Pisa, Italy

Spent 3 days in Pisa, Italy, on a business trip. First a bunch of photos, then the normal rant, douzo.
I wonder if they decided to build a church on top of the sidewalk, or build the sidewalk through the church.. This place supposedly stores yet another relic that supposedly touched Jesus at some point. How many body parts of Jesus do various Catholic churches claim to possess again, and how many Jesuses could you build from them?
So where do you live? Oh, I live on Via Delle Belle Donne...
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. A university founded by Napoleon. Nice place to have lunch in.
This is pretty much what all streets in Pisa downtown look like. It's a real maze, and because the streets are so narrow, the GPS signal jumps around like an amphetamine-crazed Batman donning a jetpack.
The place I had my meetings in was 50 meters down this cave--sorry, this street. No wonder that so many cars in the city look like their owners' method of choice for stopping is to ram the vehicle into something.

The church and the tower. My meetings held me up for the daylight hours, so once I got this far, the sun had already set.
Every tourist seemed to be doing something like this, so of course I had to give it a try, too. What great fun. It's actually sleeting, the temperature around 0 degrees...

So...

I always say that Italian people don't know how to make good pizza, based on my experiences in Rome some years ago. Had some really nice pizza this time around, washing it down with a 1-liter jug of weissbier, so I stand corrected: combining the 2-star and the 4-star pizza experiences brings Italy's total to 3 stars out of 5. They still need to work on it a bit, though, if they wish to reach the 4 stars that I give to Pizzeria Baabel in Kaijonharju, Oulu, Finland (circa 2004, that is: they've really gone downhill in the past couple of years).

I usually get along quite well with smart people and Italians are not an exception. It's just that sometimes(read: all the time) their aggressiveness is so damn tiring, brains or no brains. So of course the Italian idiots annoy me even more than the Finnish idiots. In Finland they normally just kinda sulk in small groups, knee-deep in their own spit, but in Italy filtering the same people out is a lot harder. I'm usually not considered to be a very typical Finn, far from it, but I really do appreciate silence, whenever I can find some.

Also, Ryanair just lost its position on the top of my airlines-to-be-avoided-at-all-cost.

All hail Finnair, the new champion!

Fuck that company and their staff's inability to deal with a queue less than 10 meters tall in 2 hours. They have a single(1) transfer desk in Helsinki airport, which is supposed to be their main venue, and the greasy-haired guy behind the plexiglass would fail to serve every single customer lining up in front of me, even when they just wanted to have their boarding passes printed.

Listening to the Finnair-dude's studdering English was almost, but not quite as annoying as listening to the air-headed Chinese lady right behind me in the queue having a never-ending conversation with her group of 20 more Chinese tourists. She would actually answer her own questions without giving the others a go at them, and as far as I could tell, she never once stopped to inhale. The information content in her Mandarin babble was pretty close to zero, so after an hour of involuntary eavesdropping, I was ready to 1) drown her in the nearest lavatory, 2) drown myself in vodka.

So happy to be back home (No vodka, though; 2 fingers of Laphroaig will have to do).

Pisa is a pretty place: a true relic straight from the middle-ages and renaissance, and well worth a stop of couple of days. I'm very glad that I don't live in a house 500 years old, though, those things are cold!

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

In Lovecraftian mythos the universe is cold and uncaring, and the eldritch horrors in it can drive you irreversibly mad if you so much as lay your eyes on them.

Arkham Horror is a board game that digs its claws deep into that world of nightmares, and it seriously hates you, the player.

Most of the events and player actions in the game are - in theory - controlled by chance, but if you think that is enough to stop or even slow down the Great Old Ones and their incomprehensible will... Well, ignorance is a bliss.

This game finds a way, sooner or later, one way or the other, and then it kicks you in the nuts so hard that your ears will start bleeding. In fact, "sanity" is one of the basic resources of the game, and just about every action is rigged to slowly drain that sanity. Luckily there is a mental asylum in town that can recharge your batteries after your character finally starts chewing on the furniture - and with all the traffic in and out, they might just as well install a revolving door.

All those pieces and it's only the basic set - there are several extensions that enlarge the game board and/or multiply the number of cards, sheets and colorful little parts that you shouldn't let your dog devour. I need a bigger kitchen table, I think...

One thing that separates Arkham Horror from most of the board games I've played is that the players cooperate to defeat the odds together instead of competing against each other. Victory is shared, defeat is shared. It's almost silly, how hard it can be for a group of actual people working together to beat the game, if their luck runs foul.

You and your mates take up the roles of investigators (each with their own strengths, weaknesses and bonuses), who come into the town of Arkham for various reasons to fight back the evil that threatens to overrun it and the rest of the world. Gates open and evil things that range from maniacs to cultists to undead to monsters to demi-gods creep through to roam the streets. You must fight them, make plans with your friends, collect information, weapons, magic spells and allies, enter other dimensions through the gates and try and seal them, before enough horror is unleashed to allow something even worse to enter the world. As the game progresses, things get more and more difficult, as more gates open, streets get swarmed by (sometimes very strong) enemies and the townsfolk flee their homes in panic, shutting down shops and cutting you off from supplies. Most events are presented in forms of very short story snippets, which often involve choices made by the players and by throwing dice: "A student of the university finds you working in the laboratory at night, but mistakes you for the bursar. If you wish to go on with the deception, throw a will check (throw 1 or more dice, depending on your characters stats and items), if you succeed, the student gives you $8, but if you fail, you will be thrown out to the street and lose one stamina point. If you do not wish to continue with the deception, you must leave immediately." There is so much material included just in the basic game set that replay value is high indeed.

It's not quite as complicated a game as you might (and will) think at the first glance, but for the first one or two games it is better if you are playing with someone who knows the game and its tricks already: one game can last up to 4 hours, and if you have to check and double check every single thing from the manual, you better have enough food in the house to get you and your friends through the weekend.

I like it. Will hunt down more hapless people to play it with. (****)

Robot with a private space

This is really cool. A robot analyzing its surroundings and shying away from everything that comes too close may not sound like much, but it's a damn hard trick to pull off. Great to see machine vision and robotics finally coming to the point, where the machines can react to their environment so... animal-like. (or alternatively, Silent Hill-like)

This tech has a million and one uses, but I'm sure someone will eventually make a gadget that looks like a human baby with chocolate smeared around its mouth, and the user is supposed to try and feed it, while it does its best to avoid the spoon. I can already see the pre-Christmas ads in my mind...

I like the cat-avoiding-to-be-petted comparison better. :(

Science!

The Royal Society, the oldest science academy in the world, is celebrating their 350th anniversary by posting a timeline and related milestone scientific publications dating from 1660 to the present, including works from such names as Sir Isaac Newton, Paul Dirac, and Watson and Crick.

I wish that I could, today, get away with writing publications such as this 1727 paper by William Cheselden - in which he writes about the impact that regaining eye sight had on a boy, who'd been blind since early childhood - which includes observations like this:

"Now Scarlet he thought the moft beautiful of all Colours, and of others the moft gay were the moft pleafing, whereas the firft Time he faw Black, it gave him great Uneafinefs, yet after a little Time he was reconcil'd to it; but fome Months after, feeing by Accident a Negroe Woman, he was ftruck with great Horror at the Sight."

Excellent. :)

(If I ever get a cat, I'll definitely call it Nigger-Man.)

It's about time Finland receives some lols, too

If you can't see a damn thing during high noon, it might be because your eyes are closed or because you have suddenly gone blind.

In Finland it might also mean that it's winter.

After spending most of the last winter on the other side of the equator, getting my eyes scorched by the ridiculously bright NZ summer sun, I seem to have finally succumbed to the lack of daylight in the polar winter and am now facing a mild case of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. The Winter Blues. I feel tired, I feel lazy, I often feel a bit depressed.

So to battle that, I bought me a light therapy lamp.
It's a little bit on the bright side. :)

While I was browsing the different lamps at the market, two tired-looking, greasy-haired women with 4 pre-school kids between them made a drive-by with their carts loaded up with crap they were buying for Christmas, and sneered at the lamps (and at me, apparently), tsk-tsking at the price tags (the one I bought was about 200 euros) and at how no one in their right mind would waste so much money on such useless trinkets, when buying Christmas presents for the kids already meant pawning redundant organs to the Russian black market.

I am so happy that I don't have any kids. Truly I am a blessed man. :)

Also, PPRRRÖÖÖAAARRAARRRAARRAARRR~~