synthetic insights inc.

Man, I procrastinated with the making of all these recent posts for a looong fucking time. It wasn't planned or voluntary either, starting with things is just incredibly hard for me. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to do and I know I need to do mandatory schoolwork, but if it doesn't interest me or seems cumbersome, I cannot for dear life start working on it on time. I am extremely easily distracted and sitting at the computer offers a hundred thousand ways of getting easily distracted, but this is also where I'm supposed to be doing my schoolwork. It's a vicious circle. I blame my depression and ADD for not being able to do stuff before deadlines, and I also try to fight them the best I can. It's hard. The internet and video games offer numerous many places to escape to, to the point that I do different types of absolutely useless procrastinatory (that's not a word) stuff during different nights; this way I cannot blame myself for doing the same useless...

That's what I got from a classmate one day when she noticed we were in the same bus and wanted to get my attention, but didn't dare to call me by my name so instead she sent me a text message. But truth be told, I just think she's finally assimilating to the true Finnish mentality. Cheers ;D But before I digress, I admit that I do listen to a lot of music. Whenever I leave the house, I need to have my earphones with me or I get instantly bothered and annoyed. I'm not sure why bringing music with me everywhere I go is compulsory for me but it does keep my mind active at least a little bit, in a positive way. I get ideas better when I have something to listen to and sometimes music helps me to concentrate on whatever I'm trying to concentrate on, though it has to be the exactly correct type of music or it'll do the exact opposite. I easily associate songs with certain periods or certain happenings in my life and sometimes I can't listen to a song because I d...

That's what I tell myself almost every day. And it's true. I have a book project going on and I realize I need to read books to become a better writer. Not to copy other authors' styles but to gather info, bits and pieces about how language can be used in different situations and what makes it look and sound good. I know I have something of a knack for writing, but since I want to do it in English (I think Finnish is somewhat of a clumsy literature language at times) and English isn't my first language, I need to read more stuff in English to be better at it. It's part of the reason why I haven't actually started even with the first chapter because I feel like I'm not good enough. I could be, but it takes time to learn and I'm known to be an impatient learner. Groan and slump. More than half of the books I have in my shelves are unread. More like 4/5 of them, to confess. I have a bad habit of hoarding books, putting them on the shelf and never reall...

There was a theme week on North Korea on Finland's National Geographic channel a couple of weeks backwards. Admittedly I don't watch so much TV these days but I did watch some of the shows airing during the theme week. Like every proper citizen, I'm generally aware what kind of shit goes on in North Korea under the dictatorship of the fat bastard Kim Jong-un. Watching the shows didn't incite anxiety in me but rather just pure disappointment and resentment towards the fact that in the good year of 2018 the rest of the world still hasn't taken any definitive actions against the absolute cesspool of violated human rights that is the tyranny of the Kim family. The lil' nihilist part in me constantly asks "why haven't we nuked this place yet" but then I think we probably wouldn't be much better an example of good people than Jong-un is if we did that. There was a lot of stuff in the shows but probably the most ridiculous one comes from elsewhere. ...

To be honest, I wasn't hugely excited about MindTrek after looking through the programme online. I'm sure I wasn't alone with that. Anyhow, free tickets that would usually cost like 200€ and free food? Okay alright, I'll try it out. I only went there for one day instead of two since I had something important to do during the second one. Don't remember what it was but it was important. Aside from the aforementioned pros, there was one thing I was kinda looking forward to; I noticed an ex-colleague of mine was hosting a presentation about the company he works for, the same I had worked for in the past. It's called TeacherGaming and it essentially makes educational versions of video games with a target audience of elementary schoolers. When I was still working for them, I worked on a game called Switch & Glitch, which aims to teach kids the very basics of programming. My first task was to redesign one of the main characters to look tolerable and to this day, ...

I don't watch music videos a lot, at least not for the sake of the video material. There might be songs not available elsewhere and I have to listen to them through YouTube, so those are automatic views for the possible music videos. Nevertheless, here's one of my favourite music videos ever made. Pretty sure I discovered it soon after it was published because I remember watching it a lot during my year in film acting school, which was in 2013-2014. I love it because it gives off super positive vibes and also has a message of not giving up in the times of hardship. I don't know what genre the song is, to be honest. Alternative pop?? The video's genre is just feel-good, I think. It shows the CC duo doing dances from different decades and gathering people up to do the same, inviting them to do fun stuff together no matter who they are or where they're from. Dancing is sometimes considered to be a universal language (sorry math, I hate you) and something people ...