Review

It captures well the frustration that I have with approaches to life that require IQ and wide reading.

It also blames others for my own faults, which is not a good thing. The disclaimer shows that I was aware of it but couldn't formulate the thoughts in a proper way which would have avoided it.

It ignores the notable entertainment value of hanging out with go players, concentrating on utility.

It could be more focused.

Drunk: Can't Stop Blogging

First, a disclaimer. This post is not about you, it's about me noticing that the approach which has evidently brough much happiness for you is totally useless for me, and about formulating an alternative.

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Being the attention whore that I am, can't stop blogging. The problem with blogging is that it brings indifferent kind of attention. Not good attention - the attention of new people in general and women in particular. Not bad attention - the attention of people who are waiting to use the info against me. Just indifferent attention - attention which does not have even potential significance to my happiness now or in 10 years.

There is something peculiar in the circle of people who read this blog and who I've seen face to face. I'm referring to the go player demographic. Their talk seldom touches relevant and important things, but always lingers around and teases enough to have kept me in their company for years. Here are a few examples.

1) Market value talk.
This talk peaked in the Habsburger days when finding girlfriends was a timely challenge for them. They talked about it in very abstract terms, using evolutionary psychology for justification and quoting the behaviour of apes. Maybe they were able to draw links between everyday behaviour and the high theory, but for me, something way more concrete like Rules of the Game would have much better.

2) Despite many of them working in the same profession, not once have I heard them tell their pay. Yeah, thanks a lot for the help in pay negotiations. Instead, there is an unwritten rule to avoid discussion about work-related topics.

3) Political crap. Talking about it is a fun pasttime, but who cares?

One important exception is programming, a topic which is both practical and where their talk is on the same level, at least as long as no one mentions category theory.

Warnings (2003)

This cheap thriller is in my opinion a masterpiece, but most people hate it deeply. I can't recommend it to anyone, since most people have the same taste as most people.

The atmosphere is really thick, and keeps the viewer in suspense all the time. It starts in Stephen King style with an extremely intense scene. There is a man living alone in a farm house. He's drunk, carrying a gun and scared as hell that aliens are coming to get him, proclaiming loudly that he's ready to take them. There's a psycho-style scarecrow in a sofa, and he's talking with it all the time. Then there are noises and strange lights and the man starts to chase them, but it's not clear if he's just lunatic or if he's after something.

The main events start when a cousin of the man in the farm house hears that the he's dead. He goes on to clear the house with a group of his friends. The suspense stems firstly when they discover various signs of lunacy, secondly when they start to see inklings of the phenomena that caused the lunacy, and lastly about aliens themselves.

The strength of the film is that it relies on dialog and instead of showing the beast, it describes people's reaction to the signs left by the beast. The second strength is the intense atmosphere, which is created by skillful play with viewer's expectations, good soundtrack and massive but controlled onmarch of pretty much every suspense trick you have ever seen in any thriller.

On meta-level, the film works even better. The director is showing off and making a challenge to others. He's saying "I'm showing you how thrillers should be done! I can make this good film by concentrating on storyline, atmosphere, social interactions and other things that matter! Keep your special effects, all I need is 12 days and a budget under one million!" Here are the observations that support this:

• He packs all known thriller effects to same film - haunted house, scarecrows, traces of something big and scary, tarot cards, beasts that are not seen, claustrophobic corn field, not knowing what is lunacy and what is real, kitchen utensils that cut, sudden appearances that are sometimes other people and sometimes the beast.


• When the beast is finally shown, it is almost anti-climax, as if he was making a tribute to films that are free from supernatural forces.


• The film is very consistent. By consistency, I mean that it doesn't contradict itself, doesn't invoke "people just don't behave that way!" reaction and sticks with its assumptions. Consistency usually means that the person making the film knows exactly what he's doing.

Talking about assumptions, it makes one big assumption (which is spelled out in the end) and sticks with it. On my own thriller consistency meter, Wicker Man and Witchfinder General score the highest level. Everything is explained by personalities, situations and social dynamics, no supernatural beings are assumed and large-scale consistency reigns to the end. Warnings gets to the second-highest level: it makes one assumption and sticks with it, and pretty much everything is explained by that assumption and its lemmas. I'd put The Excorcist to the same consistency level.

If I had to choose one film that captures the spirit of Stephen King's novels, this would be it. The intensity structure is the same. It starts with a short, intense scene that gives foretaste of what is to come. Then it does a series of "speed tests" that start out in normal, sane and peaceful conditions, increase intensity gradually and end up in a panic. In the end, there is long uninterrupted mayhem. When it ends, the whole film ends - there is no clean-up. And did I mention the atmosphere, skillful assembly of standard building blocks and emphasis on people's reactions?

Here's one review from IMDB which explains why I like the film but others don't:

"I saw this movie on the sci-fi channel, and I was suprised how good the story line was. I was enjoying the movie until the pitiful cartoon computer generated looking aliens showed up. They should have had men dress up as the creatures, at least they would have looked more realistic than the cartoon looking creatures. The storyline gets a 8 out of 10, but the effects get a very lousy 1 out of 10! Overall the movie I would give it about 4 1/2 out of 10!"

What do we need to save the world?

Guns. Lots of guns.

And since it's not guns that kill but humans, also concealed carry permits are needed.

Not for, not against (France, 2002)

Caty, a 27-years old news photographer meets a chance to make money quickly by photographing a robbery. She starts to hang out regularly with the gang ...

The back of the film box tells this much, and I won't spoil more. It's a noirish film, where an ordinary citizen is gradually attracted to the dark side. "In the beginning: How I became Femme Fatale" could be its second name.

I like the first half for several reasons.

Firstly, it meets my minimum standards of realism. There wasn't any single scene which would have invoked "People just don't behave that way!" alarm. The petty criminals have low impulse control and don't care about harm done to others, and are attracted by glamorous life of bling-bling and sex. The criminals as well as the girl believe that you can get something for nothing - the lottery ticket which the girl scrapes sum it up quite well.

Secondly, the sexual market value interactions were about right. The man showed high status by demonstrating his affluence. He demands that thing are done his way; at the same time he signals indifference by making it clear for the girl that she simply leave if she doesn't like his way. The man also gives protection for the girl; the gang liberates the girl from unwelcome approaches by threatening with violence those who try to approach.

Thirdly, it captures well the sense of urban existential void and isolation, both in some scenes and in the background music.

The girl is somewhat contradictory combination of high class and low class. The fact that she practiced ballet dancing, chose a semi-artistic profession and lives in a spacious apartment implies middle-to-high class. His eagerness to make quick money and lack of parent involvement during the whole film implies low class.

The second half is like an entirely different movie, but the final solution is superb.

Sexual Market Value 101

That could be the second name of Dumplings, a Korean thriller/horror movie. The main character is a formerly beautiful woman who has attracted a rich man to his side. Her decreasing looks cause a temptation for him to trade up...

The best thing about the film is that it is free from hypocritical feminist undertones. Both men and women are equally capable of evil, and both view the sexual market as a game with losers and winners.

FTO 3/3: If You Already Are Rich, FTO Is The Key To Stay Rich

The title sums it all. I intended to tell about a super-rich relative of mine (which I've met once) and quoting Millionaire's Daughter, but that wouldn't add anything relevant.

Here are some mottos with the same message.

Those with affluence and FTO can afford their expensive cars and houses in the same sense as a middle-class person can afford a bathroom renovation.

Take a luxury good that creates most envy among the poor. The envious poor can't imagine how little it means for those with affluence and FTO.

If you fear that your clothes get stolen from the drying wire, despite the fact that it hasn't happened earlier in that neighbourhood, it means that you are wearing too expensive clothes.

FTO 2/3: Future Time Orientation in The Damage Done

Damage Done is an autobiography of an Australian drug mule who got imprisoned in a Thai prison for 12 years. It also shows the strengths and weaknesses of short FTO: brilliant short-term tactical decisions combined with insane risk-taking and ignorance of warning signs.

FTO 1/3: Future Time Orientation in Oldboy (Korea, 2003)

Oldboy depicts a man with short FTO right from the first scene. In this scene, he's drunk in a police jail, noisy, impatient, resisting his chums and police, a disgusting and unempathic anti-hero. This image is strenghtened in later scenes.

The film also shows the strength of short FTO - namely, ability to make the best out of every situation. This is especially visible in his popularity with women. The film shows two successful seductions and hints at much more. (That bring this post by Bulletproof Pimp into my mind. In both Oldboy and this post, physical fitness was the only factor where the men showed long-termism.)

There are also two few scenes where long-term approaches turn out to be useless. The first of them happens at the imprisonment period, but I won't spoil it. The second happens some hours after the main character has been released. He faints and wakes up again. He utters a scientific-sounding hypothesis that lack of vitamin D and sudden sunlight made him faint. His girl answers "I hope you don't always talk like that." In the end, the hypothesis turns out to be false. Reliance to scientific explanations, a long-term strategy, turned out to make him unpopular and misguided.

The short-termist philosphy of life is also pronounced explicitly. In one scene, a gangster boss takes a tooth out of the protagonists mouth as a revenge. Then the gangster puts the pliers close the his mouth as if planning to pull another teeth. The protagonist shouts, expecting pain. At that point the gangster takes the pliers away and says "Don't imagine. You fear because you imagine what might happen. Don't imagine, so you don't fear."

The ending reflects well the main character's revulsion towards long-termism. The most important causes and consequences of the plot turn out to be arbitary and unbelievable. Things are not really explained in the end; they are messed up in the end. And in the eye of the madness, the short-term tactician wins over the long-term manipulator.

Smoking in Oldboy (Korea, 2003) and Lady Vengeance (Korea, 2005)

Oldboy and Lady Vengeance are two revenge-themed films by Chan-wook Park. They have the coolest smoking scenes ever.

In Oldboy, the main character has trained martial arts against a wall in prison, not being able to practice against opponents. When he gets free, he wonders if "15 years of imaginary training can be put into use". He goes to a gang of 5 juveniles, takes a cigarette from one gang member's mouth and inhales. In the next scene, he gets a strong kick to stomatch and falls on his back, arms and legs spread. He raises the hand holding a cigarette, puts it to his mouth, sucks a dose of Nicotine Power, and rises up to beat the gang with bare hands.

In another scene he's in a schoolyard. There is a girl riding bicycle around the yard. In order to see better under her skirt, he goes to a push-up pole, hangs upside down in it and lights a cigarette. A schoolteacher comes to say that he can't smoke in a catholic school, but the main character dismisses it with a cool rebel attitude by saying that he leaves the school tomorrow. After some minutes, he goes on to seduce the girl.

In Lady Vengeance, the strong and independent main character lights a cigarette after soul-shaking session of sex.

PS. 50% of Korean high school males and 30% of females smoke more than 5 cigarettes a day.

Life Is Full of Choices

On the one hand, there is Kiuas performing at Jalometalli festival at 18.8.2007. On the other hand, there is Culture Beat performing at D-Fest at 17.8.2007. These events are exclude one another, since if I go to the (chronologically) first, I'll drink so much that I won't be interested in travelling to the second. Is any of my dear readers willing to go with me to either event? If there are several readers, youung, fertile women are preferred. If no reader is interested, I may be too lazy to go to either event.

Bang Rajan (Thailand, 2000)

The cover of the film advertised it as "the Braveheart of Thailand". After summarizing the plot, I'll compare it to Braveheart.

The film is set in 1800th century Thailand. Two Burmese armies are on its way to Thailand's capital Ayuttaya, destroying, looting, raping, killing and enslaving everything on their way. Bang Rajan has successfully resited earlier Burmese conquest attempts. The survivors from other destroyed villages are escaping there for a final showdown, having few other places left to escape to.

In Braveheart, I wondered why the Scottish preferred the abstract concept of freedom to a violence monopoly of the most successful and enlightened sea power of the time. In Bang Rajan it is more clear why people choose to fight. There are long flashback footages where the Burmese come to burn and loot Thai villages. There also seems to be a mutual acceptance of killing: both the Burmese and the defending Vietnamese are very keen on killing them all in the opposing side. However, there are two scenes where the Burmese imprison and enslave the Thais instead of killing them, so it's not all about genocide.

Braveheart concentrated on one heroic individual and his defining experiences. The main characters of Bang Rajan represent the wider experiences of the villagers. There are escapees from another village who witnessed the destruction of their homes and killing of the people with whom they lived. There is a squad of men who have successfully fought against the Burmese before. There are pregnant women who are worried about the future of their men and offspring.

The most striking difference between Bang Rajan and Braveheart is the total lack of sophistication in Bang Rajan. The motivations or the villagers are very simple, usually linked to survival, sex, security and food. When they choose a leader, the best justification they give for him is that he is "strong and hates Burmese". There's very little tactical reasoning, which could be compared to Braveheart's long spears that are used against a cavalery attack. Even the Western-style moral sermon - where a Buddhist monk claims that also Burmese are human beings - is quite naive.

I didn't watch Braveheart to the end, since the rugged individualism got too thick. But I did watch Bang Rajan. Despite its crudeness or thanks to it, it stays consistent ("pysyy kasassa") through the whole film. It is the perfect propaganda movie: There is nothing abstract or delicate or implicit, but instead it blasts its message to viewers' face in cat-sized letters in its long, unambiguous, repeated, gruesome scenes.

I Have Nothing To Say

During the last month, I've started renting movies, so this blog will become a movie review blog for a few months. The following three changes have caused me to rent movies:

1) No more any obligation to try to use my leisure productively. As a student, there was always some book to be read or exercise to be done for a test or something. Not that I ever did them.

2) Being employed, the cost of renting a movie is insignificant to the time cost of watching it.

And, most importantly

3) I've found a way to pick non-boring movies! I look at the country of origin. If it is Asian, the movie is probably ok. Firstly, they are not Hollywood movies, which means that they don't make you so bored you stop watching in the middle. Secondly, they originate from a different culture, which means that they have lots of oddity and strangeness in details and the way things are told. Thirdly, the filter is really tough: only a small fraction of films reach the renting store, so the level is high.

• Bought a shirt reading "Perfect Waves". It's perfect for a situation, where perfect sound waves are being played.


• Perfect sound waves can be downloaded from Cantata Sangui's website. It's a goth metal band with two vocalists: an extremely high-pitched and clear female singer and extremely low-pitched male growler. The combination sounds really funny.


• Steve Yegge is back, after almost being eaten by wolves!

... everybody has one.

This video ranks 20 Eurovision songs, showing 30-second clips from each.

It's funny how taste correlates. I agree with the person who made that video that Bulgaria, Malta, Slovenia and Georgia earn a place in Top 6.

It's also funny how taste doesn't correlate. Malta's song has catchy melody and exactly the kind of words that you could memorize and sing when you're walking and nobody's around. Still, it was dropped in semifinals, and the other Subjective Top 6 countries were evenly dispersed in chart.

Regarding the winners, Serbia is ok and the singer is clearly a pro. I have to admit that I just don't "get" Ukraine's song. Russia's song had the sexiest performance, despite the fact that many other performers were more scantly clad.

Ugly Betty

Being on the topic of marketing, it is nice to see Ugly Betty ads decorating the outdoor advertisement spots. At last a clothing style which distinguishes itself from the mass.

The other clothing ads don't even try. In live environments conventionally pretty girls work, but in media bland sexiness is boring and alienation kicks ass. Just like in Eurovision song context.

Simo The Mobile Application Developer

Do you think it is cool and hip to develop mobile applications? Send your congratulations to Nokia's marketing department. This post sums up nicely the image that Nokia wants to create about mobile application developers.

Mobile application developers are social and active extroverts, who participate in commonplace activities of young people:

Whether it's at a dinner-party or late night foray into a strange bar, the fact that I work for Nokia is an easy ticket to talk. People generally have powerful reactions, as more often than not I'm working for the company that makes the product that gets them to work, connects them with who matters to them, and gets them laid.

Mobile phones are sexy status objects, but also deeply personal companions to which the user attaches on emotional level:

(Sure there are often also comments along the lines of "why on earth don't you bring back that beautiful silver bullet phone [6310] - it was my favourite thing ever..." etc.) But the fact remains - we are still carrying a good deal of people's goodwill, and we mess with it at our peril. And nowhere is this goodwill more obvious than in the trusty familiar contacts book ...

Especially Nokia mobile phones are high quality:

... with a well-deserved reputation for solidity, easy to use, reliability and the fact that the damn thing just works.

Mobile application developers are open-minded and innovative, and not afraid of breaking rules and shifting paradigms:

One of our recent Nokia speaker series guests put it like this - the telco industry has lost the opportunity to innovate in the contacts book, whereas the internet industry has come along and invented an entire new industry - social networking - to fill this innovation void. Hmmm, food for thought?

Messing with the contacts book would be like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa - an act of vandalism, surely. Surely? Well, I'm not so sure. I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that things must stay how they were because that's how they have always been.

Nokia phones were created for trendy, sexy, active and successful people, by trendy, sexy, active and successful people.

Appendix I

• Symbian folks know that C++ is not the fastest way to implement functionality. They demonstrate it by their actions: Symbian's IDE, Carbide.c++, is Eclipse-based which means that it is written in Java. Symbian's build system is a bunch of Perl macros.


• Ilkka describes the irritation of low-level languages well in this post.

What's Wrong With Symbian

In short: Crippled C++. C++ is already quite a low-level language. Symbian has plenty of coding conventions and classes, which make this even worse. There is cleanup stack to prevent memory leaks; leave mechanism to simulate exceptions; and RArrays and RPointerArrays to simulate std::vector. Finally, there are active objects to simulate threads or message passing or callbacks or whatever, I'm still not quite sure despite using them for years.

Nowadays Symbian phones have as much memory as late 486s or early Pentiums, although the memory is slower. So is it really worth it to save miniscule amounts of memory and make programming harder?

The era of mobile Java isn't here yet. I mean, the era when the operating system consists of Java VM, device APIs, and some core high-performance units like phone calls, video codecs, OpenGL, etc. Java is still too slow. Therefore, C++ is still a necessary evil.

In addition to crippled C++, also APIs are less-than-perfect. Java developers who have used entity beans or Hibernate may feel schadenfreude from this fact: Symbian has an internal database in every device, but you can only access it with SQL. No object/relation mapping tools for you. In general, there aren't any helper APIs which wrap the functionality to an easier form. 2.5 years ago when I last programmed Symbian, the APIs also has stupid bugs, but I hope that is fixed now.

The Glass of Success is Half Full

As planned, I applied for J2EE jobs using Finnish annotator (FA) as a merit. FA was implemented with embarrassingly low technologiy: HttpServeltResponse.GetPrintWriter().println() produced most of the web pages. I got to 3 job interviews based on it.

After one interviewer told me that they used JSP and servlets to implement web services in 2001, in no uncertain terms, I realized my J2EE experience was inadequate and that I would rather be an experienced Symbian programmer (despite the shittiness of Symbian, which is worth anoter post) than a J2EE trainee. After that, I applied for Symbian jobs and got one from a mid-sized Symbian subcontractor. I'm not going to tell the name of the company, since I have no idea how it differs from other mid-sized Symbian subcontractors, and because they have their own marketing department to take care of their external image, thank you veeery much for your suggestion of advertising by blogging but no thank you.

The Symbian job I got pays 600e/month more than what I got at Nokia. I started 1.4. I still haven't been assigned to any project, but anyway I'll get more pay than ever before for carrying less responsibility than at the last months of Nokia.

If I had really wanted to get a J2EE job, I could have applied at J2EE Professional Trainee Program at Tapiola. But I thought that it was too easy, since from the 4 technologies they list (JSP, XML, EJB, WSAD) I already know JSP and XML and have read a book about EJB, so that only WSAD (whatever it is) would be totally new. Also, applying to the program would be dishonest, since my interest in J2EE is not about becoming a Tapiola man, but about developing the FA.

By the way, "professional trainee" is an oxymoron. Who wants to be an oxymoron?

My initial plan with Finnish Annotator was to collect a 5000 word Finnish vocabulary by September. This would have required me to write English definitions for about 24 words a day. Now that I actually work, I have noticed that I have no energy to write word definitions after work. So 5000 words is utopistic. I'll have to either overcome procrastination or find out just how many words I have patience to write before contacting a Finnish teacher and sugggesting co-operation.

The glass of success if half full or empty in the sense that I failed to get a J2EE job but succeeded in getting a job that pays more than anything I have done before.

What to do with the money when I've accustomed to a student budget? There are practically only 3 ways to spend it in a way that actually increases my standard of living:

• Get a mortgage instead of paying rent; this would mean that in the future, if I want, I can loan money and use the apartment as a guarantee.


• Travel to foreign countries. Among my peers this is a popular hobby which I haven't done much.


• Buy sex, an option I should try since I'm never going to get any with my current levels of nerdiness and muscularity without paying for it.