. They're practically littered with books and papers and whatever I have needed when revising for the matriculation examination. The first exam is Finnish test number One, and it's on next Monday.

Its important to have some light reading when studying, something to take your mind off things. So I bought Stephen Hawking's University in a Nutshell. I don't undersand a word from it.

I also tried to read LOTR, as I noticed my Finnish had degraded into the level of a three-year-old - due to the fact that I read more English than Finnish, and also because the textbooks I've been cramming through have absolutely horrible language.

One day I opened LOTR, in Finnish, and was shocked. Finnish, when written well, is such a beautiful language... it felt like a new experience to understand each sentence completely, and I was purified. For a few seconds. Now I'm back to being the over-hyperdriven nervous... thing. The fear from the finals also explain why I have created more of those strange polls of mine.

The exams last for three weeks. 2 x Finnish, English, Swedish, German, Physics, Maths. I got 21/24 from the physics preliminary exam, which would give me the best grade... I hope for the best (ie that the exam is simple ;) ).

Every morning I start studying at 9.30 and finish after six or seven hours... And then I also should get some work done with the Curves of Danger... Phew!

Tomorrow starts the fourth and final period in my polytechnic university and after that the summer vacation begins. I don't care less to go into that place right now, but I can't get a job anywhere so I guess I'll go there sometimes. My main goal is the entrance exams to the real university in June. I haven't read the required books so much yet, but I'll have to start reading soon, or the result is the same like last year, failure.

It's just that I'm spending "a little" too much time with my computer recently, maybe because I'm still recovering from knee surgery and can't do much else, or because I'm just lazy. Well, anyway in next month things will change...

I have been locked in my room - well not really locked, more like hidden - for the past week or so, making that game of mine. It is really intense, exhilarating and I am loving it. I could see myself in crunch mode for years on end - as long as the game is good.

Jussi: Du pratar Svenska?

I'm working hard to get my uni projects going, doing piles of research on things ranging from ancient Greece to gorillas and jaguars (the cat, not the car), starting to do the actual modeling, animation and design and wondering how I'm going to get it all done in about two months. Then I'm trying to get a placement for next year, hoping to get one at Revolution, but I think I'm going to have to rock their socks off with a new animation on VHS through the mail cause either my emailed animation got lost along the way or they didn't like it much. Also applied to a few other companies. We'll see how it goes.

Just reading the online news... Haider is winning in Austria and conservatives are taking over in Greece. Hooray for facism and greed! In the meanwhile Bush continues to terrorize the world, Sharon does the same locally and Bakellende and his cronies are doing theirs to make Holland a lesser place. Wonderful.

I tend to cook decent food myself, but today I can't be asked, so a Tandoori chicken pizza with no cheese should be arriving any minute now.

Been having great fun playing a pirate version of Monkey Island, which fits in nicely with my decision to not buy anything from LucasArts until they stop acting like Disney... I'll bet Randy Breen fights like a cow.

Hm, make "any minute now" "any half-hour now". I'm getting kinda hungry...

"Something's Gotta Give" is a fun film. Saw it in the cinema the other day. Was watching "The Game" on tv last night. Brilliant film. Fincher is the king.

"There is no correlation between guns and violence" - Bastich

I am Jack's puzzled expression.

The pizza was nice.

I haven't vacuumed my room EVER.... unless you count that time in september when I moved in. Dust just plain refuses to collect in here. The other thing is I'm allergic to mites, and we've got one of those nice vacuum-cleaners that blows the mite-filled air straight out again, effectively making things worse than before the vacuuming. I try to avoid it.

Bitch. I never had tandoori chicken pizza. Hate you.

[remembers this is a diary thread]..... :(

Um, today is, um Sunday, and it's overcast and very windy outside. I'm sipping orange juice.

I've never had orange j-- hang on, actually I have. Never mind.

:( !!!!

Hmm, I checked my academic schedule for next period, and it turns out that I don't have any classes tomorrow or any Monday from here to the start of May.

Well that's fun.

It seems I'll be spending tomorrow inside my room. Hopefully doing more than *playing with the computer*

Oh, I forgot, tomorrow I'm going to repair my car, yessss, finally some real work me. :)

It's the evening, and I'm about to go watch telly. I've been doing loads of work, contemplating actually writing an article, and waiting patiently for my copy of Deus Ex: Invisible War to arrive.

Sorry, Trep. Don't hate me for eating strange blends of Italian and Indian cuisine. ;)

Maybe you should stop by Middlesbrough sometime and get one yourself. Then again, maybe you shouldn't. It's not all that nice a place. Tandoori Chicken and Teesside university are really the only good excuses to be hanging around here.

Got back this evening from being home at my mother's house for a few days. Shelves and fridge are full of food, clothes are clean, all is good. Now back to my regular weekly timetable of sleep, college, work and sitting around doing not much.

Well, off I go now. I need to set up some skeletons into the finished flesh, figure out how to make the suspenders flex the right way, and then I'm gonna shoot it all. In that marvelous pastime I plan to spend the next couple of days.

...and BTW, the game will be cell-shaded and it will look great. You may wince before that hyphenated expression I know many of you despize, but I don't care. Considering the amount of frames I plan to have, this would definitely be more time efficient than drawing it all by hand. I make one walk cycle, and immediately I have it from all 8 directions.

Not really that well, but I can fake it good enough to get an Eximia (the second best grade).


I've been listening for the Trio Töykeät album High Standards. Its not _that_ great. Fusion is definitely better than jazz, and this record has absolutely NO fusion.

What... I should bne studying!! *logs off*

Well, it was actually really hot today -- for the first time in ages -- so I went to the beach!

Yesterday, after an eight-hour work day which started at 7 a.m. and included a cumbersome task of passing an authorization to a merchant in Nepal where a creditcard holder of ours was trying to make a $6000 purchase, I overate Nepalese food in a tired, hangover fashion with a friend of mine in an overpacked restaurant with an interior design straight out of Starting Your Own Ethnic Restaurant for Dummies (complete with panoramic photographs of Annapurna and kitschy renditions of Hindu gods), after which we acquired an unhealthy amount of mint and orange chocolate and sat through the DVD of Sin noticias de Dios in the stylish downtown apartment of another friend who we found still in bed at 6 p.m. This was followed by indescribably jaded humor and piano renditions of the themes to Winnie the Pooh and Goldfinger by the sensational live acoustic piano playback system - "as if the original pianist were right there at the keyboard". It was spooky. A tram trip later I found myself exhausted back at my own 6th floor apartment.

well here it goes... my first entry in the communal diary:

Being unemployed sucks donkey ass, yeah, you get loads of time of, but after a week of doing nothing but sitting behind your pc you tend to get a bit bored.

But! I got an interview tomorrow which I'm kinda scared of cause it will be my firsat real job interview. Lets just hope they are just as nervous aswell :)

I'm listening to the excelent DJ palotai sunday session from tilos radio, a hungarian radio station that puts their exelent mixsets online for free.

Finished Call of Duty and freedom fighters this weekend, both nice games, but freedom fighters lacks a good story, gameplay is good tho. Call of Duty is a great game, heavily scripted, but great fun :) I think that every soldier that fought in the war must be stone deaf cause those mg42's are deafening!

Time to get working on my project again...

OK, I take back what I said about that Töykeät record. It's awesome - especially Celia/Reflections and Confirmation are grand. Go buy it! Or rather, steal it, since the record company has put copy protection to it, and as a real anarchist you should rebel against that kind of business. I mean, Töykeät is hardly hit music, so I don't see the point in copy protecting the CD - the target audience probably has so much money they buy TWELVE albums. Instead, as a result, I can't transfer the CD to my minidisc optically. Grrr.

OK, so buy the record and a cable you can use for analogue recordings...

Only a couple of days 'till hell (=Matricuation Examination) breaks loose. As you are all eagerly anticipating the results, you can go vote here.

The Curves of Danger is getting finished, slowly but surely. Trust me. If you could infiltrate my computer, you'd find things related to the project that would shock you severely and make you want to get the full product in your hands right now - things like some of Eirik's brilliant music, the Notepad (my own WME creation), the cool yet-to-be-released website of the project, and, of course, the script that would tell you all the details about the mysterious characters and the twisted plot full of suspension. But you can't do that, so you'd better send us some money instead, so that we can become school dropouts and finish the game tomorrow. Go to http://www.foreverdreamstudios.com NOW, baby! and find our contact information! If you decide to express your gratitude to Rich, our 3D background artist, send him food (bananas are probably all right), since he has sacrificed many of his lunchbreaks in order to bring YOU, dear reader, the best visual experience any adventure game has offered so far. You should feel a little guilty because you still haven't helped us in our feeble attempt to nourish the artistically, morally and financially bankrupt adventure genre. Therefore, give yourself a moral boost and help us!

Anyway.

I saw northern lights last night. They looked beautiful, even though they were of the boring green variety.

The exam (Finnish) was quite strange, since this year they even had ALL substance and no easy stuff - everything was somehow connected to history, the social situations, etc. Usually there is at least one lighter subject.

I don't remember what I wrote about (quite strange since the test ended a few minutes ago...) but I hope I got a sufficient grade. We'll see.