hiidenkonttibeta

Two days of work-related training endured. I made a new high-scrore in Tetris on the first day, but the second one was more interesting..

We had to fill MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) forms in advance, and were given the results on second day. I don’t exactly trust it – I got a lot of points in extrovertism, and that is something I most definetely am not (there must be something wrong with that questionnaire), but the other preferences matched. We also picked our psychological types from descriptions, and that method gave me INTP – the same result I got from tests in web both now and last year.

Anyway, reading about INTP type was fun. I’ll share some findings about living within my head.
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Today is Kalevala day. It seems to be one of the many flag-raising days.

How long do natural apples look good in room temperature? The “golden delicious” apple in the second photo has been sitting on my kitchen table for a month, and it’s only a tiny bit wrinkled. I’m starting to suspect that they might have used some preservatives on it.

A teacher (in yläaste) once asked us if anyone had seen a kiwi fruit tree. “Do they have hair already in the tree? Or do preservatives help it grow on them on a month long sea voyage from Kiwiland to Finland?” He wondered about mangos too. He suspected them being about plum-sized in their natural environment, but after enough preservatives are pumped into them, they swell into things we know as mangos – and which the mango farmers wouldn’t recognize.

“Robots don’t smile because they want to. They’re just programmed to do so – like humans recently.”

- Masamune Shirow: Ghost in the Shell

Motivated by the anime version I watched yesterday, I started re-reading Ghost in the Shell manga today. Shirow has my almost limitless admiration, for his works are sci-fi masterpieces – serious sci-fi dealing with cyborgs (I find the border between artificial life and humanity fascinating: if you start replacing your body parts with (bio-)mechanical parts, when do you become a cyborg? an artificial joint probably isn’t enough, but how about heart? if you keep going, when do you stop being human?) with a little unique humour thrown in (like ふちこま in GitS).

I also ordered 1st Intron Depot album, Dominion and Orion, which are missing from my Shirow-collection. It seems that there’s no Ghost in the Shell 2: Man-Machine Interface album yet, at least in English – I don’t think I’ll even try reading Shirow in 日本語 before a couple of years of active 日本語のべんきょう..

Sain tänään skannatuksi loppuun vuoden 2003 kuvasaaliin, graffitit poislukien. 86 säilömisen arvoista kuvaa, täytyy käydä ne vielä kunnolla läpi ja valikoida webbigalleriaan kelpaavat. Graffitikuvia on muutama rullallinen myöskin, mutta niissä ei onneksi ole pölyistä taivasta puhdistettavana..

Warm weather turns snow into slosh and water. Buildings become dangerous, since melting snow and ice on their roofs falls down on the streets, so parts of the sidewalks are closed with warning signs and strings. Anything less than gore-tex hiking boots feel like slippers.

I watched Ghost in the Shell again after a long while (meaning several months :-)
It’s still absolutely wonderful. I’d like to have it’s soundtrack, but Amazon asks $50 for it, which is pretty much for a CD…

四 photos on the way back home from the movie:

First one has wigs hanging in a barbershop window. They don’t look as scalpish in a bad quality photo as they do out there, at night..
Then there’s a car park building at night. Woohoo. But I see some potential for night shots in it.
Third one proves that it’s easy to lose an ice skate.
Last one’s a view from my apartment :-) Well, not really..

Yesterday’s Musta Romanssi goth/new wave/post-punk club night was a Midnight Movie Special: Poison Door showed an oldish vampire horror movie House of Dark Shadows from 16mm film. Not the best movie in existence (but then, old horror movies shouldn’t be judged on the same scale as modern productions – at least if you’re a fan of old horror movies ;-), but the experience was a nice one. Big thanks to Poison Door for arranging the event!

I tried, of course, to take a photo. It didn’t, of course, turn out very good:

After the movie I had a little chat with a foreigner who seemed to have wandered in a random bar. He had been in Oulu for two days and wondered if it’s always this cold in here during winter (well, it had been -26°C for two days, now it’s -5°C). He also wondered the appearance of the customers (well, it was a gothic club night) and the quietness of the place (see the previous wondering – “normal” people were probably scared).