Mindtrek day 2.

Today's breakfast was great and afternoon cake even greater. That's all you need to know. 

Today there was Academic track which had more game focused presentations. For example there were people from schools telling about their projects. Timo Nummenmaa from Oasis had this "Deck of Cards - House of colleagues" card game that had 61 characters cards that were based on the workers. Goal of this game was to promote social atmosphere. I think the Idea was fun and it could be useful for many people. For us it could be helpful excuse to socialize with people from other classes.

Later today we went to listen Adrian David Cheok's "Everysense, Everywhere Internet Communication" presentation. It was interesting. I heard about lot of stuff I didn't know existed. Creepy thing he told us about was Huggy pajamas, project he was part of. I find the idea of somebody sending hug virtually very disturbing. Maybe If I didn't need to wear a shirt that looks like a rain coat it wouldn't be too bad. But honestly it wouldn't be the same. Hug isn't just about he feeling. It's also about the smell, sound and what you see. No matter what you feel, if there is nobody standing front of you it's not a hug. 

Even creepier invention was Kissinger. I can not imagine what kind of desperation or madness would make me kiss that creepy ball with plastic lips. Sorry it's just not my cup of tea. There is no way it would feel real. You can taste the plastic and again, you can't see the other person. It think there is still long way to go before we can use touch, smell or taste as everyday communication method. If people would become robots or at least cyborgs it would easier. If you are made of plastic, touch of plastic is so much more natural.

Here is picture of my breakfast, only thing that matters:

Mindtrek Day 1.

I have to say, if you give me free food at the very beginning of the day I won't care what comes next. Free food equals happiness. Second thing I found nice about Mindtrek was comfy chairs. It was hard to decide which programs to watch because the names didn't always tell enough what they were going to be about. Even so, I managed to find first day of Mindtrek pleasant and suprinsingly interesting.

Most of the programs were quite business like and gave professional feeling. There was one that wasn't so serious. Jarmo Puskala kept this presentation about "Iron Sky - Herding Cats - How to work with internet audience". There were lot of funny videos included and I think that made Jarmo's presentation lot different from other's.

He made good point about the fact that working with people through the internet is lot like herding cats. People say and do what they want. And it's actually better if you don't give people money, because when there is money involved greedy ones arrive and all they want is to get as much money as they can with as little work as possible. They let their fans comment and help with production.
Thanks to that 10 prosents of Iron sky budjet was from fan financing. Fans are happy when they can help, for example when they needed to make a fake newspaper for the Iron sky movie, they asked their fans to write articles and people were happy to do so! Imagine if you could write a crazy story and it would be published in fake newspaper?

I have to confess I didn't know that Iron sky was from the same production team as Star Wreck. But now that I know it explains a lot. His presentation was interesting but it felt he spent a lot of time talking about production of the movies. He didn't go too deep about how you communicate with people through internet but I think that's something we all going to learn sooner or later so it didn't bother me. I was just happy there was some program that was easy to listen.

Now I'm waiting to see what kind breakfast they are serving tomorrow! Here is a picture of fancy water glass they had:

Trash TV you are my muse and inspiration

I watch tv a lot but somehow I manage to miss all the news. So I know nothing. You could say that missing the important information is my superpower. That and the fact I'm always hungry.

I have to come clean and tell you that my guilty pleasure is to watch american top model, or some other country's version of it. Project Runway is a great way to kill my braincells too. When I'm feeling like destroying even the last drop of my sanity I switch channel to MTV.

MTV is the GOD of trash TV. You can hardly remember that mtv used to be about music.

Ex on the beach, Geordie shore, My sweet sixteen... The list could go on forever. All these tv shows are able to destroy your mind and will to live in less than 6 seconds.
After you wake up from that coma those shows put your mind into, you start feeling like maybe there is hope for you. You feel "superior" when compared to those sad little creatures you see on your tv screen. That's why I say it's healthy to watch trash tv. It helps your self-esteem to rise.

You don't need apples to keep a doctor away! Watching how teens get drunk and are miserable is great way to start feeling happy about your own life.
That's my advice to you. :) If somebody get's even more depressed after wathcing those shows I do not take the resbonsibility.

Textual analysis what?!

This week we got to read this article about textual analysis. First I was little confused by the meaning of it. But then I realised that textual analysis just means that you analyse the game by thinking what kind of meaning it is sending, or how it represents for example cultural politics.

Your role as a player in video games can affect the meaning in lot of different ways. Some things may have cultural meaning to others and for somebody else it may be just a pretty statue on background.

Like in every part of media you can find meaning behind everything and since video games are slightly different from for an example fashion ad, there's many new things to analyse.

There is written story, music, enviroment, characters, animation, and effects. All the little details might have some significant meaning. For example do you ever think how the movement of your character affects your opinion of it? I find slowly or heavily moving characters really annoying to play and might not enjoy some game as much as I could because of that.

Batman Arkham Asylum is a game that has very clear theme for me. It's dark and mysterious. From the very first moment it's clear that you are the detective. It's like the game is trying to make you feel like the batman himself. There are lot of objects and side quests you can do, and they have lot more meaning if you know something about Batman series before you play the game.

I think the enviroment, characters and story represent the dark theme pretty well. No matter where you go all you can see is destruction and victims of Joker or some other villain. All villains look like they have run out of asylum, which they actually have.

Here is screenshot from Batman Arkham asylum:

My awkward some skills

Social media is still little bit foreign subject to me. I boycot facebook, I don't follow any youtubers or upload anything anywhere. I have Instagram but I haven't used it for six months. Only social media I do check almost daily is Twitter. Why Twitter? Why not Facebook or something else?

Propably because in Twitter you can't tell your hole story of life, but instead it's about jokes and funny things that happenned to you today. Reading one tweet is easy way to sum up somebody's day and personally I found it relaxing way to check up on my friends.

Tumblr. That's one of the things I should use more as a person who is interested in art and stuff. Deviantart used to be the number one thing for artists to use but lately Tumblr has been taking the lead. I'm still learning to use it, hopefully someday I fill success. Honestly Tv and Radio are still big parts of my life. Brainless tv programs are what give me life at 3am when I'm trying to finnish some project, and radio is all background noise I need when I'm drawing. I quess I'm little behind my time.

I don't now how serious my FoMO is, because there are still times when I just forgot that my phone's battery is dead and I forget it for hours. The reason why I use my phone when there are people around me might be because I'm trying to escape social interaction. "Please I'm busy with my phone, don't talk to me." And that's why I try to use my phone as little as possible when talking with other people.

It's going to be interesting to see how this whole keeping a blog thing is going to work out for me and if it's going to chance my social media habits ?

Very epic first post of my very first blog.

Hi world! I'm alive and here to give you some introduction of myself.

We got this great task to create introduction video of yourself. And here you can hear me talking and see some amazing drawings. I'm deeply sorry to inform you that my face had some serious business to attend so it didn't have time to star this video. (Except in some pictures)