I have mentioned in my previous scribbles that I read a lot of fantasy literature in my adolescence. I was reminded of this time in my life when a friend of mine asked if he could borrow my copy of the first entry in the Wheel of Time series. Funnily enough, even though I own the book, I have never actually read it. I bought it in the twilight period of my fantasy-reading phase and never got around to reading it before I ran out of enthusiasm. Why did this happen, I wonder. I rarely read fantasy nowadays; the last book I read that comes even close to the fantasy genre was Piranesi and even that is arguable.

The thing about the fantasy genre, though, is that it’s very broad. The aforementioned Piranesi, The Lord of the Rings and the expanded universe Star Wars books all qualify as fantasy even though they have very different settings, themes and atmospheres. When I was reading fantasy I was mainly interested in the subgenre of fantasy that most people think of when the subject is mentioned; medieval Europe-ish setting, swords, dragons, magic, the lot. Think something along the lines of The Witcher, The Chronicles of Narnia or Tales from Earthsea. All of which I’ve read, by the way. Then there are the outliers such as Harry Potter or Discworld, which do not tick all the boxes in terms of traditional fantasy settings or themes, but still cannot be classified as anything else.

It is very difficult determining all the subgenres and subclasses of fantasy. Most people do separate the genre into two main categories, however, them being the low fantasy and high fantasy genres. Now, even the people who divide fantasy into those two categories argue where the line exactly goes and what the dividing factors are, but I believe most people agree that the factors lie within the epicness and scale of a story. Epic, grim stories featuring humane characters and intricate built fantasy worlds such as A Song of Ice and Fire are usually classified as high fantasy, whereas less intricate stories with more mundane worlds such as the aforementioned Harry Potter are classified as low fantasy.

To return to my earlier question why I ditched the fantasy genre and never got back to it, I believe I might have simply gotten the fantasy fatigue. See, I read a lot of high fantasy, the subgenre with intricately woven worlds and plotlines. A well-written high fantasy story is like an expensive wedding cake; layers upon layers of detailed flavors, all designed to work together in harmony to bring you the best possible experience. But you really have to savor all the bites you take to get the best experience out of it, and if you miss something, the harmony is broken. A good low fantasy story, on the other hand, is to me more like a well-made sandwich. It’s not as classy as a wedding cake and maybe there wasn’t a lot of thought put into the flavors, but a well-made sandwich nevertheless leaves you satisfied and content.

Maybe I got tired of consuming entire wedding cakes one after the other. Reading The Lord of the Rings is a feat in itself; you need a breather after finishing such a literary classic. After reading so many stories with carefully constructed worlds and carefully planned intriguing plotlines, I just had enough. I got burned out by high fantasy and haven’t looked back since.

But how about low fantasy? Did wedding cakes ruin sandwiches for me too?

As I said, I have read Piranesi which would qualify as low fantasy, I suppose. It doesn’t have magical creatures and dark, brooding characters like The Witcher or political intrigue like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it does have fantasy as a background element, an atmosphere of sorts. Now, I’ll probably talk about Piranesi in more detail in the future as part of my Mind, Body and Soul series, but the gist of it is that the main character explores a seemingly never-ending maze-like building and keeps records of his exploration. The exploration in itself is very fantasy-like, as the character comes across statues of people and mythological creatures and different ecological environments within the building. It’s very fantasy-like in its setting and I enjoyed it a lot.

So it cannot be that I’ve been burned out by the fantasy genre completely; I just happen to enjoy the lighter side of it now that I’m older. I’m less interested in dragons now and more interested in the mood of it all.

There was one fantasy series that I wanted to bring up as an example of a series that I think strikes a good balance between high and low fantasy that I’ve been meaning to get back to. When I was younger, I used to be quite into the Redwall series, and as it happens, it might be my favorite fantasy series altogether. See, it does feature a setting akin to medieval England with meadows, sword fights and the occasional gruesome death, but it also features fuzzy animals, weirdly detailed descriptions of delicious meals and worldbuilding that is only as intricate as it needs to be.

Redwall is a series of books that center around a monastery inhabited by anthropomorphic animals named titularly Redwall Abbey. Every book in the series is a self-contained story and only a few entries in the series share characters between them. There is a chronological order to the stories which does not follow the publishing order of the books, but there is so little continuous story between the books that you could just read them in the order they were written.

A common story in the Redwall series centers around some of the animals living in the abbey when a disaster strikes, usually in the form of a marauding group of vermin who pose a threat to the existence of Redwall Abbey. The hero or heroine then must go through a series of trials, usually manifesting as a series of riddles, to fetch a mcguffin that would supposedly help with dealing with the threat while also enjoying vast amounts of meals that the author is very keen on describing in much detail.

Take the first book in the series, which incidentally is also my favorite one, simply titled Redwall. The story follows the mouse Matthias, as the abbey gets sieged by a rat warlord Cluny the Scourge. Matthias then has to solve a series of riddles to find a sword belonging to the legendary Martin the Warrior to defeat Cluny and his army of vermin. Adventures in the English countryside ensue.

Yeah, not a story that would make for an award-winning Scorcese adaptation, but there lies the beauty of it. I say adventures in the English countryside ensue, but it’s never really clear where Redwall Abbey is located or what the world is like apart from the locations the story takes the reader to, but the story doesn’t really need that. I believe Portugal is mentioned in the first book but as far as I know that is the only real world place that gets name dropped in the series.

Yes, all the characters are either good or bad; good characters being charismatic farmyard animals such as mice, moles and rabbits and bad characters being disgusting vermin like rats and stoats. Not very subtle but I think subtlety is sometimes overrated in literature. Sometimes I want things spelled out for me so I can focus on just the adventures and not the duality of the human-animal psyche. I can just relax and let the story take me and not worry about complex characters or geopolitical plotlines. 

Redwall as a series is a well-made sandwich that doesn’t have the subtle flavors of a wedding cake fantasy story, but I’d take a well-made sandwich over a wedding cake any day. These days I enjoy the lowest of the low fantasy that barely qualifies; the lower the better, until the story reaches wine cellar levels of low. I’ve been meaning to tip my toes into the mid-low levels of fantasy by picking up one of the Redwall books again to see if I can manage to get through one of them. If I am, maybe I’d even give The Winds of Winter a try when it’s published as I hit retirement age.

Once again it’s time to discuss my three books of the month, featuring the book of the Soul, the book of the Mind and the book of the Heart. I think it becomes evident that my choices were safe this time, and as it happens, I could have made them better. I do not wish to spoil the next paragraph, but even the best of them was sort of okay, and even then it was mostly because the book was copying its homework from another book I had already read. It is interesting, though, that this time the choices feature a book that I did not finish but retrospectively regret ever picking up and giving the author money for. Without further ado, here come the books two… plus another one.

For my Soul book I decided to play safe and bought a book by an author I already like, namely No Mud, No Lotus by Thich Nhat Hanh. A short read compared to his books I’ve read previously, which is not a problem at all. What attracts me to Thich Nhat Hanh’s books are his philosophy and how he writes, even if the writing has gone through translation into English. Mindfulness is something I’d like to give a more serious try one of these days. Speaking of, the book goes into great lengths about the benefits of practising mindfulness, but also therein lies the problem. In my opinion No Mud, No Lotus as a book is so close to Mr. Thich’s earlier book Peace is Every Step that after reading it I was not much more educated on mindfulness than before reading the book, since it pretty much goes through the same motions. No Mud, No Lotus does include some practical exercise sets on mindfulness that Peace is Every Step lacks, but when it comes to theory, I would rather recommend the latter. All in all, still a very enjoyable read, and I already have my eyes on my next Thich Nhat Hanh book.

You probably are aware that I am a fan of the absurd. Catch-22, A Confederacy of Dunces and Naked Lunch all stand proud on my new bookshelf. Again, playing it safe, I went for a rather new book of absurdist fiction called Antkind: a Novel for my Heart book. The book is authored by Charlie Kaufman of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fame. Being John Malkovich is a movie I like and I would even classify as Kafkaesque, if I was feeling particularly pretentious. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie that exists to me, and I have no problem with it. It’s nice to see Jim Carrey try something serious for a change. It’s alright.

Antkind really evokes the spirit of the former, in my opinion. It is absurd, I’ll give it that. And thick; spanning over seven hundred pages. It’s sad for me to say, but for my Heart book Antkind really breaks it by being really tedious and somehow dated for a book that was published in 2020. Okay, it had some laugh-out-loud funny moments, but mathematically speaking seven funny pages out of seven hundred only amounts to one percent of fun and ninety-nine percent of boredom. It did tickle my absurdist bone the right way; the book is about an unlikeable film critic named B, who comes across what he thinks is the best movie ever made, called Antkind, before accidentally destroying it and having the chance to show it to the world. B then proceeds to try to reconstruct the movie from memory, which is harder than it seems since he also suffers from a case of amnesia.

There are some really funny chapters about B’s encounters with psychiatrists, and the book piqued my interest at themes when it broke the fourth wall, but then there are several really unfunny chapters about, I kid you not, an army of robots all of whom resemble former president Donald Trump, and who also behave like sexual deviants. As I mentioned the book being dated, for even for the memelordiest forum posters of the internet Donald Trump in 2020 is a pretty old hat. I guess these chapters are funny to you if you think Donald Trump is inherently funny and not the epitome of everything that is wrong with Western democracy and the patron saint of the downfall of the civilised world. If that’s the case then good for you, this is your book. I, on the other hand, am not going to recommend it.

If you thought that Antkind was the low point of these books three then guess again. Antkind was a slog to get through but I still finished it. For my Mind book I chose a book titled How to Build a Billion Dollar App by George Berkowski. I would like to praise every book I read at least a little bit, even for the smallest achievements. No Mud, No Lotus was still educational and well written, and Antkind was occasionally funny. What I have to praise about HtBaMDA (I can’t bring myself to write out the whole title) is that it validates the habit of judging a book by its cover.

I know the title sounds cheesy and like one of those million get-rich-quick-scheme books. I was ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. I thought the book was going to give me some insight into mobile app development; how does one set up and maintain the infrastructure, employ external contractors, plan out a technical roadmap for future features, things like that. What a fool I was. As you could probably guess, the book was all anecdotes about known successful mobile apps and zero technical or financial advice. The teachings of the book boiled down to: Have a million-dollar idea and build your app. Case closed. I wasn’t even in it to make a million dollars; I just wanted to build an app and learn how to do all the other things besides programming which I already know how to do. I believe I caught wind of the book’s true intentions and I left it unfinished around the midway point.

So, yeah, not a great month for books. The Soul book was pretty alright, and I guess I’m happy that I finished my Heart book. I would have been better having left my Mind book in the store, though. Thankfully the next three books I’ll talk about are better, and I did finish them all, but that’s a story for another time.

Sometimes programming is less about the code you’re writing and more about the tools you’re using. I do not manage this website in an industrial capacity and I feel that my selection of tools reflect that.

I have written this website using .Net – Razor Pages, to be precise – so I feel Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio suffice for my needs. I have been meaning to convert this website from Razor Pages to a more up-to-date Blazor, but that seems like a lot of effort for something that already works fine. Razor Pages might not be the hip new framework that the kids are using, and asynchronous component reloads are borderline impossible without writing your own AJAX scripts, but for a simple website like mine it does the job.

However, I recently did upgrade my toolbox with a whole new integrated system. See, I recently finished reading a book called The DevOps Handbook. In my opinion, mostly an underwhelming book, but it did contain some valuable nuggets of information. I read the second edition, which contained some real-life examples of implementing DevOps in big businesses. So, most of the time it just boiled down to a chapter beginning with theory about a certain aspect of DevOps, and then ending with a concrete example, meaning the same as the beginning but with proper nouns mixed in. After finishing it I’m not sure if I learned more about DevOps or the business culture at Etsy.

Back to the topic. I use DevOps, kanban boards and CI/CD pipelines every day at my work. However, I realized that there is a staggering contrast between my work methods and my hobbyist methods. When I first started in web development in 2019, my job required me to develop and maintain a website using Web Forms and then deploying it to the server using an FTP tool. Eventually my job evolved to developing a Razor Pages project as well, but the methods stayed the same. Only two job changes later was I introduced to continuous integration and continuous deployment.

It has been five years since I started my career in web development, but even as late as this January, if I needed to update this very website, did I publish the files onto a local folder, drag them over to the server using FileZilla and replace the existing server files with the new ones. I don’t want to pull back the curtain too much, but for security reasons this involved some tinkering with the server firewall as well. It was all very inconvenient.

After reading The DevOps Handbook, even if I didn’t learn much new from it, it did give me the inspiration to finally implement a CI/CD pipeline on my server, so I could deploy website updates like a goddamn professional instead of my former caveman methods.

I familiarized myself with Jenkins, an open-source automation tool. It was a bit of an arcane process to get it installed and working on my server, but I finally managed to set it up and get it running on my server. Mind you, this whole website generates zero revenue for me, so I used the lowest available tier possible, meaning this whole website is running on crackers and spit. After installing Jenkins I did have to bump up my memory up to double the previous, so that’s how much I considered it an improvement.

I am a solo developer so I rarely use more than one Git branch in my projects. When there is nobody else to mess up your version history there are also no merge conflicts. With Jenkins up and running, however, I did create a new release branch alongside the master branch. I set up Jenkins to communicate with GitHub so whenever I make a push into the release branch, an automatic build and deploy are started. So, I can safely work on the website in the master branch and whenever I deem it ready for publishing, I merge it with the release branch and push the changes into GitHub.

Since I could update my website anytime I have spare time, my website could also go down any hour of the day for the duration of the update. IIS has this convenient feature that when it detects an app_offline.htm file in the website root folder, it displays that file instead of the website, so the website could go down and the users could still see a maintenance message. This website is running on an Ubuntu server with NGINX, so I had to configure NGINX manually to have the same feature. I created a simple app_offline.htm file and committed it to the version control. Then, I set a new step in the Jenkins deploy process that the file is copied into the root folder at the beginning of the deployment, and then removed when everything is finished. In the NGINX configuration, I set it to serve the client with the app_offline.htm file if it is detected in the root folder, otherwise it would serve the actual website as per usual.

Now I don’t have to bother with FTP tools or managing the server portion of the website manually. Jenkins will do it for me. This system is fairly standard for people in web development, but I was inspired only recently to implement it, even though I consider myself a skilled professional. There are probably more methods I could put into practice, but there is a limit of cost-efficiency with hobbyist projects like this one. First and foremost, I really should update this website to use Blazor. Maybe down the line I could add more unit tests or create a whole program that runs the whole server for me. The best part of being a programmer that when it comes to code, the sky's the limit.

Continuing on the last scribbling’s subject, I would like to write about a specific book I read. As I previously mentioned, I do order three books at a time as per my method. I want to write about a specific batch of books that included a very special book; a batch that consisted of Ikigai, The Pragmatic Programmer and, today’s main course, House of Leaves.

Disappointingly enough, I have little to say about Ikigai or The Pragmatic Programmer. Sometimes I have difficulties with choosing my Soul book, and going through the list of potential candidates on my regular online book retailer, I chose Ikigai for its pleasant appearance, length and price. I had heard of this book, mostly in the context of discussing coffee table books. You know, books that look pretty on a coffee table and mainly serve as a conversation starter rather than as a reading experience. But since it’s a fairly popular book I purchased it, read it and put it in my bookshelf after. What do you want from me? It was an alright book, telling about a specific Japanese lifestyle that enables some people to live in their nineties and beyond. Nothing world-changing but there was nothing wrong with the book either. I enjoyed my time with it and now I’ll probably never think about it again.

The Pragmatic Programmer was a book I picked up to hone my programming skills. Even though I consider myself a pretty seasoned software developer I still like to keep my basic skills sharp and shiny. The Pragmatic Programmer is a book about general programming paradigms; the does and not-does of software development. The book did teach me new things and things I already knew just bolstered my pre-existing knowledge. I do think it’s a very good book to read whether you are a novice programmer or a very experienced one. Moving on.

I did not know much about House of Leaves getting into it. I did know it was considered a cult classic, I knew that there was something peculiar about the style of writing and I knew the story had something to do with impossible geometry, and that’s about it. Boy howdy was I in for a treat.

I must preface this by saying that I love House of Leaves. It might even be my new favorite book, but as I will explain later, that is very hard to qualify. One reason I say that is that House of Leaves is a book I find myself thinking about a lot even months after finishing it. It really is a book so special and masterfully written that I find myself considering if I should call it a book in the first place; perhaps a written experience is a more accurate depiction, since the word book carries several connotations.

When you think about book as in the concept of book, you usually think about a written sequence of words, fiction or otherwise, that goes from point A to point B in some fashion within the confines of the stack of papers the words have been printed on. Nonfiction usually deals with presenting information, starting with the abstract and getting into more detail from there. Fiction might tell a story, usually in a three-act structure. Nevertheless, books are by design intended to be read in a linear order from page one to the last page, correct? By this I don’t mean fiction that plays with a non-linear sequence of events in terms of the story’s chronology. There are several books that have a non-linear narrative where some events are read about before other events that, in the context of the story, happen before said events. No, even in that case I mean that the reader is expected to read the book in the order of the physical pages from one, two, three and so on until they reach the last page with no backtracking needed.

Also, I used to hold the firm belief that a book’s quality can be measured on a single thing; whether a book makes me feel something or whether it makes me bored; bored being the absence of feelings. The Wager by David Grann was a gripping book that kept me on the edge of my bed throughout the whole story. That is a book that made me feel excited, worried, terrified and sad for its characters. On the other hand, I felt nothing for the cutout archetype characters of The Fatherland or its stupid story, so I didn’t even bother finishing it. It made me feel numb, which I used to interpret that the book is unequivocally bad.

I will come back to both of these points.

House of Leaves not only provided me with one of the greatest reading experiences of recent years; House of Leaves changed how I see books as a medium. And now that I’ve been building up this book as some sort of holy grail of literature, let me tell you what it’s about.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a book that involves several multi-layered stories. At first hand one could easily state that there are three stories, a story within a story within a story, but as is the case with many things in this book, there are arguably more depending on how you interpret things.

The first level in this wedding cake of a novel is the Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is a seemingly fictional documentary about Will Navidson, a journalist, and his wife and two children, and the titular house they move into in the beginning of the book. The Navidson Record is a the story of Navidson finding that the house his family has moved into contains a door that leads into a seemingly infinite labyrinth of empty rooms, doors, hallways and staircases, all of which couldn’t possibly be contained in the small house alone. Navidson ventures into the maze several times, deeper and deeper each time, hires help investigating the house’s secrets while trying to keep his family together as the appearance of the mysterious door causes his relationship to his wife to rupture.

The Navidson Record in House of Leaves is the center point of an academic dissertation by a man called Zampano. This is how the Navidson Record is presented to the reader; as the subject of an academic paper that discusses themes, psychological motives and symbolism in the documentary recorded by Will Navidson. The academic paper quotes several real-life people and professionals in several fields dissecting the events and characters presented in the Navidson Record like an actual piece of academic writing. This is the first layer of the book.

The first layer is the academic paper regarding the Navidson Record and written by Zampano. In his paper Zampano assures that the Navidson Record is a real documentary and has been published and documented by several other people. However, as the second layer starts to unfold, Zampano is blind, and there seems to be no evidence that anything in the paper is real, and none of the people being quoted in the paper are aware of such a documentary.

This is where we arrive at Johnny Truant, an orphaned man who together with his friend find Zampano dead in the man’s apartment, where Johnny incidentally finds the paper discussing the Navidson Record. Johnny’s story is told as footnotes to Zampano’s paper; he starts reading the paper he finds and gets practically consumed by it, and starts documenting his own thoughts in the footnotes of Zampano’s paper. Sometimes he talks about the paper itself but more often than not he goes over things happening in his own personal life. As Johnny’s story is written in footnote format, both stories, Zampano’s paper on the Navidson Record and Johnny’s journal, go on simultaneously on the same page throughout House of Leaves. On top of that, there is the third level of storytelling, which is another set of footnotes to Johnny’s footnotes, written by people only referred to as “the editors” and that seem to have been written after Johnny’s notes, commenting on them. So, in House of Leaves, there are in total three simultaneous stories going on on every page.

I said earlier that the book is masterfully written. I do really think so because Danielewski takes the concept of an academic paper, usually the most boring and least engaging form of writing and turns it into something so surreal and yet so gripping, and uses footnotes and margins as a way of telling a story which is absolutely fantastic. If this was not enough to turn this book into a cult classic then let me tell you, reader, that Zampano’s notes contain references to other notes or citations to other sources, as is usual for academic writing, but this feature turns the whole book upside down. As I mentioned earlier, a book is usually designed to be read in the order the pages are layed out. However, with this genius idea of writing, following Zampano’s notes and citations the reader is encouraged to jump from page to page, sometimes backwards, and sometimes ending in a literal dead-end. The reader could traverse the pages in order, or discover alternate routes and secret paths throughout the stories. I loved reading it, never knowing what I might uncover next.

The thing in House of Leaves that made me change my view of books as a medium was a chapter very early in the book titled “Echo”. This chapter involves Zampano discussing a moment in the Navidson Record where Will Navidson prepares to determine the size of an impossibly large hall he found within the house by the means of sonar measurement. Zampano’s paper goes on to infuriating details about the concept of echo, its symbolism and meaning in different cultures. This chapter goes on for pages without much action and it was truly a slog to get through for me.

However, the geniusness of the chapter lies in its boredom. In the context of the Navidson Record, Navidson’s exploration of the house has started to affect his relationship to his wife, and their mutual communication has started to cease. More to the point, the hallways and rooms Navidson comes across in the house, completely alone both physically and increasingly also socially, are described to be completely featureless, and as Navidson descends deeper and deeper into the house, also quite chilly. The way Danielewski uses boring academic writing peppered with dense jargon through Zampano really emphasizes the loneliness Navidson experiences in his exploration into the house and the constant dullness of his environments. Empty, featureless room after empty, featureless hallway with nobody to talk to; emphasized by paragraph after paragraph of boring, rambling discourse on echo and its presence in Greek mythology.

Using previously mentioned techniques and styles Danielewski is not only writing about a maze; he has written a maze. Several notes and references that take you from the straight path and sometimes leave you to nowhere, paragraphs of text that have seemingly nothing interesting to them only to simulate a long journey through a labyrinth with no stimuli whatsoever. If the echo chapter was not as boring and difficult to read as it is, I don’t know if I would have enjoyed it more. The fact that Echo is as boring as it is makes it good in the end, because it really ties back to the subject matter and the themes of House of Leaves, that I can’t in good conscience use boredom to measure a book’s quality ever again.

This is why I’m not sure if I should call House of Leaves a book, since it breaks so many rules of writing a book that I have previously taken for granted. It is by no means linear in its physical appearance and it does have intentionally boring parts, but all of these techniques work to its advantage. I am yet to mention the appendices; if you’re like me and you buy the edition that includes the Whalestoe Letters, a series of letters written by Johnny’s mother Pelafina to her son featured as an appendix, then once you reach the end of the book you are left wondering if you missed a completely sectioned-off part of the book. I don’t want to spoil anything, but much like Zampano’s paper, Pelafina’s letters contain several passages that the reader is required to decrypt. There is one particular letter that is very heartbreaking, and the way it is meant to be read really punctuates the emotions in that letter. The letters, incidentally, raise the question if there are more than just these three stories I described going on in the book, or whether there is something bigger the reader might have missed. At least I felt that way.

I am aware that Danielewski has encouraged this kind of speculative interpretation of his book, and that there are internet communities sharing and discussing possible clues and additional paths in the labyrinth that is House of Leaves. I do love the book but I do think discussing it like a sort of Da Vinci Code style riddle would diminish its value for me. Someday I will pick up the book once again, and much like Will Navidson, Zampano and Johnny Truant, I will go back to the maze again. House of Leaves is a book I could talk about for hours and there are still so many unique little characteristics that I haven’t even mentioned, but it also makes me a little bit melancholic. House of Leaves was such an unique and unforgettable reading experience for me that I fear I will never come across a book of its equal again. A book that is so memorable but a book that also changes how you view every other book from here on out.

I could end this piece of writing with some sort of poignant pun like I usually try to do, but having finished writing I find myself in a wistful mood. Instead, I would like to close this with a poem included in the book’s appendices:

You shall be my roots and

I will be your shade,

though the sun burns my leaves.

You shall quench my thirst and

I will feed you fruit,

though time takes my seed.

And when I'm lost and can tell nothing of this earth

you will give me hope.

And my voice you will always hear.

And my hand you will always have.

For I will shelter you.

And I will comfort you.

And even when we are nothing left,

not even in death,

I will remember you.

It has been quite some time since I published anything on this website. To tell the truth, I have been occupied with a hobbyist programming project for the last few months that I have dedicated all the time left over by work, relationships and wasting time in general. Today I found some time that I’d rather dedicate to writing these scribbles again rather than producing loops, statements and variables.

But  what should I write about this time? When I glanced at my Google Docs folder, I saw two unfinished scribbles, one of which never got further than the title. I don’t feel like continuing on either of them since they were not interesting enough to finish in the first place.

This is probably going to be a short one, but I’d like to talk about this system I came up with last fall around the time I took a break from writing. I like to read a lot, right? In high school I used to consume a lot of fantasy; Harry Potter, Witcher, Althalus and the entire Redwall series to name a few. During my college years my reading habits grew faint, mostly because of the amount of academic writing I had to wrap my mind around. Now that those days are in the past and I’ve found myself with a stable job and adulthood responsibilities, I’ve taken up reading again.

The problem with reading as a hobby is that there are so many books one can choose from. There are some freaks who are able to read several books at once, switching from one to another on a day-to-day basis, but I am not one of them. I pick up a book, finish it in several short sections and put it on my shelf. Therefore I have to dedicate my time to a single book at a time, and choosing which book to pick up can be quite the hassle. Sometimes I’m interested in one kind of topic, such as historical true crime à la David Grann of Killers of the Flower Moon and the Wager fame. Sometimes I feel like improving myself as a person so I pick up a book by Thich Nhat Hanh. The problem is to select a book to stick to for days at a time and not lose interest in the topic before finishing it.

For this problem I did create a system: Every time I order more books to read, I order three books, one for each category I devised. The categories are Heart, Mind and Soul. The Heart category comprises books that cause emotions, whether they be joy, sadness, fear, et cetera. The Mind category comprises books that teach me something, such as books about programming, history or natural sciences. The Soul category comprises books that develop my psychological side for the lack of a better wording, such as philosophy books and certain publications with spiritual subtexts. After I acquire the three books, I finish them and start the process from the beginning.

I have done this now for a few months, finishing three very different books at a time. Just for example, the first three books I started out with were:

1. For the Heart: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys

2. For the Mind: Narconomics by Tom Wainwright

3. For the Soul: The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh

I chose Flowers for Algernon for my Heart book for I had read that the book is very touching. I did know the book by its reputation beforehand and I had heard it’s a common reading assignment in American schools. It’s one of the great novels one should read in their lifetime, so I bought it and had a go at it. I must agree it is very moving and the last page managed to squeeze some tears out of me. It actually resonated with me more than I had expected; the book is about Charlie, a mentally handicapped person who gains great intellect through an experimental surgery, previously having been performed only on a laboratory mouse named Algernon. Charlie finds himself alienated from his former relationships because of his intellect and confused by his emerging sexual feelings. The way the book is written, in the form of a self-written journal by Charlie, really emphasises his progress as his grammar and writing style improve paragraph by paragraph. Charlie’s conclusion in the book also really touched me, since the thoughts and fears he goes through in the end are really similar to mine. As I said, the Heart category must not be only about joy; sadness is a feeling too and not in any way worse.

I heard a recommendation for Narconomics in a now-finished podcast I sometimes listen to called Hello Internet. The book is about the drug trade, its causes and results. The book was published a decade ago so some of the data it refers to might be outdated, but it really grants the reader a great insight into why modern policies to restrict illegal drug trade fail so spectacularly, since the policies have not really evolved since the 1930s. Wainwright himself did the investigative journalism and writes about his journey through South America having visited cocaine farms and talked to cartel members. The book really gives you the basis you need to understand why criminalising some substances is not always the best solution and which actions could lead to the best results.

Last but not least, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching was the second book by Thich Nhat Hanh that I’ve read, the first being Peace is Every Step. This book is a bit more technical than the latter and it provides more direct insight into the Buddhist faith than any of the other books of his that I’ve read since. Let me be clear; I’m not into Buddhism as a religion, but I do appreciate the message it teaches and especially the lessons Thich Nhat Hanh brings across. I like his writing style, even if translated from Vietnamese to English, and I like how he does not act as an authority in what he teaches. Instead of commanding as many religious texts do, he suggests, which is a very important distinction. I’d imagine The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching to be a handy pocket guide to Buddhism if you’re a practitioner, but even a non-committed layman such as I got a lot out of it. The Four Noble Truths and the Three Doors of Liberation, for example.

After finishing these three books, I did order more following the same pattern. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll write about them, who knows. I do like to write about what I read, for it allows me to process the books in a way I can’t do without an outlet, and that’s what this website is for.

Back in high school I was given an assignment to review a book of my own choosing for a Finnish class. I went straight to the source to the village library to pick up a book. I had no idea what kind of book I was going to borrow, so I went in pretty blind. In front of the entrance, there was a rotating metal shelf displaying books that had recently been acquired and added to the library’s collection. I remember one of the books stood out from the rest; it had a purple, intriguing cover that immediately caught my eye. The name was also short and striking; The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I refused to walk further into the labyrinth of shelves and books and borrowed The Alchemist instead.

I did end up giving it a praising review, if memory serves. I had not yet been tainted by exposure to Zero Punctuation at that time of my life, more’s the pity. I seem to remember that even at the time of the assignment I genuinely thought the book was trash, but lacked the conviction to give it the written treatment it deserved. I don’t usually look back at my high school years, but the reason I’m doing that now is because a book I recently finished reading reminded me of The Alchemist.

I have the habit of ordering a batch of new books every few months. Once I finish reading the last one, I order a new pile. One of those batches contained Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. When I look for new books to read, I usually go to Reddit or some other forum to skim through book recommendation threads. That one time I was interested in fiction books that at least tangentially touched upon the subject of Buddhist ideas. One of the most recommended books on the subject was the aforementioned Siddhartha.

First, I sort of liked the core premise and story of Siddhartha. A son of a brahmin goes on  a journey wanting to find enlightenment, meets a cast of characters including Buddha himself and takes upon himself a variety of professions. However, after reaching the last page I found myself disliking the book. The main problem I had with the book, alongside the weirdly short inner margins on the pages that my copy had, and the main problem I had with The Alchemist, is that it is written in a really infuriating way; I feel like the author wanted to have a grand meaning behind every single sentence in the book.

Paulo Coelho, as I understand it, is regarded as an author associated with self-discovery literature. It makes sense that a book of this variety, a category that Siddhartha falls into, would have a grand meaning. It is expected that the reader has somehow changed or come across a discovery by the end. The problem is, I feel like every sentence in the book is designed to bring forward ideas first and to develop characters or advancing plot distant second. The characters and situations feel very hollow when all they do is talk in mysterious riddles paragraphs on end, rather than bringing across what the character is like, and by the end I end up disliking the whole cast because I know nothing about them and don’t care about their predicaments. For example, in one chapter the titular character Siddhartha comes across a person whose job is to transport people across a river on a raft. The rest of the chapter is spent with the character rambling on about what it means to live by the river, how the river talks to you if you listen closely and the meaning of flowing water and stuff like that. Not one line is dedicated to what the character likes as a person or why I should care about him.

Siddhartha is a short book, meaning it doesn’t contain a lot of if any filler, but the incessant philosophical onslaught brings it down. I wouldn’t recommend it. Incidentally, after I finished it and ordered new books online, I got my hands on an actual nonfiction book about Soto Buddhism, which is a collection of written works by an influential Japanese monk titled A Moon in a Dewdrop. I have only read a few chapters into it, and it is very difficult to grasp at times, but I’m enjoying it a whole lot more than I did Siddhartha. At least in a nonfiction book the thematic ideas and the narrative are not in a constant war with each other, which is sort of ironic about a fiction book on finding nirvana.

This month I finally finished reading another book. No, it was not Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I started reading that because I am a fan of absurdism, and based on the synopsis it was right up my alley. So I did start it but never finished it. I don’t know if this was the case with the original first edition, but the copy I have has a quality that makes it very difficult to read; it has virtually no line breaks. There are breaks between paragraphs, but after a dialogue line, for example, the text just keeps on going on the same line without a break. This may sound like a minute problem, but trust me, it keeps adding up and the book turns into a wall. It was such a slog to get through so I never finished it.

After giving up on The Trial I looked for something different. The online book store that I order my books from had updated their Top 10 Most Popular Books list recently, and this time it featured a book called Atomic Habits. A self-help book, focusing on how one can improve their life by adjusting their routines. I’ve never been a person particularly fond of self-help literacy, but since it was on the list and had a nice cover, I decided to give it a go.

After finishing reading it, I must say I enjoyed it. It is not a long book and it is not preachy like some other books of its kind. Even though I consider myself a man of established routines, I got some good tips and even motivation from the book. It also made me think about my own habits and how they fit into the templates the book used to illustrate its points.

For example, I eat the same breakfast every day, which I have done for years. Occasionally there are periods when I have to switch to cheaper alternatives like oatmeal when money is tight, but most of the time I eat the following: two slices of rye bread, toastered, topped by a layer of plant-based spread, two slices of poultry cold cuts and four slices of cucumber, six even if I’m feeling frisky. This complemented by two cups of coffee is what I eat every morning and have eaten for as long as I can remember. Some people would consider this insane and ask me why I don’t mix up my choices. Variety is the spice of life, after all. See, I don’t even think about that, because this breakfast is a habit for me, and like the book says, you have to make your habits appealing if you want to execute them long-term. See, it may not look like it, but my breakfast is actually crafted to be culinarily appealing.

I toast my bread slices because it makes them nice and crispy. This, combined with a butter-like spread, creates a contrast of textures.Cold cuts have a softer and dryer meat-like texture and cucumber slices are crunchy but also very moist. When you combine all these layers you get a whole that has different oral sensations with every bite. This, I have found, is the key that makes me not get bored with my breakfast. You have to make your habits stimulating to make you keep upholding them, if you see what I mean.

One of the points the book makes is that to be successful at anything that requires habits or repetitive routines is that you have to fall in love with boredom. Successful athletics may get a head start with the right genes, but only the best ones are the ones who can keep exercising time and time again without getting bored of it. I am a hobbyist swimmer, far from a professional one or what people usually consider an athletic body, but I still run into the problem of getting bored in the pool. There are very few stimuli in the pool; the only things my eyes see are either the bottom tiles of the pool or the feet of the person swimming in front of me. I don’t have water-resistant earphones, so I can’t listen to music or podcasts as I swim. The only audio I hear are the background noises of the swimming hall. I admit, it gets really boring after the first thousand meters, but I still haver to push through. Same with professional bodybuilders who have to do the same reps over and over again.

The book has some tips how to get your motivation up. One example was adjusting your habit to make it stimulating, see my breakfast above. One other idea is to keep track of your habit. I always wear my sports watch to the pool, which helps me keep track of different stats of my performance. Heart beat, distance swum, stroke-to-distance ratio, things like that. It also keeps a calendar of the days I go swimming, which makes it easier to track. All of my swims are converted into numbers, which I enjoy seeing go up. The downside is that tracking your habit can easily become a goal in itself, which can make you lose motivation. I swim because I want to have a healthy heart and weigh less. I do weigh myself on a scale and note down the numbers, which I enjoy seeing go down, of course, but I do not set the numbers going down a goal, if that makes sense. If I did, and after a month didn’t see a significant change in the numbers, I think it would make me lose motivation, since what’s the point of trying to lose weight if it’s not going down after a month’s worth of exercise.

Atomic Habits also mentioned that to keep yourself motivated you have to make the habit a part of your identity. You don’t study a new language because you want to learn a new language, you study a new language because you are a person interested in languages. A tiny difference, sure, but very essential. Now, this part of the book I was very iffy about, because I am very wary of building my identity based on something external. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. I even wrote a thing titled Personality Lich on that subject; basing your sense of self on external phenomena. But after finishing the book, I must admit there might be a kernel of truth in the claim. After thinking about it, I might be more hesitant to skip my exercise if I considered myself a swimmer. Do swimmers skip swimming exercises? No. Do those guys who like pandas skip swimming exercises? Maybe.

At the end of the day, I do recommend Atomic Habits. It’s 20 percent actual useful information and 80 percent anecdotes, but it gets the points across. If you are like me and want to improve yourself as a swimmer, this book might be for you. If you want to improve yourself as a Schwimmer, however, better start by enrolling in an acting class for neuroticism and destructive co-dependence.

I don’t watch a lot of movies. I see new ones with the same interval most people make dental appointments. Watching movies is an investment; you give up two hours of your life and if the movie is good, it may enhance your life. Chances are, too, that the movie is bad and you will never get those two hours back. In late 2022 and early 2023 I saw an unusual amount of movies, some of them even in the theater oddly enough. What’s even more odd, the ratio of time wasted to world-changing thoughts provoked was surprisingly positive. I’m not saying 2022 was an overwhelmingly great year where every movie that came out was a Scorcese-level character piece, but I had fun watching some of them.

Technically I saw this movie in early 2023, but I went in with little expectations to see Puss in Boots 2: The Last Wish. I had heard some people on the internet praise the story and the animation style, but then again, Puss in Boots is a franchise that was originally a spinoff of a sequel to an erect middle finger to Disney disguised as a movie. Furthermore, I remember going to see the first Puss in Boots in a theater, but I remember virtually nothing about the actual movie. I do remember a goose and Humpty Dumpty being the central villain, but nothing more. So remembering how unforgettable the first movie was and the franchise’s position in the grand scheme of Dreamwork’s things, you could understand that I was not expecting much, even though I definitely should have been knowing the result.

Puss in Boots 2 is an amazing movie. Not only is the animation a mix of traditional Dreamworks style and a hint of anime, which is inherently interesting, but it has speed and energy that matches the tempo of the scenes, which makes it fun to watch. The two main antagonists, the John Mulaney one and the other one, are very distinct from each other but equally entertaining. For a long time watching one family-friendly Pixar flick after another, I have begun to dread the way Disney et al have abandoned the idea of a traditional fairytale villain. These days Pixar films are all about life lessons and moral ambiguity, which was fine the first twelve times, but now it’s getting old. The Wolf in Puss in Boots 2 is my favorite type of villain; very funny but at the same time extremely intimidating (see The Joker in The Dark Knight or Gaunter O’Dimm in Witcher 3:Wild Hunt). I might actually go see a second sequel if they ever make one.

The other movie I have fond memories of watching was Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not only is the movie gut-punchingly funny and tears-in-eyes heartfelt, but it managed to do something no movie has done since The Dark Knight; it managed to topple the competition within ease and make its way to my favorite movie of all time.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, or EEAO for short, is a multi-dimensional tale about a Chinese laundromat owner and her relationship with her husband and daughter. I don’t want to talk too much about this movie because I don’t want to spoil anything, but it hits just the right spots for me. It starts out slightly absurdist and doesn’t let up. In fact, there is a fight scene early on between the laundromat lady and the IRS agent that was rather silly, and watching it I though the movie had reached maximum silliness. Oh, how wrong I was. What I love most about the movie that every time you think you have seen the craziest thing yet, the movie whacks you over the head with something even crazier and just keeps on going.

Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but the moment a character played by Randy Newman, of all people, appeared, I was already in tears marveling at what this movie was doing to me. Movies rarely make me laugh, most of the time they manage get a light chuckle out of me or, at most, a sudden burst of air from my nostrils. This movie exceeded all expectations and made me laugh in tears. Not to say that the movie lacks drama; again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but the scene with the rocks, especially when the other one turns around, is at the same time one of the funniest and definitely the most touching scene in the movie. I did not know if my eyes were wet from laughter or this movie managing to strike sparks out of my flinty heart.

I have never had much respect for the Academy, I admit. The reason that I dislike the Oscars is that, in my opinion, most of the time the Best Picture Award goes to a movie that was specifically built for that award, hence the term Oscar bait. The Academy feeds into the loop that keeps churning out these soulless character/period dramas like Forrest Gump or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. You know, serious movies about characters suffering from circumstances manufactured to be as touching and thought-provoking as possible, even though it usually ends up being either a war or incurable illness.

EEAO winning a truckload of awards including the Best Picture changed my mind. I was a hundred percent sure that for the reasons I just listed, the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front was going to take the cake, since it’s a movie about the horrors of war, in addition to the war being the First World War which in turn has spawned more period dramas than widows. I was sure that the Academy would go for it since then we could all sit down and have a ponder about the point of sending young men to their deaths for no actual gain, and pat ourselves on the back for realizing that. EEAO winning the awards gave me hope that the Academy does actually care about the movies’ technical achievements and, most importantly, the feelings they make us experience while watching them.

There were many other movies that I saw last year and enjoyed, but these were the two I think about even now. I should probably watch more current and upcoming movies in case the same thing happens again and a movie exceeds all my expectations. Or maybe I’ll go back and watch Ratatouille while listening to the Toy Story soundtrack, for no particular reason.

Last May I wrote my thing on my experiences in China. Today I decided to follow up on that by writing on them some more. Honestly, time makes fools of us all by flying by so fast that I’d better write these memories down before they are but extinguished neurons.

Last time I told about my encounters with some locals. What I did not write about, however, were the events that preceded my trip to China. Not explaining the reasons that led me there was a bit of an oversight, to be fair. During my university studies I had to take a mandatory course on technical writing in English. As I stepped into the classroom for the first time I found an available seat next to another student who happened to be from Vietnam. We got talking and we developed an academic bond that over time evolved into proper friendship. Anyway, eventually she told me about Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration that was held in February. I already knew that in the Far East people celebrated Lunar New Year but I had never experienced it myself. She invited me to her place and we had a great meal there. That was the spark that turned my emerging interest in East Asia into a real wildfire.

Fortunately, at my university it was possible to take up a minor in East Asian studies. I enrolled on the program, and as was required by the program, I had to choose one between three possible languages to study; Chinese, Korean and Japanese. At that point they all seemed equally difficult to me. However, there were a lot of people enrolling for Japanese classes, so they had a pre-requirement that all participants should have a preliminary understanding of the language. That, plus me associating people studying Japanese with such an enthusiasm with general weebyness, anime body pillows and such, I ruled Japanese out. I had to choose between Chinese and Korean. At that point I didn’t know much about Korea, except that they treat their young pop idols like cattle. China I knew to be a big player in international politics and economy, so the weights were lifting in their favor.

So, I enrolled on the Chinese course. Our teacher was lovely old Chinese lady, Mrs. Zhu, or as we called her, Zhu Laoshi, who had emigrated from China decades ago. Our classes were taught mainly in English with some Mandarin Chinese sprinkled in there as we progressed. Mrs. Zhu was a really sweet woman, and in a way a sad testament of how it was to live in China during the Mao reign. Get this: she told us that when she was a kid, for one of her birthdays she got an egg as a present, since in the 1950s China an egg was the equivalent of a modern iPhone.

Anyway, Mrs. Zhu was a really demanding teacher, as you can imagine an old Chinese mother to be. I used to spend about an hour per assignment drawing my Chinese characters, because I wanted to get the strokes just right. And for my efforts, Mrs. Zhu gave me praise for my beautiful writing style. Not much praise for my pronunciation, though. She also had a thick Chinese accent and didn’t speak the best English, which is understandable. She did enough for us students to understand her well. One time she told us a fairly important contextual difference that we had to look out for when talking to a native speaker, and that was the case of the word xiaojie. Xiaojie under regular circumstances is the Mandarin equivalent of the English miss, as in the pronoun one uses to refer to a young lady. For example, when trying to catch the attention of a young waitress, you would call her by xiaojie. However, that word has a secondary meaning, as it can also be used to refer to a prostitute. If you go to a shady street corner motel and ask the receptionist if they have any xiaojie, it is very apparent what you are after. So, she taught us an important lesson. However, bless her sweet old heart, she didn’t explain it in the most correct grammatical sense. She explained that xiaojie can refer to a prostitute, a person who, and I quote, “sells the sex”. A small grammatical mistake that in no way shrouds the meaning of the phrase, but the unnecessary article made me laugh in class.

I did not continue my Chinese studies under Mrs. Zhu after I got back from China. I went on and completed my minor and got involved in the East Asian studies student club instead. That can be a story for another time. What I do want to expand on is that if you want to study Mandarin Chinese, you should not do it in mainland China. I did study Mandarin Chinese there for a year, under several teachers, all natives, and not one grasped how difficult learning Mandarin Chinese as a second language is. I did actually meet a guy on the airport on my way there who was from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese as his native language. He said that, yes, native Mandarin speakers do not always get that their native language is hard to learn for some, and they don’t understand it because they only speak that one language and have spoken that specific language their whole lives. Your best bet is either abroad or in Hong Kong, if you want a teacher who understands the struggle.

Hopefully I can make this an annual thing to air out my recollections. These paragraphs may bore the socks off of some people, but these memories are very special to me and I enjoy writing them down. I still have some in store and maybe I’ll get back to them on a later date.

Apparently at the time of writing this, we as a society are living in the so-called Golden Age of Television. Crazy, right? I have a hard time believing that since all there is on TV when I hop from channel to channel is reality trash, the fourteenth iteration of the singing competition format, infomercials or an unholy mix of them all. When people call this age the Golden Age of Television they of course refer to the streaming services that are slowly killing television, so one can get confused. Not without a cause, mind. The streaming format has all the advantages that television has and then some. First, you don’t need to be at your television at a certain time to catch a show or, God forbid, TiVo it. With streaming you can watch anything you want whenever you want. Second, since the episodes of a series don’t need to fill a fixed time slot between commercials and other shows, they can be as long or short as needed for the benefit of the story teller. The flexibility of the streaming format is convenient and enables the kind of entertainment that has not been possible before. When you put it like that, I sort of agree with the Golden Age sentiment.

However, nowadays I rarely watch any prestige TV, and let me tell you why. There have been multiple shows that have attracted a wide audience and have been more successful than the last. The earliest one that I remember was The Sopranos, and it has been a very decent uphill from there. There have been shows like Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Black Mirror, Westworld and Game of Thrones. Every single one of them held in high regard, more or less. I have seen a few episodes of Breaking Bad and Westworld, and I must admit that some moments in those shows caused a few sparks fly off my flinty soul. But ever since Game of Thrones was concluded with an ending many consider to be worse than that of the average case of HIV, I have come down with a severe case of Prestige TV Fatigue.

See, in the olden days TV wasn’t so heavily serialised. There were shows like The X-Files, Star Trek and Dr. Who; shows that consisted of episodes that started from status quo and ended in status quo. Every episode was their own separate entity in a sense; watching and enjoying an episode didn’t require you having watched the previous one. Nowadays I feel that Prestige TV has the impression that having a deep, complex story requires serialisation. In some cases that is unavoidable, like I can’t really imagine a way to have a successful non-serialised version of Game of Thrones.

Watching TV nowadays takes effort because of this. I have to watch every episode in order to keep track. With more complex worldbuilding there are more events and names to be committed to memory. This phenomenon also compounds with every new show you pick up. I can’t seriously be expected to remember all the intricate political intrigues in Game of Thrones and also consider the underlying philosophical debates of existence in Westworld. Sometimes I would just like to kick back, watch an episode of a show I like and not have to recall all the events set up in the previous two hundred episodes.

This brings me to today’s topic, The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian is a show based on the Star Wars universe, focusing on a bounty hunter Mandalorian and his adopted child Baby Yoda. The sixth episode of the third season aired recently, which made me think of this Prestige TV stuff in the first place. The Mandalorian is a very good exception to the fatigue I just complained about; it does have a series-spanning overarching story, but at the same time every episode is a self-contained adventure, so you have the option to ditch the background plot and just focus on the plot of the week.

What I like about The Mandalorian is that it gets what made Star Wars a compelling story in the first place; something that the Disney Trilogy missed hard. The fact that the story focuses on this no-name bounty hunter and his little green friend is exactly the format that inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars in the first place; he is the ronin of the samurai movies of old. He arrives on a planet, helps the locals, maybe battles a menacing space monster and leaves. On to the next planet. A simple story well told.

What brought down the Prequels and the Disney Trilogy to some extent was that they focused way too much on the galactic politics, the Jedi Order and nonsense prophecies. Prophecies as a way to advance plot are a novice writer’s tool anyway; when you have a prophecy you don’t need to come up with character motivation or in-universe reasons to explain why the story involves the main character. Also, leaning on the Senate and the Jedi Council to begin with was a mistake. First, nobody goes to the cinema to watch Prime Minister’s Questions, so leave out the politics. Second, making the main characters prophesied jedi knights is boring and takes away relatability.

This is what The Mandalorian gets right. The main character is just a commoner of the galaxy, no prophecies and no political cliques. He has a clear moral code, sensible motivation and the cutest sidekick to base a line of stuffed toys off of for fans to buy.

However, for the last few episodes a slight worry has started growing inside me. We have spent an entire episode focusing on a group of ex-Imperials going through a rehabilitation program, one of whom is an obvious turncoat. In the second season it was heavily implied that Baby Yoda was kidnapped by remnant Imperials to create Snoke, and these past few episodes have delved into the resurrection of the Empire and the formation of the First Order a little too much for my comfort. What I’m worried about is that The Mandalorian is slowly turning into yet another backstory; we had the Prequels explaining the story behind Darth Vader, and that went as well as one could expect.

I really enjoy The Mandalorian for what it is, detached from all the other Star Wars properties. What I think would be the best was for the show to distance itself as far from the Disney Star Wars movies and shows as possible. Do not go the way of Game of Thrones and go out in a blazing garbage fire of glory. Keep true to yourself, this is the way.

You know what? I have been writing these scribbles for over a year now and not once have I discussed what actually is my bread and butter: programming. Crazy, I know. What makes it even crazier is that the platform that I publish my scribbles on, meaning this very website, I programmed from scratch with my own ten fingers. As a professional I find talking about these simple hobbyist web applications a bit tedious, though, especially those of my own creation. It’s like writing a cook book consisting of my own recipes for myself. What really is the point? But, as an exercise in creative writing, I will hold back the curtain a bit and let you glimpse into a fresh modification to the website’s source code that I found mildly fascinating to implement.

I admit I behave like I don’t care about the traffic on this website with my too-cool-for-school attitude, but if there’s anything I do care about, it’s where visitors to my website originate and what they have decided to visit. Collecting data on visitors and processing it is called analytics, and almost every website on the internet does it. Think of your website as a Facebook post; you send it out there and after a while you can come back to it and see a number implying how many people liked it. Similar data can be gathered on a website. When you load a page, it creates a record in the website logs showing what you accessed, when and from where. At the time of writing I have links to this website on my LinkedIn and Instagram profiles. If someone clicks a link on one of my profiles and lands on this website, I will know. There are many third-party services that one could use to get even more intricate data on their website’s traffic.

The thing about collecting this kind of data is that you really have to track individual visitors to get a clear picture who accesses which page. If you want to do that then things can get a bit tricky. You probably have heard of a thing called GDPR, or the General Data Protection Regulation. All websites that get visited by a citizen of the European Union have to comply with this regulation, meaning that the website’s owner can’t just collect any kind of data without consent. You are probably aware that any time you visit a website for the first time, the first thing you see is a cookie consent banner or popup of some sort that asks for your permission for collecting data of your visit. Collection of any data that can be used to trace back to an individual requires consent.

In addition to that, most websites utilize a third-party analytics service that only muddle the issue. Not only will you need consent for collecting data, but you also need to ask for consent for sharing that data with a third party. One of the most popular third-party service is Google Analytics, which infamously has been deemed illegal within the EU due to its data processing and storing methods. So, at first when I wanted to get a better picture of how many visits my website gets and where my visitors generally come from, I also used a third-party service. This is where I will get a bit more technical.

I admit, at first I did use Google Analytics before I learned about its status in the EU. Oops. How Google Analytics works is that a cookie will be generated upon receiving consent. This cookie is user-specific and will be attached to your browser. Using scripts on this website Google then sends data to its servers every time the person does something on the page, be it loading a page or clicking a button. After I learned about Google Analytics and its issues, I switched to a GDPR-compliant service PanelBear. After using PanelBear for about a week, I received an email about the service being shut down. I was pretty much out of third-party options.

The thing about third-party analytics services is that the tracking they conduct happens on the client side, aka in the browser. They generally communicate with the analytics servers using JavaScript scripts that can be blocked with common advertisement-blocking browser extensions, which is very unfortunate for tracking purposes.

I was facing two challenges at once: finding an alternate solution for website analytics and finding a solution for script-blocking extensions that shrouded my view. I decided to program my own solution.

In website applications there are these things called middleware. When you make a request to a website, e.g. load a page, before reaching the user interface layer the request will go through middleware, which implement some logic for processing the request. A simple example of middleware would be authentication middleware. A user requests a profile page that is only available to the user themself. Before returning the page to the browser, the authentication middleware checks that the request sender has the permission to access that page. If not, the user is not granted access and the request stops at the middleware. If yes, the request goes through to the interface layer and returns the profile page.

Not only do middleware grant me access to intact requests and responses, but all the logic is located on the server side. By writing up a global middleware, meaning a middleware that is applied to all requests rather than page-specific ones, I could funnel all visitors through a pipeline that could record and store data on the visitor without any meddling ad blockers. However, there was one more problem to tackle.

As I said, collecting, processing or storing data on visitors requires consent from them, as regulated by the GDPR. However, this applies to data that is considered personal, i.e. data that can be used to identify the visitor. I am only interested in which pages get visited and where the requests originate on country-level, so I didn’t even need to worry about personal data. I started writing a middleware that would get information from the coming request, but only the kind of information that would let me stay on the legal side of the GDPR.

A new problem then arose: if I couldn’t collect data that could be used to identify a visitor, how could I then tell which requests came from the same source? This is where I came closest to the gray sidelines of the GDPR. Every request that comes along carries data on the visitor’s system; information on browser and operating system. This information is stored in the request in the form of a user-agent header. The user-agent header tells the website which browser and device the visitor is using, be it a Chrome browser on Windows or Firefox on Android. This is not data that can be traced back to an individual user, but it can be enough to tell different visitors apart.

The IP address is basically your computer’s identification address. The request carries the IP in order to return the requested resource to the correct destination. As you can imagine, the IP address is definitely personal data. However, a common IPv4 address has two main parts: the network ID part and the host ID part. When put together, they can be traced back to an individual device. By themselves, the network ID can only be used to identify the network the device operates in, and the host ID becomes meaningless.

As I was also curious about where visitors to this website are located on country-level, I could achieve geolocation by network ID alone, since networks rarely cross national borders. Also, to geolocate a visitor, I have to use an external third-party geolocation service that I need to share the visitor’s IP address with. Not sending them the whole address but only the network part, I can dodge the necessity for sharing personal data with third-party services, which would create an handful of new problems in itself.

Now that I had the user-agent header and the network ID filters set, I could fairly reliably tell requests originating from different sources apart. To also avoid problems with storing said data in an irresponsible way, I added a hashing function to the mix; by combining the user-agent header, the network ID and, in addition, the current date, I could create a hash string that would be unique to each request source each day, but be also absolute gibberish to the naked eye in case someone with nefarious intentions got access to my database. There is no way anyone could use it and trace it back to a person.

As you clicked the button that took you onto this page, chances are my middleware collected your country of origin and stored it in my database to satisfy my curiosity. Anytime you load a new page a record will be created, and I can see a log of visitor jumping from page to page. Not you, mind, since there is no way I can trace the records back to a user, only to a country where a user is located. And unless you are the Pope, chances are you’ll be untraceable.

In the future if I come up with anything new and interesting to add to this website, I might reconsider my former stance of not writing anything related to my career interests. All in all, be safe, dear visitor, for I will not collect nor sell your information to the Cambridge Analyticas of the world.

As the record shows, I did not write anything last month. The first half of January I spent in a post-Christmas food coma and the second half I had the privilege to experience authentic Vietnamese Lunar New Year in Ho Chi Minh City. I’ve previously written short stories depicting my experiences in China during my exchange year, so I already had some idea what East Asian cultures are like. Vietnam and her people are very similar to my experiences, but, on the other hand, totally different. This time around I would like to share my fresh experiences of staying in Vietnam for the holidays.

The thing is, I’m Finnish. My ancestors are Finnish. Therefore, centuries of living in the freezing snow and half-year long darkness have given me a genetic Dungeons&Dragons-like +50% resistance to cold. However, it has in no way prepared me for temperatures above 24 Celsius. So, from the moment I stepped out of the plane until I got back on it two weeks later, I was sweating like a pig, day and night. I felt like a beached whale except that instead of moisture I had a severe lack of coolness that I had to sustain with cold brews and ice. Speaking of which, cold brew as a concept was a bit of a culture shock for me. I am a regular consumer of coffee but never in my life had I had an urge to drink that stuff cold. After getting over my initial shock I discovered that it wasn’t that bad. Like my East German cohorts I grew fond of it, incidentally.

Speaking of a culture clash, I quickly discovered another aspect of Vietnamese culture that clashed with my Finnish worldview like a six-lane pileup. As I said, I already had some similar experiences in China so it did not come as such big a shock to me, and I knew that the more south and hotter you get the worse it gets, but the pollution was mind-boggling. As a Finn I’ve grown to appreciate nature, environmental cleanliness and fresh air, but it seems that the good Vietnamese people have other ideals. Trash on the street, in the rivers, even in the nature preservation area that I visited. I don’t think I need to mention the smog or the lack of recycling opportunities.

However, I don’t want to be the stereotypical European who travels in your country just to complain how everything is not how Charlemagne imagined it. There is a lot I love about Vietnam; the people are talkative, friendly and welcoming. The food is amazing. The nature, the aforementioned pollution problem not withstanding, is magnificent. As I walked down the streets little children came up to me and said “Hello” in English. In a high contrast to the usual potatoes I eat back home, the people there have approximately five million different noodle variants and twice as many sauces, each more delicious than the last. For the first time in my life I saw an Asian elephant in a zoo and traveled to a nature preservation area where I saw monkeys, crocodiles and other exotic animals in their natural habitat. It was all such an amazing experience!

It would have been wonderful to stay there for longer. I could only scratch the surface on what the country has to offer for a tourist like me; it is impossible to take all that in in just two weeks. I visited the Gucci Tunnels, the underground tunnel network that the Viet Cong used during the war. I visited the HCMC Zoo, and the Independence Palace and the Museum of History, where I learned a lot about the rich history of the country. The city was vibrant lovely and full of things to marvel. Honestly, it would be wonderful to stay there for a year or two.

I will definitely return there one day, and ever since I left China my dream has been to return to East Asia and live there. After my trip I can confidently say that the goal of my dreams is Vietnam, and I will figure out how to get back there. It is very difficult for a foreigner like me to get a residence permit, let alone own property there. Hopefully in the future I do figure it out. Until then, I will continue writing down my thoughts one post at a time.

It’s been one year since I wrote my first little segment and set up this website. It’s been a year of challenges; Covid-19, war in Europe, the upcoming economic recession shaped like an abandoned Chinese skyscraper looming over us all, you name it. At the end of the day, or year, it’s been a net gain for me. Most years are, if I’m honest. Even bad things can be taken as experiences that you learn from. Every cloud has a silver lining. Or, going by today’s theme, a platinum lining.

When the cold and darkness arrived this winter I thought that the perfect swan song for this challenging year would be to complete one of the most challenging video games I have ever player, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice by From Software, known for my previous post about Elden Ring. Sekiro follows the From Software template of easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay mixed with intricate background storytelling, same as its big brothers Dark Souls and the aforementioned Elden Ring.

The events in Sekiro take place in Ashina, a fictional daimyo of Meiji era Japan. The game revolves around Wolf, a shinobi tasked with protecting Lord Kuro, an immortal dragon boy. At the beginning of the game Lord Kuro gets imprisoned by the daimyo Lord Genichiro Ashina, and Wolf then has to rescue Kuro and find a way to severe his immortality.

The gameplay is simple yet challenging. Wolf is a shinobi and equipped with a katana and a few shinobi tools that can aid him in battle. The primary way to deal with enemies in the game is the katana, taking enemies head-on or picking the off one-by-one from the shadows. The versatile approaches the player can take compensate for the absence of weapon variety. The other tools like the shuriken or the firecrackers can help the player land a few hits here and there but they are rarely game changers.

Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, and coming from there, I had to unlearn some key muscle memories. First off, in Dark Souls the player can choose their weapon, whether it be a sword, a halberd, a giant club made of a dragon’s tooth or a spell. As previously mentioned, in Sekiro you either use your katana or turn off the game and go to sleep. Second, in Dark Souls you’d be well in your right to run up to incoming enemies and smash them with your big club until you’ve turned them into paste, or dodge roll their attacks and stab them in the back. The main difference between Sekiro and its predecessors is that the combat is 100% more reactive. You could take the approach of charging into a patrolling samurai and wildly swinging your sword, but the results would be poor for your shinobi health. Instead, the intended experience is taking it slow; reading your opponent’s movements and deflecting their strikes, slowly breaking their stance and only striking back at opportune moments. This was the first stumbling block for me, being used to zweihandering my way through Blighttown.

When I picked up the controller I set myself a goal of defeating every boss and every subsequent miniboss as I progressed through the game. There are no stats to increase in this game, save for your vitality, posture and attack power. You need special items to upgrade each of them and your healing flask, and the only way to get them is defeating bosses. This had previously been my downfall; skipping difficult enemies and therefore not being upgraded enough to take on the final boss. That said, I had never beaten the final boss of the game, or the other optional end-game boss. This time, however I vowed to change that.

At this point I have to admit that I no matter how much I like Dark Souls, I like Sekiro despite its differences, maybe even because of. The thing is, I really like Sekiro on paper. The lack of weapon variety means that the challenge is more streamlined and honed for a specific experience. In Dark Souls you can easily break the game by finding a weapon or a spell that goes around the intended challenge curve. In Sekiro, meanwhile, the developers can adjust the difficulty curve better since they know what the players have up their sleeves. In Sekiro the player controls a main character who is an actual character with voice lines and a personality, and not the mute husk of a character like in Dark Souls. This makes the story and its characters more compelling, in my opinion, when you can have an actual conversation about the burden of immortality.

That said, there are some wrinkles on the paper that I like Sekiro on. The events take place in fantasy Japan, and the game being Japanese, granted, it can be really heavy on Japanese folklore and mythology. For example, there are these enemies that look like peacocks with tentacles and that play flutes that steal your youth until you become a withered old man. These enemies, like so many others, are based on actual creatures in Japanese mythology. This is all nice and well in small doses, but I feel that the Japanese oddness can overwhelm me pretty quickly, and that I need a doctorate in Japanese folklore to fully enjoy the game.

Also, while I appreciate the streamlined combat system, I must admit that I really suck at it. As I said, the intended way to defeat enemies is deflecting and parrying their strikes. All well designed, but this essentially turns the game into glorified Guitar Hero, where you have to read the incoming stikes and press the deflect button in rhythm to the enemy’s attack. Then some enemies have taken advanced lessons in combat and use lunges and sweeps that can’t be deflected but have to be countered in specific ways, and switching from deflect to dodge at a moment’s notice make my fingers tangle up and an enraged samurai, in turn, turns Wolf into a shish kebab.

After going through a few mental training sessions and getting my ass handed to me enough times, I finally made it and was able to beat the final boss and all the possible preceding bosses for the first time in my life. I don’t have an OCD or anything related to that, but I find that if I am playing a game that I enjoy on every level, gameplay, story and challenge included, I can’t let it go until I have achieved everything there is to achieve. I was playing this game on PlayStation 5, and Sony has this achievement tracking system where they give you virtual trophies for every pre-established achievement. I went through the list of trophies and set myself a goal to get each and every one of them.

There are easy trophies that are story-related and practically impossible to miss; those are the bronze trophies. There are trophies that require some amounts of skill to get; those are the silver ones. There are trophies that require an extensive amount of skill or time to get; those are the gold trophies. Then there is a trophy for getting every available trophy on the list; this is the platinum one, which every game has. That’s how you know if a player is a connoisseur of a particular game by checking whether or not they have the platinum trophy.

Getting the platinum trophy in Sekiro requires a lot of time and effort. Basically you have to beat the game at least once, with some post-game shenanigans. You have to beat every boss in the game, which is pretty standard. You also have to maximize your vitality, upgrade your shinobi tools and healing flask to their maximum levels and, last but definitely not the least, acquire every available shinobi technique in the game. Now, the last point doesn’t sound the hardest, but to get every technique you need to spend skill points to acquire them, and you get skill points by gathering enough experience by defeating enemies. Every skill point gained raises the amount of needed experience for the next one, and by the last one I was spending several dozens of minutes giving impromptu katana spinal surgeries to the one Central Ministry shinobi by the Castle Antechamber idol.

But at the end of the day, again, I grinded my way to the top and was awarded with the platinum trophy for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It may not mean anything to anyone else, or even to myself for that matter, but as I said, life is made of small net gains. I really like Sekiro for what it’s worth and I feel good about completing it as it was intended. That’s the final word, really. I’ll now bestow a shiny award upon you for reaching the end of this ultimately pointless post. A net gain, right?

Raindrops on roses. Whiskers on kittens. White copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Self-published books on Amazon.com. These are a few of my favorite things.

I was thinking about what my favorite things in the world are. Every person has their own; one’s favorite things are what can make life’s rainy days just a tiny bit sunnier. Your favorite things can be something observable: a book, a YouTube video, the way a bee flies through the air. It can also be something more abstract, like an idea or a feeling. I have several from both column A and column B. Although I’d like to discuss every single one of them in more detail, I’ll concentrate on two of them that recently popped into my mind.

The written word is one of humankind’s oldest cultural achievements, arguably predated only by using your hands to shape stuff. In fact, I am relishing that achievement right now as I’m writing this and contributing absolutely nothing to the society. Not only have books and written documents been used to distribute knowledge and ideas, but they have been a way to preserve tales from centuries ago. The Brothers Grimm are a good example of the latter, collecting folktales and printing them on paper, so children and Disney executives of today could still enjoy them. Some people go into great effort to preserve stories by others; Shakespeare’s plays are still being printed to this day, making sure that future generations can enjoy the Immortal Bard as we have.

Then there are people who have gone so deep that they believe everything written down under the sun is worth distributing, especially when, more to the point, they are the original creator of the subject of the distribution. And yes, I know this is the hypocrisy singularity when it’s coming from me, writing this and publishing it on my own website that I have built and host. Trust me, when I say that under no circumstances do I imagine that my words could affect someone’s day to an extent that my writings would be worth spreading. This is what I do for a hobby, for myself and nobody else, okay? Then again, I digress.

If you find yourself bored, I suggest peeking into a fun rabbit hole that I discovered. Did you know that self-published books form an annual market worth over a billion dollars? And that Amazon.com has the grip on the majority of that market? Books are how Amazon started its journey to global villainy, after all, so it is no wonder that most self-published authors can be found there. And oh boy, let me tell you how deep the rabbit hole goes. You start your journey sensible with used text books and Stephen King novels. There is a thick layer of respected third-party publishers. Then comes the second layer of mixed results; you start noticing cookbooks and self-help books with the name of the publisher notably absent, but still, they are all seemingly legit. Then the rabbit hole starts taking a steeper turn.

Your eyes start landing on books predicated on the idea that the movie The Matrix is based on a true story. More and more stories involving dinosaur erotica start coming up. You are surrounded by darkness, the unadulterated stream of consciousness weaved by the most troubled minds of our society. You are in a world of no filters, no second opinions, no second-guessing one’s skills or opinions. The jaws of madness begin to close.

If you are too scared, and I don’t blame you, I’ll give you a good example of the mild variety. True Light is a book that is self-published on Amazon. It is a self-help book, I think. I’ll admit, I have never read it, but don’t blame me until you hear the reason.

In True Light every, single, word, is, followed, by, a, comma.

You think that I am exaggerating, but I assure you, I am not. Go on and have a look at it now. The product page contains the back-cover blurb and it gives you a pretty accurate picture from what I’ve seen. I honestly don’t think this book was written as a joke, and my online peers seem to agree with me. You might think that this all sounds insane and I’d completely agree with you. I didn’t say the rabbit hole was going to be beautiful, but it let’s you gaze into a world you didn’t think would even exist. These kinds of books let you experience the human mind in its purest, in good and ill. However, not all self-proclaimed authors generate such deranged sentences. Madness has many forms, such as a form it can only achieve in a very special kind of a creative subconcious.

There once was an aspiring young writer called Jim Theis. By the age of 16, in 1970, Jim had been interested in science fiction and fantasy, to the point that he himself tried his hand at writing fiction. And so he did: he wrote a preliminary draft of his book, and shipped it to a fanzine of the sci-fi scene for publishing. The short story was indeed published in the magazine, and after a while it caught the eye of a science fiction author Thomas N. Scortia, who was so impressed by the book that he went on to share it further amongst his colleagues, providing it the publicity it enjoys to this day. The name of the book? The Eye of Argon.

It wasn’t Jim’s masterful writing or real-to-life characters who put his story in the spotlight. To put it bluntly, The Eye of Argon is considered to be the worst fantasy novel ever published. I mean, it is miraculous how bad it is. There is absolutely no chance any of it was written in jest; I hold that what makes the book so amazing is the fact that it was written completely in earnest. The book is available for download for free, if you want to have a look. Go ahead, it is online, and it is quite short. If you enjoy bad literature, you can’t get better than The Eye of Argon and its countless typos, misused words and general lack of narrative skill.

I love works of art that have been created in earnest, and fail in such a spectacular manner in what they were set out to do. The Phantom Menace is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of failure on film, but there are people who genuinely enjoy it for the bad decisions that went into its inception. It is fascinating to imagine how a mind that thought Jar-Jar Binks was a good idea works. The Eye of Argon is my Phantom Menace. I would have loved to meet Jim Theis in his prime and ask him carefully if he really thought what he was writing was good enough to publish. Then again, I am glad that he had no breaks on his creative train and now we can harvest the fruits of that wreck. The Eye of Argon is the only work of fiction that has provided me with an experience that leaves me wondering how a person, blinded by their lack of skill and misplaced enthusiasm, overcomes all obstacles and produces something so pure. A very unique experience, and that’s why I love it so. The Eye of Argon is one of my favorite things.

I was going to name this one Let Me Be Frank, but then I realized that was also the title of that one YouTube video of Frank Underwood washing the dishes. I say Frank Underwood, since it wasn’t really Kevin Spacey talking in the video; it was him as his character from House of Cards, talking about how he was cancelled out of the series after his past deeds became public knowledge. That was a rather surreal series of events to watch, a man going from an acclaimed actor to trying to save whatever prestige he had by vowing revenge on those who had wronged him. By wronged, of course, I mean those who exposed him.

Kevin Spacey had a certain reputation even before the whole debackle. To my mind, he always played the same role; a sinister smart-ass authoritarian figure. Such roles include performances like the aforementioned House of Cards, Baby Driver, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Se7en (I still insist on pronouncing it “Sesevenen” in the hopes that replacing letters with numbers can some day be removed from the film industry the same way Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed from the Romanian government hierarchy). My point is, an actor like Kevin Spacey could play Barney the Dinosaur and still come out as unnecessarily evil because of his actorial stigma.

Incidentally, I have been watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia lately. I’m only halfway through the series as it stands now, but already I’m absolutely in love with it. To begin with, I love a setting where there are no morally good characters. As Rob McElhenney put it, the maxim of Friends was “I’ll be there for you”, whereas IASIP’s is “I’ll never be there”. The show is themed around the ignorance of white Americans, which as a white European, I find unendingly amusing. These are the kinds of characters you love to watch and hate their actions at the same time, a really refreshing turn after Friends, How I Met Your Mother and similar sitcoms. Barney Stinson, a fan-favorite character played by Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother, was an irredeemable womanizer and carried much of the show in the early seasons, but quickly lost steam after the writers started to add misplaced depth and humanity to the character. IASIP leans to the horrible natures of its characters and the viewers love to both watch the hijinxs the characters get to and the morally educative comeuppances that follow.

One specific aspect of the show I want to talk about is the character Frank Reynolds, a terrible father figure to two other main characters and co-owner of the bar where the series is set. Frank is played by Danny DeVito, who looks exactly like he did in Taxi back in the late 70s. My earliest exposure to Danny DeVito that I can remember would probably be watching Matilda, a film he both directed and acted in. I love the movie, and I should’ve guessed his first performance I would ever see would carry a long way. In Matilda DeVito plays a dishonest businessman and an awful father who neglects his daughter, constantly trying to sway her decisions towards the worst. Now, you could take all those characteristics and apply them to Frank Reynolds, and they would fit perfectly.

After watching episode after episode of IASIP, I must say Danny DeVito has started to slip retroactively into the Kevin Spacey school of actors in my mind. I look back to all the times I’ve seen DeVito on screen and I’m starting to notice similarities with his Frank Reynolds with increasing ease, such as in his roles in Batman Returns and The Rainmaker, and even in his short appearance on Friends, where he played a washed-up stripper for one episode. If I watch that episode again now, all I see is Frank Reynolds posing as a stripped for his newest scheme to bang engaged women.

The thing is, an actor being typecasted can work for the better. DeVito’s wonderful performance in IASIP has only enhanced my experiences with him, whereas I do not care if I see Kevin Spacey on the big screen ever again. The show is yet to show signs of declining in quality, like other sitcoms of its kin, and I will definitely watch it to the end. Maybe they’ll keep things fresh by doing something wacky, like introducing Ryan Reynolds as Rob’s long-lost cousin. I do not mind, at this point I have a lot of confidence in the creators of the show, and what comes to DeVito, maybe I’ll start going through his earlier works that I have missed, even if it means enduring Matthew Broderick in Deck the Halls.

So, I did finish Catch-22. I will modify my statement from last time slightly. Yes, I still think it’s a good book. Now after finishing it, I think it’s even better than I thought previously. Last time I did mention that the book uses the humor in a curious way to build up suspense during the Avignon bombing, which I still hold true. After picking up the book again I realized that it is indeed true for the entire second half of the book. You know how it goes, you write a few paragraphs on your website, you go to bed, pick up the book, read what happens to Kid Sampson and McWatt. Yossarian recalling the Avignon bombing in increasing gruesomeness as the book goes on also helps establish that motif. I still hold that it can be a slog to read at times. But now after continuing on to pick up Naked Lunch, I sure long for a coherent story.

Last time I wrote that one of the main strengths of the book are the characters. I think the characters forming the backbone works well for any story, for what is a plot if not a sequence of actions performed by the characters. After finishing my last writing I became to wonder; which characters in literature have I enjoyed the most?

A couple of characters sprung into mind: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces and Too-Ticky from Moominland Midwinter, to name a few. Although all of these characters have contributed to me shaping my own personality in some way or another, my most favorite character in fictional literature has to be Captain Hastings from Agatha Christie’s Poirot books.

Hastings is a sidekick to Poirot, a master detective who always solves the mystery at the end of the book. He isn’t as smart as Poirot, but he is intelligent in his own way. He is a World War I veteran, and he often comes across a pleasant gentleman, although with somewhat boyish naivete. He does help Poirot solve cases, usually by providing the critical clue by accident. He has his flaws, as he is swayed by female attraction, and often goes after the wrong suspects if left on his own. The stories are often told from his perspective and he works as the reader’s surrogate, asking questions on the reader’s behalf.

What I like in my characters, protagonists or not, is being able to show competence and responsibility that comes from authority. Very few characters in fiction are written this way; if a character is competent and has authority within the story’s environment, it is hard to think up obstacles for the character to overcome and thus create a compelling story. Frodo Baggins is not a competent warrior and therefore can’t face an army of orcs alone; he must deal with the situation in another way. He also doesn’t have any authority in Middle-Earth, and therefore can’t force other characters to help him on his cause. I do like Frodo as a character, but it is very common to write your characters this way in order to have a plot with threats and obstacles.

I’ve never got that feeling from Hastings. He is competent and capable, but since the books are written as mysteries playing against his strong points, he still has obstacles to overcome. He is capable; he has a sharp mind and can form his own theories based on logic and established clues. As Poirot himself is not physically capable, it is left to Hastings to break down doors and apprehend suspects. He has authority in many situations; as a former officer he often assumes the highest authority at a crime scene, forbidding suspects from leaving the venue. He is determined and brave in any situation, and works with high morals.

The crucial difference is that Hastings is not competent only when compared to Poirot; Poirot is the one to solve the case, which Hastings alone could not accomplish. On his own, in any other situation than a mystery, Hastings would be very much on top of things. His flaws are relatable, even when unwittingly working against Poirot, as in the book Murder on the Links.

Of course, one can’t overlook his film portrayal in Agatha Christie’s Poirot, played by Hugh Fraser. I think of that film series the same I think of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, meaning the casting is perfect. Poirot played by David Suchet, Inspector Japp played by Philip Jackson and, of course, Hugh Fraser bringing Captain Hastings alive as the wonderfully charming detective sidekick. Truth to be told, when reading the books I can’t help but have the mental image of Hugh Fraser’s performance whenever Captain Hastings is on the page.

To me, Hastings is the perfect model of a character. Still competent in his own right and not artificially restrained by planting him in an environment where he has no power over the situation. I admit it is difficult to write such a character in any other story than a detective one, but I’m sure there are examples. I say, old chap!

You know, since I finished reading A Confederacy of Dunces I’ve been looking for similar novels that scratch that particular itch I have for absurdist humor. There’s precious little of that available, however. So, after finishing the book, I went online and looked up a few lists for must-read novels. One title that was prominent on all the lists was Catch-22, a novel taking place on the Italian front in the Second World War, and was supposedly themed around the absurdity and futility of war. The Time Magazine and had placed it on the top 100 English-language modern novels list and the Observer had titled it as one of the top 100 greatest novels in general. The book seemed to align with my tastes and since it had received such great praise, I decided to give it a go.

Little did I know what I was in for. At the point of writing this, I started the 544-page book a few months ago and I am yet to finish it. Not that the book is bad, quite the opposite. Critics of modern literature don’t throw around such praise like confetti. The book is well written and paced, the characters are many and distinctive, and the overall storytelling works well with the established themes. So why do I struggle getting through it? I’m usually a fast reader and my enthusiasm for absurdism should only boost my efforts.

I have a few nitpicks with the book. First, as I said the characters are distinctive. There’s a method to test this claim; describe a character without referring to their name, looks or trade (in other words, mainly referring to their personality). If a person would be able to name that character accurately by that description, the character is likely very distinctive, and I’d say all the characters in the book are just that. However, I’m a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of personalities on display. Almost every chapter introduces a new character, so titles, ranks, relationships and names that you have to remember keep piling on more and more as you progress through the book. Okay, so the chaplain, who is a captain, has this kind of personality, he has this kind of backstory, he works with a corporal whom he has a complicated relationship with and he relates to the other thirty established characters in these various ways… At some point, enough is enough. My brain already has limited space for new information. If I’m introduced to one more new character I’m sure that I will forget some other stuff I’ve learned like some of the original 150 Pokémon.

The way that the book is written certainly doesn’t help. It is written well, I assure you, but one man can’t consume an entire wedding cake alone, no matter how well it has been made. Most of the humor in the book comes from the way it is written, sort of like in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That is good, I approve. However, this means that some of if not most of the sentences will drag on for several lines accumulating witty turns of phrases and adjectives as they go. So, at the end of a paragraph-long sentence I’ve already forgotten how it started, which doesn’t really help with making me remember and understand stuff.

Not that there’s nothing I enjoy about the book. There’s a chapter that centers around a bombing mission over Avignon, and the humorist mood of the book takes a turn to dramatic, and things actually get suspenseful. I’d say that chapter has been the highlight of the book for me, since it doesn’t completely abandon the humor, but rather uses the absurdist nature of it to build up the suspense on whether or not the characters will get out alive. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t go into detail on how it works, but the book utilizes the established motif of craziness to its advantage.

The biggest stumbling block I’ve come across with the book by far, however, has nothing to do with the book itself. It’s not you, Catch-22, it’s me. I’m just going to go and say it: I don’t find it that funny. You might think not being funny for a humorist novel is a bit of a downside, and you’d be right. But as I mentioned, the book is written in a way I like and I love absurdist humor. So, where does the problem lie?

The problem with any joke is that if you have already heard it, the element of surprise is gone, and so is the humor value. Unfortunately for Catch-22, I picked it up after I had been exposed to a masterful military satire and comedic marvel, Blackadder Goes Forth. The fourth series of the British sitcom Blackadder from the 1980s is not only gut-wrenchingly funny, but also deals with the absurdity of war and futility of being a tiny, expendable cog in a huge war machine. Both Catch-22 and Blackadder Goes Forth tell the story of a captain desperately trying to escape the war they have been sucked into, how they have to deal with their superiors, who are classic armchair generals distanced from the actual horrors of war, and their brothers-in-arms, who are in places crazy and incompetent and whom the protagonists resent with passion.

Blackadder Goes Forth is, in my opinion, the best of the series and I watch clips of it religiously on YouTube. It’s a shame that I was exposed to it and Catch-22 in this order; I think I would’ve still preferred Blackadder to Catch-22, but I would’ve enjoyed the latter a whole lot more. I will finish the book, but if you subtract the humor out of a humorist book, then all that are left are words without deeper effect, and the experience turns into not unlike reading a dictionary. So, pardon me for taking my time with the book. At least it does not suck like Fatherland, so I don’t have the excuse to not finish it.

I highly recommend reading Catch-22 if you’re into military satire or absurdism, but only on the condition that you haven’t consumed anything similar but funnier. I have, and I still push through one chapter a night. In the words of General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

Humans are a peculiar lot. We demonstrably are the apex creations of the world, but we also have the constant urge to point this out to our lesser cohabitants. We have this obsession that, from blue whales to amoebas and from redwood trees to dandelions, every living creature on this earth has to understand who runs the show. If we can’t hunt cave bears to extinction with pointy sticks, we have to resort to other measures.

I went for a walk the other day. The sun was shining, flowers were booming, sea gulls were harassing innocent passers-by for their ice creams and the wind was making a mess of my hair. It was absolutely wonderful. One of my favorite places to have a walk is a nearby pair of islands, one of which contains sheep. I can take a bus close to river delta area quite conveniently and walk over to the islands using duckboards. This place is a designated nature preservation area, so the urban infrastructure there is really scarce and the nature is as beautiful as you can get that close to the city.

The sheep on Sheep Island are few, but accustomed to human contact. Many a day can one see visitors take photographs of the sheep or caressing them. If the sheep are busy sleeping in the sun or meeting them has lost its novelty, the small island also has a few nooks and crannies for visitors to stop, sit down and eat their snacks in peace. I like to go sit on a bench by the water and just admire the glittering sea. However, not always is my trip there so pleasant.

As I was walking there, my eyes latched on to several objects lying on the ground that seemed, so to speak, unnatural. Midst this beautiful landscape and greenery there were candy wrappers, cigarette butts, bottle caps, styrofoam pieces and countless plastic shards the waves had washed ashore. My mood dropped from life-enjoying to disgusted very quickly. Sheep Island is a popular destination to people who want to enjoy walking in nature while remaining close to the city. What I can’t comprehend is why some people come here for the nature but at the same time put effort into destroying it.

There was an episode of Hello Internet by CGP Grey and Brady Haran titled Charismatic Megafauna. In that episode, they brought up a phenomenon where people, in general, are more likely to care more about the wellbeing of a large mammal than that of a small insect. Let’s put this in perspective; if you accidentally stepped on an ant, maybe you would feel bad for a little bit, but it wouldn’t ruin your day. However, if you stepped on the toes of a cat, you would feel bad about yourself for a considerably longer time, I wager. Scientists estimate that between 200 and 2000 species on this earth get wiped into extinction every year. However, most of these species consist of plants and small insects and reptiles, so the general public doesn’t care as long us there still are lynx at the zoo. For example, there is a species of grass, Eriocaulon jordanii, that has been declared extinct after having its natural habitat being appropriated to rice cultivation over long periods of time. Does a random person on the street know that? Probably not. Do they care? Ditto mark.

This brings me back to Sheep Island. The nature and the sheep are the main attraction there, we established that. And even with the charismatic megafauna modifier, these sheep and their beautiful habitat are endangered by people littering. People who presumably have come there to admire them. Tell me how that makes any sense. A sheep could be having lunch with no worries in its mind and accidentally swallow a burrito wrapper hidden in the grass it was eating, and it would cause a myriad of problems in its digestion.

What I’m saying is that I don’t understand people who litter. I know I just spent six paragraphs on getting that one idea across and now crammed it into one sentence, but I can’t emphasize enough how much it pisses me off. There are a lot of causes in this world you can pick and fight for. Some people pick multiple, others pick none. I, for one, will fight tooth and nail for our lush, green forests and woolly friends. Please, anytime you see a stray chocolate bar wrapper, pick it up and throw it in the bin. If not for the grass, then at least for the sheep.

Life is an exercise in arduousness. This is especially true to those who work in retail and to those who fail their fiftieth attempt at a boss, who is ten percent recognizable human shape and ninety percent blurry motion of flailing sword-brandishing limbs. The latter was my experience with Elden Ring, a video game by From Software. Although the arduousness analogy takes a bit of a hit on try number fifty-one, after one finally memorizes the boss’ attack patterns and wipes the floor with visceral mess that used to be their face.

I recently completed my playthrough of the aforementioned game. I had been looking forward to playing it for quite some time. I had stayed mostly spoiler-free and knowing it was developed by From Software who also have created Dark Souls, one of my favorite video games of all time, only made my expectations soar higher. I can’t remember the last time I had actually looked forward to a game, but I’m pretty sure it was back in 2011 when Batman: Arkham City came out. So as you can see, Elden Ring was a nice change of pace.

The only problem that had prevented me from playing it soon after the game came out was the teeny-tiny iota of a global semiconductor deficit which meant that one would be more likely to see a unicorn on the electronics store shelf than a PlayStation 5. But after an unholy sacrifice and a deal with the local leprechaun I was finally able to obtain one. Not that I am one of those excruciating Sony fanboys; I still believe that video game consoles peaked during the PlayStation 2 era. This was rather the case of Sony withholding a candy bar out of my reach until I bought and consumed their expensive salad first.

But the homogenous mass of middle managers that constitute the current-day big tech companies couldn’t give two figs about what I, or more to the point, most people think about them as long as they keep turning a profit. As a society we have come to accept that and the Earth keeps revolving around the sun.

One does need a drop of escapism in the bland cocktail of life, however, and I achieved to maintain that for sixty hours or so. I’m bit of a completionist when it comes to games so I had to rummage through every nook and cranny for every special item and boss fight the game had to offer, so the trip between two ruined churches took twice the amount of time it would’ve taken the average gamer. I would see a castle or a volcano in the distance, get sidetracked on my way there, find a shelf-dwelling unicorn with claymores instead of legs and get stomped into mulch on my first try at slicing myself a piece of mythical rump.

That flower lady with the fake hand, whom the internet has declared to be the most difficult boss fight in any From Software game, sure gave me a run for my money. To this day I am yet to beat the final boss in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, but within a dozen tries I managed to give the lady her final impromptu spinal surgery with my Tree Sentinel Halberd. She did have that very unfair attack where she replaces every air molecule in the arena with a whirling blade, which you could neither dodge nor run away from, but other than that she put up a fair fight.

After years of witnessing my enthusiasm for playing video games decrease by the day, it is refreshing to feel that excitement again. The video game industry has gone downhill since my childhood with overpriced DLC, scammy lootbox systems and design-by-charts development models, but games like Elden Ring truly are the rays of sunshine that shine through the cracks on the lid of my coffin. I have the privilege to tell you that mere days before the time of writing, the remake of Resident Evil 4 was announced. I am not sure if it is my nostalgia towards the PlayStation 2 era of gaming and the original Resident Evil 4 being the bee’s knees, or because Elden Ring reawakened my enjoyment of video games, but I am really looking forward to playing it. At least instead of running away and drinking my healing juice like a coward, I can suplex all the monsters that want to bite my face off.

There’s an old Sikh saying: “If you have never lived through horrors that is living in a sharehouse in your early 20s, you have not fully lived.” I might be misremembering that quote a bit, but I think the point still stands. I lived in a sharehouse for one summer, and what an experience that was. Mind you, I had never shared a house with people I had not met before, nor was that something I actively aspired to do. However, due to me getting a job in another city during my college studies, I was planning to move to that particular city and I needed a relatively cheap residence for a couple of months. Luckily the local student housing organization leased rooms in sharehouses to out-of-towners during summer breaks between graduates moving out in the spring and new students moving in in the fall. The sharehouse I got a room in was quite far from the city center, but I prefer living closer to nature than the shopping street anyway. For just a few hundred euros per month, the house was exactly in the shape you might expect, but I was okay with that too. Paint peeling off the walls and a few leaky pipes are part of that deal in my books. I’ve lived bleaker before. How I had not lived before, however, was with two complete strangers I met on the day I moved in.

The sharehouse I moved into was already occupied by two students a couple younger than me. I was about 23 or 24, and at that time I was already passed that line into responsible adulthood where I ate properly, cleaned regularly and managed my finances in a sustainable way. As I would come to find out, these two were younger than me, and unfortunately had yet to meet my standards for coexistence. The room I rented was between theirs and adjacent to the common room that also worked as a kitchen. As you came through the front door, you would enter the short corridor, which had two doors, which lead to the bathroom and Roommate Number One’s room respectively. Beyond the corridor was the common room that had two doors; one to my room and one to Roommate Number Two’s room. So as you can imagine, I had a good vantage point to both of my roommates’ daily lives.

Let’s talk about Roommate Number One, whom I’ll title Chimney. I’ll call him that, for the only times I saw him in broad daylight let alone at all was when he went smoking next to our front door. Chimney was slim and pale and kept to himself for the most part. He regularly kept his door closed, so even when I went to the bathroom and passed his room I could only wonder what was going on inside. Chimney liked video games, that much was certain. He often chose past midnight to be the perfect time to audibly chat with his chums and organize raids, a time I had chosen to dedicate to sleeping. Other than that and the smoking habit, Chimney rarely caused any friction in our roommateship.

And now we come to Roommate Number Two. I have more to tell you about him than Chimney, so I’m having a hard time choosing a name. Based on his most notable quality, I’ll call him the Baguette Whisperer, or BW for short. Now, BW was your stereotypical socially awkward quiet guy. Not taking care of his looks by even trimming his larval-stage neckbeard or wearing non-stained t-shirts, he was quite a sight to behold. Whenever the door to his room was ajar, I could only see darkness, and occasionally the shine from a screen of some description. His diet consisted of frozen meals. More often than not, if we happened to occupy the kitchen at the same time, I would be frying chicken on a pan or slicing bell peppers, and he would be peeking in the oven to see if his frozen baguette had heated up to appropriate levels. He would then grab his greasy treat and waddle back into the safety of his own room to watch the regional equivalent of the show Neighbours. And, every time without failure, if he entered the common room and saw me there, he would exhale sharply like he had just returned from a ten-kilometer jog. For the first three or four times I was nonplussed and even confronted him about it once, but then I figured out that was his way of acknowledging my presence without having to say hello to me in his own awkward way.

This all seems pretty standard for a socially awkward guy who has yet to grasp the responsibilities that come with adulthood, right? The strangest part comes next. I already told you how he behaved if he entered the room that I was already in, but it was even more fascinating if I entered the room that he was already in. To give you context, there was a large birch just outside my window covering it, so even with the window open the air flow was bad. If it was a hot day, I kept the door to my room open or at least ajar, so with the common room window open the air would flow in and out better. The important part is, normally my door was not closed, and therefore I could enter the common room without making a sound.

If that ever happened, and BW was there “preparing” his meal, I would witness something intriguing. I would slip out through my door and see BW looking in the oven, his back turned to me, mumbling to himself. The first time I saw this I was perplexed to the extent of not wanting to alert him to my presence. There he was, hunched over the oven, watching his baguette and whispering quietly. I could never hear exactly what he was saying, but witnessing it made me feel a weird kinship towards Dian Fossey. After finishing with his preparations, he would turn around and find me standing behind him at my door. Then he would go through his usual exhalation routine, and quickly slip back into his room. This happened every time I caught him in the common room during dinner time, and after the first couple of times I made sure to loudly turn the handle on my door before entering just to spare him the embarrassment.

Before concluding my story, I would state what might come to you as the obvious, but I was the only person in the household who cared about the cleanliness of the common room, or even our private rooms, as it seemed. The vacuum cleaner would always be in the same spot to the millimeter where I had left it after I had finished using it the previous time. During my first month there, I got fed up how slowly the bathroom sink was draining and decided to open up the pipes. To my shock, the pipe was clogged with a couple, lovely injection needles. After confronting Chimney about it he told me they most likely belonged to the previous occupant of my room, who had a few problems in his life. During that conversation, it was brought up to me that the year-old brochures by the local church and the Communist Party on the kitchen table were also remnants of his life there.

I left at the end of the summer to return to my college city. I did not see Chimney that day. Maybe it was not time for his cigarette break on the moment of my exit. I did see the Baguette Whisperer and told him good luck. For the first time during my stay there, he actually rose to acceptable standards of social interaction and told me the same. That has been to date my weirdest living experience, but I don’t regret a moment I spent there. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, they say. It might not necessarily be completely accurate, but I came out of that arrangement a mentally richer man.