How horrible can media be in 2025?

This is how:

I guess I should open this up a little bit?
For me the two most horrible things I can imagine in furute is that they stop printing on paper.
I wouldn't care about newspapers so much but I can imagine that after newspaper magazines and books would be next. I just love books. Real books you can hold in your hands.

And other thing is the filtering the internet. It is good to filter some of the websites your child uses but if we are always controlled it would feel like there is no privacy left.

Twitter stalking

I had hard time choosing who to follow on Twitter. Honestly I'm not that interested in celebrity’s life. As long as the person is good at what they do I'm happy. Lot of actors and writers are already giving lot of their time just to produce good stuff, it feels little greedy to expect them to give us their personal life too. Though it's not really like that. Their facebook and twitter accounts mostly are just part of the campaign.

That's why I find it even more boring. Why would I want to follow somebody who is just trying to keep up good image?

After long time thinking I choice Billy Boyd. Why? I'm not the biggest Lotr fan but once upon a time I was in London Winter film and comic con. It was pretty small event. They had lot of guests and Billy Boyd was one of them. As the day was ending and they were closing doors I saw him walking through them. There would have been plenty of time to ask for picture with him but as a regular antisocial Finn I was too scared to do so. And I wasn't just scared, somehow it felt rude to go and ask a picture with some stranger? You don't do that with people you don't know. Right?

Because of that I have quite bitter memories whenever I hear Boyd's name so I though maybe following him on twitter would help. But no. Honestly Boyd's twitter is quite boring. It's like he goes there always once in a day and there is nothing interesting. He just wishes some people good birthday, maybe posts some selfies from backstage and he was in some expo in Canada last month? Not the most inspiriting twitter account I must say. There is no much interacting with fans. Maybe that's because he's not such a hot topic anymore? He has been doing more of a musical career lately if I have understood right.

Are his tweets boring? You can decide that yourself. Here is his one of his tweets:

"Great night with @gibsonguitar . Beautiful new guitars for 2016, wonderful people and great music from @LosLobosBand

I survived!

I survived through the whole weekend of Comic con. Be proud of me. Three full days I spend with complete strangers but still it wasn't awkward. There were people everywhere, doing all kind of things. Funniest thing might be when there was two people playing a car game and it was shown on a big screen and there were lot of people just sitting on the floor and watching. I guess it was some sort of tournament? In my last post I told you about things I liked but nothing is perfect.

Comic con had some real problems. I think the biggest failure was on Sunday when we found out that they had only one cloakroom to use (on previous years they had two) and it got full around 11 am. After that if you came to the convention with your luggage you had to carry it with you everywhere and people who tried to chance in to their cosplays couldn't do that. Some people just decided to leave compleatly.

In Finland we don't have expos like Comic con. We have lot of conventions but they are mainly for Japanese pop culture. There are of course Finncon, for science fiction and Ropecon for role players. But there is nothing you can compare with Comic con. I'm not saying that London Comic con is better than any convention in Finland. Because it surely is not. In London they have big names and lot of people, but the heart of the organization is not made by fans, unlike in Finland. That makes a big difference.

It was easy to see that advertisement and making money had much bigger role than in Finnish conventions. Sure they got free goodies, but also load of advertisement and useless crap. What I did not expect was that in some technical things they are way behind us. 

For example the stages they have, they are enough if you have some famous person up there and all you do is ask questions. But, if you are making a cosplay show on that very same stage it's not going to work at all. The stage is small and nobody can see anything. This year there was lot of technical issues during the Euro cosplay contest, the lights went on and off very randomly and sometimes they played the music too early. Even without those problems the stage was not good enough. It was really small and unpractical.

Here is picture of the winner of Euro cosplay 2015: 

My super busy weekend

So yes, I attented MCM London Comic con on October 2015. If you ask me what I remember about that weekend, I would say people. There were so many different kind of fans and how they showed their point of interest. Some people cosplayed, other took photographs, they draw fan art or their own stuff, people bought lot of merchandises and took pictures with their idols... There were so many different things fans could and did do that it felt little overwhelming.

We all have our own top interest and should focus on that. My first comic con problem was that there were too much going on. I felt huge need to run from one place to another at the same time so I could see it all. Which naturally isn't possible.

On Friday I thought the best thing ever was the comic village where people were selling their art. I loved it and since it felt like good idea to support independent artist I spend way too much money on there...

Saturday's highlight was Doctor Who panel, there were some writers and directors of the show. I was positively surprised that there was one quite young female writer. I'm not going to comment on that more because I haven't seen the episodes she has written so I don't know if she is any good but I have hope so.

What I heard from other visitors is that usually in May Comic con has bigger stars. So, next time let's go there on May!

On Sunday... There was the Hillywood show! Visit their Youtube channel if you don't know them! I'm not their biggest fan but I do enjoy watching the parodies they have made. It was really heart warming how happy they got when they saw how excited and happy fans were when they saw them. It was also funny how you could see that they also are just fans who after hard work ended up being famous. I think they said they have been doing this for 9 years?

Google you are my creepy stalker and over protective mom

Google never stops surprising me. Today it was reminding me about my flight to London that leaves tomorrow. Since when has Google known about my flight plans? I still don't know how. Well part of the reason why I'm not looking in to it is because a.) I'm lazy, b.) don't really care (seriously I'm not that important, if you want to spy me feel free to do so) and c.) if there are things I don't like or understand I tend to ignore them.

I'm a person who never reads those small texts after contracts so I won't be surprised if I hear some day that I have sold my kidney and brains to Google so they can do some nice experiments. I would be a little upset but not surprised.

Somehow Google manages to make me feel stalked and "over protected" at the same time. When ever I use new computer to sign in to my account I get emails everywhere telling me that I have singed in at new computer. Don't worry Google, it's just me.

I use Gmail, Google maps and Google drive almost daily. I think three different apps from same corporation is quite lot. And I'm sure there are more I'm using but just not realizing it. For example Google search. I use it so often that I don't even realize it is Google.

Is our privacy being compromised? Well most likely yes. In future probably even more. My solution to this problem is to stay as unimportant and as boring as I can. That way if somebody would accidentally stalk me they would stop very fast.

Comic industry what are you doing

You can thank other media course I'm doing at the moment for this post. Our job was to make a research on subject of our interest and I chose eComics. Downloading comics and reading them from your computer or phone isn't new thing anymore, but is it destroying printed comics?

After short research it seemed quite clear to me that is not the case. Quite opposite actually. Digital comics have chance to prove themselves being useful if the industry managed to develop some things. For example the pricing is ridiculous. You would think that since there will be no costs from shipping or printing the price would be cheaper. That's not the case at the moment. Only small part of comics are cheaper when you buy them digitally.
They might be scared of losing profits if people can buy comics cheaper online but I think they worry for nothing. Most of the comic book fans are collectors. You are proud of your comics and you want to be able to show them off. Cheap digital released would just help them to get more readers. Usually when people get hooked they will start buying other merchandises too.

I also found one interesting article here. It had lot of good points. I don't really care about rivalry thing going between Marvel and Image comics. But what I could agree with is that Marvel has lot of characters people love more than anything. Only problem are the story lines which are super confusing. I like reading Marvel comics but I would lie if I said I always understand what is happening in them.
You read one good story and get all happy just to soon to be disappointed when they start over and all that has happened is wiped out. I feel mad that they keep destroying great characters and good story lines just so they can get a little bit more money. Even though, honestly sometimes you are just happy that the story line gets erased. Writers keep making crazy stuff up to get people interested. It's just like soap opera!

So instead of worrying about losses you might get from digital publishing we should really start helping companies like Image comics to keep making comics with reasonable stories and good characters! It shouldn't be all about money. Most people don't start making comics just because they want to get rich. I can't imagine worse plan to get rich that being a comic artist. Where do we go wrong?

The Cheetahs

We had to design our very own reality show. We ended up with idea where three or possibly more students have to go undercover and act as if they are students of different field. For example three art students go undercover in astrophysics class. These three people are called Cheetahs.
All students in the class are told that they are coming from same study field so these three art students don't know about each others. If the undercover art student is found out they get eliminated. So you ether study really hard to be good or then you cheat. As long as you don't get caught everything is allowed.
If Cheetah finds other art student they can join their forces or try stab each others on the back. You just have to be really careful not to get caught yourself.


Other alternative version of this program could be if there were more students from different fields and they are put into one class. They are told that they all are from different schools but your goal is to keep your study field secret and get as good grades as you can from all different courses. Who gets the highest points wins the prize. There will be art, mathematics, chemistry, building cars etc...

Again you can study or cheat. Main point is you can't reveal your real study field or get caught at cheating. This makes it interesting. Imagine situation where student desperately needs more points from a test and it happens to be from his real study field. If he nails the test he gets more points and bigger chance to win, but if that is only subject where he is succeeding he might get exposed by others.
And if you are found out it's game over. So it would be interesting to see how people try to be equally bad and good so their real study field isn't found out.