Kirjoitin arvostelun Red Faction: Guerrilla -videopelistä Tilt.tv-sivustolle. Arvostelu on täällä.

An article I wrote for the 2003 Danish Knutebook, As Larp Grows Up, has been translated into Slovakian.

The article is called Fuck the Audience, or Vyserte sa na publikum. It’s available here.

Kannattaa googlata itseään. Sitä löytää kaikenlaista, kuten tällasen Avaa-lehdessä olleen artikkelin, johon mua haastateltiin taannoin. Aiheena roolipelit Suomessa.

Pettersson muistelee, naurahtaa, arvelee ja paljastaa!

Issue #21 of Roolipelaaja, the roleplaying magazine I edit, is at the printers!

Non-fiction: ed. Nancy Robinson Flannery: This Everlasting Silence - The love letters of Paquita Delprat and Douglas Mawson 1911-1914 (Melbourne University Press, 2000)

The Australian Douglas Mawson is an Antarctic explorer contemporary with his more famous colleagues Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott and Ernst Shackleton. He’s less known because he never attempted stunts like being first at the South Pole. Instead, he went to Antarctica purely for science. He suffered great calamity on a long and arduous sledging journey, losing one of his companions to a crevasse and the other to vitamin A poisoning. Poisoned himself, he staggered back to base without food, his skin falling off, only to miss the supply ship that would take him home by one day.

He also wrote one of the best Antarctic books published, Home of the Blizzard, about his travails.

Just before embarking for Antarctica, Mawson was engaged to a girl called Pequita Delprat. They were married three years later when Mawson finally came home. This book contains their love letters from the period Mawson was on Antarctica.

Sad to say, the book is only of very limited interest. Their correspondence was limited by the fact that there were very few opportunities to actually deliver the letters, so it’s actually a book with two running monologues. The title is Delprat’s phrase describing the feeling of not hearing anything from her berothed in months.

Perhaps due to the mores of the day and their relative naivete, neither Mawson nor Delprat is a particularly penetrating letter writer. There are allusions to issues that might be interesting, but they just never get there. It’s a book of inarticulate pining over vast distances.

There’s a lot of strange stuff on Pirate Bay. This looks promising:

Yoga and Meditation: Pathway to Destruction - Documentary

Here’s the uploader’s explanation. I highlighted the best parts:

Yoga’s practice in everyday situations — is it dangerous? Eastern meditation and yoga are being used by vibrant young businessmen, athletes and children for achieving better, healthier living. How ironic that these religious practices were originally designed in India to prepare the dying Hindu for the reincarnation process. Today, eastern mysticism is being carefully marketed as science and has successfully infiltrated the medical profession, the public school system, the U.S. government, and nearly all areas of mainstream western society. The great deception in the Cult of Hinduism is the alleged enlightenment. Trying to appeal to the Cult of Christianity the Hindu gurus typically redefine Jesus after their own likeness. Meditation is not a redeeming act other than becoming a mindless humn being. To get a look at what Meditation can do for you one only needs to look at India. A country where people let Cows piss on their head and call it a blessing. Where they worship rats in a very dirty temple. Worshiping millions of cooky Gods, EVEN EVIL GODS !!Yet their streets are dirty and filled with extremely handicapped people. You will find out why that is in this Documentary. Caring for humanity is not just an invention or philosophy. Anyone who thinks and expects that with just a little meditative will power he will reach NIRVANA is heading for an emotional catastrophe and possibly Schizophrenia. If that’s not enough they drink cow piss and the latest rage is Cosmetic Make-up made from cow shit. Is it me or does this seem like normal behavior.

The comments are in a similar vein of moderation. This guy sounds like he could use some meditation:

YET 40 % of the intelligent vibrant young businessmen, athletes and children for achieving better, healthier living all over the world Does Yoga…….
$%^& YOUR MAMA ARSE HOLE…………..
I think you are suffering from HIV after u fucked your sister who was in fact fucked by some retard arse hole like your father, who got infected with the same HIV virus after he fucked your mom……
Look Meditation cannot cure HIV , you should know it. u fuked ur mama and u get infected its totally ur proble mo56erfucker …. why blame meditation?????? ha ha ha
You should shoot yourself with an overdoes of heroine mixed with cow piss …..
Thats the only way people like u can achieve nirvana……..
Blaady RETARD !!!!!!!!!!!!!
If u dont know something try to ask someone, not to babble like this……..

I watched the Dennis Hopper movie Out of the Blue recently. The best part is this wonderful opening monologue where Linda Manz talks about punk.

The sequence is sampled in the Primal Scream song Kill All Hippies:

Uudessa Kumppani-lehdessä (4/2009) on kirjoittamani artikkeli videopelien Afrikka-kuvasta. Käsittelyssä ovat pelit Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5 ja Afrika. Juttu löytyy täältä. Tsekatkaa lopusta myös Kaarina Vainion tiivistelmä siitä, kenen selkänahasta halpa pelikonsoli revitään.

This was the first year in some time I missed the Nordic roleplaying conference Knutepunkt, organized this year in Norway. The Norwegians published their book on the net with exemplary speed, and it has an article by me as well.

The name of the book is Larp, the Universe and Everything, and it can be found here.

My article is about documenting roleplaying games and is called Pix or didn’t happen. Read it here.

This is inevitable when funds are cut from space programs.

Prostinauts

I once wrote a column for the culture section of Helsingin Sanomat about LOLcats. Now I found a blog with English translations of Russian lolcats. The flavor is different.

Cease your protests, the deal is done!  You are to make a fine wife for uncouth American businessman!

We sleep with vigor. Content with the knowledge that Lenin’s body shall never decay…

My living quarters are comprised of the bone meal of the bourgeois!

Issue #20 of Roolipelaaja, the roleplaying magazine I edit, is at the printers.

A friend sent me the link to this, a gallery of historical polar images called Freeze Frame. It’s maintained by the British Scott Polar Research Institute. There’s a lot of interesting stuff there, from photos almost a hundred years old to very recent stuff, like the one above.

My favorite manga artist Shintaro Kago has his own YouTube channel.

Terror of golf course

Terror of olympic game

James Gunn’s porn parody series PG Porn has a couple of new episodes. The tagline is: “For people who love everything about porn… except the sex.”

Helpful Bus

Roadside Ass-sistance