I know I’ve ranted on topics of deeper import than this, but what the hell.

I like to listen to music – enough to go fairly regularly to live concerts anyway, and to listen to it at home with attention. (I don’t like background music much, on the other hand.) The fidelity of the sound reproduction makes more of a difference to the latter than I thought. Music isn’t just music; it reveals itself more when you can hear it clearly. I get  kicks out of hearing things in it that I didn’t hear before.

I’ve steered clear of hi-fi until now. That is, I haven’t attempted to understand what happens in sound reproduction, nor how to make it work at home. I haven’t spent any big bucks on gear – not even now – and I haven’t paid particular attention to how I’ve set it up. The reason is, I think, that there’s something unpleasant about the hi-fi scene. High-end audio is ridiculously expensive. I’m talking Ferrari expensive. There’s a concomitant impression that if you’re not ready to casually drop twenty, fifty, or a hundred and fifty grand on your hi-fi system, you won’t be able to get, well, high fidelity.

I have discovered that all that is bollocks. There’s nothing magical or crazily exclusive, nor even terribly difficult about high-fidelity stereo. Digital recording and playback democratized the bejeezus out of it. The upshot is that the snobs came up with a whole new mythology around it, of cables that cost twenty grand, of amplifiers that “expand the soundstage” and “mellow the sound”; of CD players costing in the thousands or even tens of thousands that make that stream of bits much more musical; of turntables and phono pre-amps  that will get better sound out of carefully selected audiophile-grade LP’s than your humble iTunes download or discount-drawer CD.

And it’s all a big load of bollocks!

Unlike any similar scene I’ve looked at, most of those audio upgrades provide no tangible benefit at all.

The sad thing is, I can totally get the appeal of, say, a lovingly hand-crafted tube amplifier. It’s like a lovingly hand-crafted mechanical watch, with the additional benefit that it (probably) doesn’t perform any worse than the hi-fi equivalent of a Casio G-Shock. The difference is that nobody in the watch scene claims that a lovingly hand-crafted mechanical watch – an A. Lange & Söhne, say – will keep the time more accurately than the Casio. Quite the contrary, in fact. But your golden-eared audiophiliacs will claim, contrary to both argument and evidence, that said hand-crafted tube amplifier will sound better than a two hundred buck Yamaha or Sony grabbed from the local electronics superstore. 

Similarly, I can totally get the appeal of vinyl. LP’s are wonderful artifacts, with their big sleeves and cover art, and that every one is unique. The sound of an LP is appealing the same way a grainy black-and-white photograph is appealing: the rumble, wow, surface noise, and occasional snap and pop give a sonic overlay that tells you that this is a recording. It’s fun to play records. But they are not higher fidelity – truer to the original recordings – than CD’s or other (uncompressed) digital recordings. They’re lower fidelity. In fact, almost all LP’s made in the past 20 years were recorded, mixed, and mastered digitally; the only difference between the LP and the CD is that you get the LP’s characteristic degradation on top of the digital recording. Conversely, if you digitize your LP collection, it will sound exactly the same when played in the digitized versions (assuming you have decent equipment to do the A/D conversion and don’t screw it up, which are admittedly fairly big ifs). 

Yet there’s a whole industry that lives on convincing people that digital is for wannabies and those who want real hi-fi still listen to LP’s.

The whole hi-fi industry is built on this kind of bullshit: on making you feel that your gear is inadequate, and making you upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Since we’re so incredibly suggestible, every upgrade will sound better – in your mind, that is. But objectively, it won’t. Unless you’re upgrading speakers, and those only up to a certain point, and subject to any number of caveats. It pisses me off.

So what’s the secret of getting high-end sound for cheap, then?

Simply this.

Buy a good pair of speakers. If you have a small room, bookshelf-size ones will do fine. If you shop used, you can get 90% of high-end sound for about a hundred euros, and into high-end sound territory – where the limiting factor will probably be your room, whatever you do it, rather than speakers – for maybe a thousand or so. This is probably the hard part, since it’s hard to tell what the good ones are without making a few mistakes. (On the other hand, speakers from well-respected brands are easy to sell, and if you bought used, you probably won’t even lose any more than the shipping.)

Then buy or scavenge an amp. A cheap A/V receiver will do. I just saw some slightly tatty but relatively new and perfectly functional ones at the local recycling center for about 50-70 €. There was a Sony and a Yamaha if I recall correctly. It will sound exactly as good as a 50,000 dollar Krell.

Then get a source. If the A/V receiver is relatively new, it might have a digital USB audio in port. In this case, your computer will do. If it doesn’t, and your computer doesn’t have a tolerably good sound card, you’ll need a CD player. You can buy a perfectly good one used on eBay for about ten euros, if you can’t scavenge one for free from somewhere. 

Then get some cable. Dig through your drawers for an RCA interconnect; they tend to come with things like TV’s and related paraphernalia. If not, buy one. It costs about 10 cents.

You’ll also need speaker wire. Ordinary power cable will do just fine, you can get that at the hardware store by the meter.

Find a room. Put the speakers in the room somehow, so that you and the speakers will form an isosceles triangle with you at the apex, with an angle of between 60 and 70 degrees between you and the speakers, with your chair against the wall. The speakers shouldn’t be against the wall, nor (worse) in a corner. Put a big soft pillow behind your head. If you use the room for other stuff so that it’s cluttered, great – bookshelves and books are especially good, as a rugs, soft cushions, curtains, and anything that breaks up the flat surfaces of the walls, floor, and ceiling. 

Then connect everything up, making sure that red goes to red and white  (or black) goes to white (or black).

Sit down and listen to some of your favorite records. The thing to listen for is for the music to “snap into focus” so that you can hear where each singer, instrument, or group of instruments is. If you can hear not just left-right but also front-back, awesome.

There is a real difference between speakers in this respect – and in my limited experience, the speakers most likely to give you this kick are studio monitors – that’s what sound engineers use when they record the damn things, and because they’re tools rather than status symbols, they’re also usually less expensive for any given quality point. The twist is that you might have to listen to them for a while before you learn to like them, as “normal” speakers are often tweaked to make the music bassier than it was when recorded, which is often initially more pleasing. I have it on good authority that this initial positive impression usually fades in about an hour, though. Which is one reason listening to speakers at the dealer’s – especially when the dealer is trying to sell you something – isn’t as helpful as you might think.

Then move the speakers a bit. Pull them closer together, or spread them wider apart. Push them towards the wall, or into the room. Move your chair. Furniture permitting, rotate the whole arrangement 90 degrees or so. See if it made a difference. 

Decide which one you like best, and you’re done.

Anything you spend on top of this is cosmetic. You can spend a few tens of euros more on nicer-looking cables and connectors; you can buy an amp and CD player that look good and where the knobs feel nice to turn or the remote control isn’t studded with buttons. And if you can afford a beautiful hand-crafted tube amplifier, then hey, there are worse things you could be spending your money on I’m sure. If you feel compelled to upgrade, then try different speakers to see which ones you like best. Again, the used market is great.

But do not buy into the hype that you can’t have “real” hi-fi without spending a fortune or getting an electrical engineering degree. That’s the mythology that the industry lives on, and it’s all lies.

A friend and colleague of mine has been very concerned about the quality of my music listening experience, ever since I expressed admiration of a pair of speakers he owns. This was recently rectified as he found a similar pair for sale. After doing my due diligence – i.e., borrowing them and comparing them against the ones I already owned, using about 20 kg of hi-fi gear borrowed from him – my wife decided to give them to me as my birthday present. So now I am the proud owner of a pair of Duntech PCL-10’s in like-new condition, which, I am assured, were the bee’s knees for small listening rooms in about 1995.

It’s been interesting. I’ve been hearing things in music I know quite well that I didn’t realize were there. For example, Leonard Cohen plays with the recording studio as an instrument. In “Morning Glory” from Dear Heather, he’s conducting a dialog with himself. I hadn’t realized that there’s a spatial relationship between the two Leonards, one at center stage, the other towards the back at stage right. In another, “The Faith,” he’s conducting a similar dialog with his chorus, but this time the chorus and all of the instruments are clearly localized in space, while his voice floats unlocalized, overlaying the entire auditory space. This adds a whole new dimension – quite literally – to the music.

So yeah, there is a point to this hi-fi thing, besides just new toys to play with: the experience is different and richer.

I got curious about this stuff and am reading a book called This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. There’s some fascinating stuff there about how the brain constructs music from vibrations in the air, and then reacts to it. It’s simultaneously simpler and more complex than I expected. He’s exploring the interface between the mind and the world from a very interesting angle.

I also did some reading up on hi-fi. That was fascinating too, but for a different reason. I was struck by the sheer amount of woo and magical thinking around it. There’s a certain amount of it among cameras and watches too – two other gadget-related things I’m interested in – but nowhere near as much. Nobody I know is claming that a Rolex is better at telling the time than a Casio, for example, and most camera-related brand wars are about the meaning of unambiguous, observable differences, Sigma Foveon fanatics notwithstanding. The only thing I’ve come across that comes close is the cosmetics industry.

We have magic digital interconnects that “increase clarity” or “broaden the sound stage.” There are magic rocks you can put on your CD player that are supposed to make it sound better. There are racks with crystals embedded in the shelves that, they claim, will make your music sound clearer. Not among the occasional crank, mind – this is the stuff that goes on in completely mainstream publications. Steve Guttenberg, formerly of Stereophile magazine, currently at CNet, for example, who is really good at pointing out things to listen for, is completely full of it.

Thing is, hi-fi – high fidelity – is not a complicated concept. It just means reproduction of sound as closely as possible to the way it was originally generated. This process has two hard parts and one easy part. The hard parts are the end points: recording at one end, and conversion of an electrical signal to sound at the other. Recording is clearly both an art and a craft, and physics dictate that speaker construction is also a fine act of balancing constraints against each other, with “acoustically transparent” speakers remaining elusive – at least at prices and sizes ordinary humans can afford, or want in their homes. What’s more, the room you put them in, and how you position them, will make a major difference on how they sound.

The electrical part, on the other hand, is easy. Electronics is a mature science and engineering discipline that’s been around since the late 19th century. We’re now so good at signal processing that we can talk to a space probe launced in 1977, and now on the very edge of the solar system.

Ever since digital recording and playback, everything from the microphone to the part where the speaker wire connects to the speaker has been “acoustically transparent” – i.e., so close to perfect human hearing won’t be able to pick up on the distortions introduced – unless something is defective or pushed outside its operational parameters (e.g. by cranking up the volume on the amp so much it starts to clip the peaks). Put bluntly, all competently made cables, amplifiers, CD players, and digital music recorders sound the same. Yet this is exactly the part where the woo is thickest.

Any practical advice? I can only relay what I’ve learned so far. 

The amplifier doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not defective and is powerful enough to drive your speakers. The best value for money is in home theater A/V receivers from mainstream brands. There are some inexpensive stereo amplifiers around too, which don’t sound any better but have fewer features – and by extension fewer complications – to deal with. The used market has scads of amps available as well; the only potential problem with that is that they might be defective, and some of the problems might not be obvious without a known quantity to compare against. If some capacitors have lost their capacitance, for example, the amp might appear to work fine, but is distorting the signal enough to make an audible difference. This isn’t difficult or expensive to fix, but you do have to be an electronics geek to be able to diagnose the problem correctly first!

The CD player doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not broken. You can pick up a perfectly good used one for 10 euros or even for free. I grabbed one – a Sony from the late 1990’s or early noughties – from the office, where this same colleague had squirreled several away a while back, after a neighbor moved out and was about to cart them to a landfill.

The speakers matter. Unfortunately I’m completely out of my depth giving buying advice on them. All I can say about that is that I’ve found it useful to listen to the Chesky Records Ultimate Demonstration Disc, which points out things to listen for. There is a loose correlation between price and quality in speakers, but I’m not convinced that simply throwing money at this problem is the right way to go. Most of the speakers I’ve liked have fallen under the “studio monitor” category, but that’s really just me. Speakers are much less risky to buy used, since, having no moving parts and being electronically simpler, they’re less likely to be broken.

The room and speaker placement matters. I’ve experimented placing them at various positions, and in some places they “snap into focus” – my perception shifts from “music playing from two speakers” to “music coming from an imaginary soundstage in the general direction of the speakers.” It’s like a phase shift, where my brain suddenly gets the right cues to interpret the sound in a different way. It’s similar to the feeling you get when one of those Magic Eye illusions snap into focus and suddenly you see a three-dimensional object emerging from the chaotic mess of points you were just looking at.

Real hi-fi is no longer prohibitively expensive, nor difficult. What bothers me is that it’s unnecessarily daunting. For example, speaker manufacturers are extremely coy about the measured performance about their speakers, which makes it very difficult to compare them. This even though you could represent pretty much everything you need to know about them in two or three curves – frequency response, total harmonic distortion, and phase. I’m pretty sure any competent manufacturer measures these. They just don’t want to share them. I think it’s because too much information would ruin the woo: people arguing ferociously about the merits of various products is golden for the industry. That’s too bad in my opinion. Music is rather wonderful, and more people could be able to listen to it better without it.

About a year ago, I got a La Pavoni Europiccola espresso machine. It’s about as simple and old-school as it gets. The only thing it does for you is control the temperature; the rest is up to you. This is why it has a bit of a scary reputation among coffee geeks. In fact the first espresso you pull with it is unlikely to be a tremendous success, and you do need to do a little bit of reading and maybe watch a YouTube video or two to see how it’s done.

I quickly discovered that it’s not all that scary though. I was pulling espressos better than the ones I get at most cafés here within a day or so, with occasional rather good ones. Since then, I’ve been making one every day, several on weekends. All in all, I suppose I’ve pulled maybe 500 espressos through that thing by now.

The really cool thing about it is the constant learning, and constant improvement in results, and control over the result. The amount of variables that go into an espresso is pretty daunting – the beans, the grind, the dose, the tamp, the temperature, the pull. I’ve slowly developed a feel for each of these things, and gotten more and more control over the process.

After getting the very basic requirements more or less in the ballpark – decent, fresh beans, roughly the right dose, roughly the right grind, a tamp that’s roughly level and more or less where it should be – the first thing I got a feel for was the pull.

The pull starts with the pre-infusion. On the Pavoni, this means raising the lever so that water flows into the gruppo and wets the puck of coffee sitting in the filter. I learned the trick of pulling down gently on the lever to force the water into the puck, and then gently raising it to let more water in bringing it up to the right quantity for a double. I can feel the water flow into the puck, and I can relieve the pressure so that a few seconds later, a few drops of coffee will drip out and into the cup. 

I’ve also learned to control the proper pull itself, so that the coffee flows thorugh at a constant pressure, in a neat, unbroken stream of crema. 

The pull was the key to unlocking the next part of the mystery, which is temperature. I noticed that even though everything appeared to be the same, sometimes I got a nice rich crema and sometimes the coffee came out watery. The reason was actually pretty simple – the machine had just not heated up enough. The boiler was hot, but the gruppo and portafilter weren’t. The solution is just to let it warm up for longer, and/or slowly run about two to four (if I’m in a hurry) cups of hot water through it. I can now feel if the temperature is “right,” by the sound the machine makes when the water goes through it, and by the way the gruppo radiates heat. 

Incidentally, the manual says to run two to four cups of water through the gruppo before pulling an espresso. It just took me a while to understand what that meant.

With the pull and the temperature under control, I learned to understand dose and tamp. It turned out that for a long time I’d been overdosing a little. I had been using rather “forgiving” blends with lots of Robusta, while my Arabicas had turned out a bit thin and acid. Turns out the problem was with this overdosing. This problem had just been masked by the other, bigger problems I had had with the pull and temperature. 

Now I understand what the right dose and tamp are, and have enough dosing and tamping technique to get it right most of the time. My grinder doesn’t have a doser, so I have to do that by feel too. I went back to the Arabica I had really liked in a macchinetta but had abandoned on the Pavoni, and lo and behold, it’s really good again. It’s just rather finicky. If you don’t get everything right, it’ll turn out thin, or watery, or bitter, or lacking in crema, or broken in some other way.

I’m quite looking forward to finding out what the next year of espresso will teach me. Perhaps I’ll manage to make a decent Yirgacheffe or one of the other really fruity African varieties that I’ve found disappointing before. 

If you want to enter the domain of coffee geekery with a manual espresso machine, I say go for it. I also say start with an Italian roast with at least 30-50% Robusta. They’re easier than pure Arabicas and you’ll be drinking really good coffee from the get-go.

The hysterical overreaction to the Boston bombings has been hilarious to watch. Two kids armed with a bunch of pressure cookers and, of course, those things that don’t kill people manage to turn a big chunk of the US Eastern seaboard into a war zone. Just imagine what an actual militia could do!

Don’t get me wrong, it would not have been fun to lose a leg or a loved one to one of the actual blasts. It’s certainly a life-changing tragedy for the ones directly affected. But for everyone else, this has been pure entertainment, the best reality show ever. The only thing missing is live streaming video from the perps, cops, and drones, triumphantly climaxing in a pinpoint airstrike on the perp’s escape vehicle from a Predator. And if a couple civilians get caught in the crossfire, well hey, another great occasion for solemn pronouncements, flag-waving, marching in unison, and other exciting drama.

Seems Miranda rights are out the window, the kids are treated as ‘enemy combatants’ and all that commotion. Turns out the precious American freedom ain’t worth squat when the rubber meets the road.

So keep up the good work. This is a new and much more entertaining — and less tragic — role model for putative school shooters to follow. A couple more like this and we won’t need TV anymore. Twitter and streaming video will keep us good and entertained.

Some years ago I resolved that when I feel the irresistible urge to buy something unnecessary, at least I’ll do my best not to buy disposable junk. I’ve mostly managed to stick to that, and have in fact bought less unnecessary stuff – but the stuff I’ve bought has been rather nice and has given me a good deal of pleasure. Brewing coffee with my Europiccola brightens every day, for example.

I bought something that’s not junk just today.

I’ve known for a while that one of the world’s most highly-regarded independent watchmakers, Stepan Sarpaneva, has his workshop just a ten-minute walk from where I work. I’ve long admired his watches from a distance – the Korona series is just plain beautiful, even more in real life than in pictures. They’re like miniature mechanical sculptures with the additional benefit that you can use them to tell time – and the fact that the design was inspired by moonlight on cast-iron sewer gratings in Helsinki just makes them even cooler. 

They’re totally out of my league though. 

Even so, I eventually worked up the courage to drop him a line and ask if I could swing by his workshop. He said sure, so I did. The workshop is on the top floor of the old Nokia cable factory, which nowadays houses all kinds of activity; there’s a martial arts dojo, a theater, art galleries, workshops for craftsmen of various types, dance classes and what have you. It has a nice grassroots feel about it; not a showcase, but a place where people do stuff. 

Stepan’s workshop is not a big one. There’s a lathe and a few workbenches, a motorcycle, a table for showing off stuff, and a desk with a computer where, it appears, his brother handles some of the business end of things. The light is really good which I’ve no doubt helps in his line of work and no doubt makes for nice publicity photos as a bonus.

I liked Stepan. He struck me as a laid-back guy with a sense of humor that’s very much apparent in the stuff he makes, too. He showed me some of the stuff he’s working on at the moment; there were some custom Koronas on the way, and he happened to have a Moonmachine – his haute horologie collaboration with MB&F – there too (it’s not there anymore, so don’t get any dumb ideas, burglars). It is wack. You can’t hold it and not laugh out loud; it’s just at the same time so intricate, beautiful, humorous, and utterly pointless; it’s to a functional watch what this is to a practical mode of transport, only with better taste. MB&F labels it performance art, and that’s exactly what it is.

It turned out that he was working on something that was within my reach… and, to boot, it was exactly the kind of thing I’ve been keeping an eye out for for a while now. Stepan has another line of watches, which he brands S.U.F – short for SarpanevaUhrenFabrik – which he revives from time to time. While they’re his designs, unlike with the “proper” Sarpanevas, he subcontracts for all of the parts, and then (or one of the couple of people working for him) assembles and adjusts them. They still have a very personalized feel about them – you get to specify which combination of dial, seals, case style, and hands you want, if you want touches like the crown on the left, or to leave out the date window. I don’t know if strictly every watch is unique, but it’s going to be fairly close I’m sure.

So I went and bought a S.U.F Myrsky. 

The Myrsky is a “Flieger” style watch. It’s inspired by 1940’s aviator watches, of which the best-known example is probably the IWC “Big Pilot.” The Flieger is a highly functional design, as the original purpose required easy readability and enough robustness to work in pretty rough environmental conditions. Especially German watchmakers have revived the style lately; Sinn has a few pretty cool modern re-interpretations of it, while Damasko and Tutima make more traditional versions. High-end marques like Glashütte Original have their interpretations as well.

The Myrsky is more like the Sinn than the Tutima, in that it’s a re-interpretation of the Flieger idea rather than a replica or lookalike. I like that. I like things to look like what they are; a genuine 1940’s or 1950’s Flieger is much more interesting to me than a modern watch that’s made to look like one. On the other hand, I’m always a sucker for a new and good reinterpretation of an old and good idea.

The case is brushed stainless steel and the most traditionally Flieger element of the Myrsky. At 42 mm it’s towards the smaller end for a modern Flieger, which makes it about as big a watch as I can handle. It’s a handsome case with clean lines and an understated but definite presence. There’s no way you’d mistake it for a tool watch though; the fit and finish are way too good for that!

The movement is a Soprod A10, which I believe Stepan uses for all of his watches nowadays (except the MB&F collaboration, of course). It’s designed as a drop-in replacement for the ETA 2892, but is a different and more modern design. The workmanship looks excellent, even if the one in the Myrsky is not particularly lavishly decorated – just some clean Geneva stripes with the S.U.F logo engraved in black on the rotor. 

I don’t know the ETA 2892, but the winding action on the A10 is certainly miles nicer than on the “workhorse” ETA 2824, and gives the movement quite a refined feel – it’s almost as enjoyable to wind as my manual-wind NOMOS.

The dial is in my opinion the most successful on the S.U.F’s so far. I didn’t ask Stepan about the printing technique, but it looks like very high-quality silk-screen. The lettering is silver on a matte warm dark-gray base, with luminous dots inside the markings. It’s a lively design as Flieger dials go. The numbering is for seconds rather than hours, which gives the dial a nice, symmetric look. The lettering is in a compressed Bauhaus-style font (Stepan said it’s his design, specifically for this watch), with bold markings for hours and seconds. A final nice touch is a discreet gloss black “crosshairs” design and MYRSKY above 6 o’clock. The luminous dots are noticeably whiter than the silver printing, which gives the dial a nice hint of three-dimensionality.

The second hand is unusual and looks really cool – it’s blued steel and has a luminous lozenge about three-quarters of the way towards the tip. It’s also highly legible against the dark background and meshes well with the idea of numbering for seconds, as well as a little nod to the traditional blued sword hands on Flieger watches. Stepan also has blued hour and minute hands, but they would be a bit hard to see against the dark-gray dial. (They would look really good on a white version though, if he decided to do that one of these years.)

I ordered mine without a date window; I thought the dial looks lively enough as it is and didn’t want to clutter it up. It would be between 4 and 5 o’clock where it doesn’t mess up the symmetrical numbering.

Stepan makes a few variants of this watch. He showed me a flat black (PVD?) case, a dial with red numbering and a red seal around the glass, which gave it a “racing” look. Handsome enough but a bit too blingy for my eye.

So yeah. Boys never grow up, the toys just get more expensive.

I just discovered Wineskin. It’s a really neat way to run Windows programs — like old games, for example — in Mac OS X. You use an application called Winery to create a wrapper for your application. The wrapper behaves exactly like a native OS X app. When you’re done, you double-click the wrapper, and off you go. It works really well.

I’ve tried it with two old games (bought from gog.com) so far, and they run beautifully. I was even able to install all the recommended mods. It took a small amount of experimentation and Googling to get everything working, but much less than I would’ve expected, and this is way easier than dual-booting, running a virtual machine, or having a second computer. Not to mention you don’t need a Windows license.

Specifics I learned –

• You don’t need to use the “Copy into package” features in Wineskin. Just right-click on the wrapper, select “Show package contents,” navigate where you want to go, and copy in the files normally.
• Installing patches is a bit of a hassle, as you have to run the installers by selecting the patch_installer.exe (once copied into place) as the executable to run, and then start the wrapper as if you were starting the game. All of the installers I ran needed me to check use Start.exe for them (and then un-check it after they were installed).
• There are a bunch of different emulator engines available. The first one I tried didn’t work. The second one did. They were really easy to install and select through the Wineskin user interface.

All in all, I was hugely impressed. Once wrapped, they really run exactly as well as on a native machine. Very nice indeed!

Whoo, the Leningrad Cowboys. That takes me back a bit. For me, they represent the transition from gray, grim, monochrome Kekkoslovakia into the odd country of indestructible cell phones, Angry Birds, enthusiastic and very determined salsa dancers, sushi cooks, and that weird monster band that won the Eurovision song contest once. When they did that gig with the Red Army Choir on the stairs of the Helsinki cathedral, we had finally managed to get over some national traumas that had been messing with us for a long time.

Not that we don’t have problems now, what with Nokia having gone down in flames, asshat racism becoming mainstream discourse, and what have you, but I still wouldn’t want to go back. No way, no how.

The Cowboys are really much more than the Cowboys. Finland is a fucking small country. We’re, like, the size of Brooklyn, population-wise. That means that the cultural circles were always really, really small. Everybody knows everybody else and does weird shit together, if they’re at all like-minded. The Cowboys are just one manifestation of something that would probably dump a mug of beer on your head if you called it an artists’ collective, but that’s one of the best ones of its kind nevertheless. It’s a bunch of wildly talented musicians, actors, writers, directors, inventors, and all-around maniacs that kept coming up with outlandish shit and making it happen.

Pre-Cowboys, the bunch’s most visible manifestations were the Sleepy Sleepers – a band – and the films of the Kaurismäki brothers. You saw the same people in the films and in the band, and the Leningrad Cowboys go America film was really just what happened when Kaurismäki decided to put all the Sleepers in the same film at the same time and then let them do their shit. The Sleepers really pissed off the parents of teenagers back in the ‘80’s. 

They did have their more civic-minded moments as well, as with their educational Condom Song, which made an indelible impression on teenage minds at the time. I still think it beats the shit out of most sex ed.

Resisting temptation to embed every single Sleepy Sleepers video here. Look ‘em up on YouTube. They’re all there. 

Anyway. Actors and movies. The Kaurismäki brothers have made some really shitkicking films. Lately they’ve even gotten a fair bit of international recognition, and indeed they’ve become a fair bit more… let’s say, approachable, in their idiom. One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly from their films is that the same faces keep showing up. Most of the best-known faces in the Kaurismäki films aren’t professionally trained actors at all; they’re just people from that group cast into roles that would fit them. I still think Silu Seppälä in Zombie and the Ghost Train is absolutely brilliant.

The guy in the yellow jacket is the late and seriously lamented Matti Pellonpää. He is a trained actor and another Kaurismäki regular. 

My favorite Kaurismäki movie, though, is Calamari Union. It’s a love letter to Helsinki, in black and white, with the long, lingering shots and minimal dialog that’s the Aki Kaurismäki hallmark. It was also obvious that it was just a movie that these guys were making because they wanted to make a movie. Completely unpretentious, unapologetic, unadorned.

The other stuff. Bars and restaurants. A couple of the people in that group like to run restaurants. There are a few here and there in Helsinki, like Cantina West which is something like what the Leningrad Cowboys would imagine, well, a cantina in the West to be like, which is in my opinion better than most of the real things. For one thing, they serve a mean horse steak. The Moskva bar, which is a tiny hole in the wall that’s actually pretty close to what Soviet bars were like in the 1970’s. There’s a photo of Matti Pellonpää over one of the Formica tables. It appears in some of the films too. And others as well.

Simply put, the Sleepers/Cowboys/Kaurismäkis have done more than most to hold up a mirror to Finland, to give us a mythology and a self-image that’s uniquely ours, yet both true enough and imagined enough to be worthwhile.

I heard they’re going to build another monument to the Winter War in one of the few good piazzas in Helsinki. I could think of some other people who would deserve it more. I hope they’ll at least give the horse one of those ‘dos. That’s worth celebrating every bit as much.

I’m getting a little bit excited about Jolla.

Jolla is what happened after the Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, wrote his infamous memo comparing the company to being stuck on a burning oil platform. It’s Finnish for dinghy, which is something that would come in very handy in a situation like that.

There are a bunch of reasons. For one thing, I’ve followed the rise and fall of Nokia more closely than most; a close family friend was instrumental in laying the groundwork for Nokia’s success. Nokia Research Centre was in the next building from where I work; now it’s vacant except for a shiny new cafeteria that feels like a derelict spaceship where the galley androids are still happily serving food to a long-dead crew. Two of my closest colleagues are ex-Nokia; the boyfriend of another of my closest colleagues is still there but wants out. The guy at the next desk over worked in the next office from the guy who’s now the Jolla CEO.

I felt sad about seeing Nokia crash and burn, the more so for doing it by outsourcing their innovation to, of all companies, Microsoft. 

So at the basic level, Jolla represents something of the best of a Nokia that no longer exists.

There’s more to this than nostalgia, though.

I’ve checked out Jolla’s recent presentations at Slush, and I think I’m finally getting what they’re trying to do. It really is pretty damn cool, and I don’t mean in the “shiny new toys” department, although I get the impression that their toys are shaping up to be pretty damn shiny. (I wonder who their manufacturing partners are? Huawei? ZTE?)

It’s the way they’re doing it.

There’s their way of communicating. It’s refreshingly different. The way they marched the entire company on-stage for their presentation, with some of their people clearly terrified of speaking in public but at the same time super-excited about what they’re doing. The way their logo and website’s color is different every time, and instead of the usual corporate pablum just aggregates everything about them on various social media. Their Twitter presence. 

There’s more to this than a clever marketing strategy too, though.

What Jolla are trying to do is, I think, pretty revolutionary. They’re trying to create a whole new way of doing business, and one that’s far more in tune with the times than, say, Google, Facebook, or Apple, or even Twitter or Rovio. 

The normal way of surviving in the ICT business, especially in the already-threadbare Web 2.0 environment, is to stake out a piece of ground, own it, and expand it. Facebook and Apple have been the most successful at building their walled gardens. Google is pretty damn good at it. Nokia and Microsoft are trying hard but not getting anywhere much, as far as I can tell. The potential for success is measured in market share. 

Jolla, on the other hand, seems to be looking at stuff in a fundamentally different way. They’re getting people involved. Building networked communities of communities. They want to have “their” OS work on as broad a range of stuff as possible, and stuff on their OS with as many other things out there as possible. They intend to turn this into a business by packaging the chaos into something your average non-geeky guy or girl can enjoy using.

What I like about this way of working is that it’s based on generosity rather than greed. Community and peer-to-peer rather than ownership and exclusion. It’s pretty unlikely that Jolla will ever be able to extract the kind of monopolistic rents that make for Apple’s huge earnings, although I’ve no doubt that if it does take off, the founders won’t be short of pocket change. However, if it works out, they will be able to make it possible for lots of  people all over the world make a living doing what they enjoy doing. And they’ll certainly be able to do so themselves. 

While this approach certainly has precedents, e.g. in the FOSS community, there is something new about it. It could be the harbinger of the same kind of revolution that turned the Internet from a set of loosely-connected information resources into a set of huge social networks.

I really, truly wish them well. If Web 3.0 turns out to follow their vision, the world will be a better place.

I get a phone every two years as a perk from work. The one I have now is close to two years old. I know what brand my next one is going to be.

I bought a Kindle a few years ago. It was the second-generation one. I liked it a lot. I actually prefer reading novels and other from-start-to-finish type things on it. It’s also very nice when traveling.

Eventually I wore out the Next Page button. These things aren’t really built to last. So I wanted a replacement. Just about then Amazon came out with the nice new Kindle Paperwhite. It addressed exactly the things I thought were still missing or wrong with the one I had: a slightly sharper screen, a reading light, and a touch interface rather than those clunky buttons.

I’ve been a pretty good Kindle customer, I think. I’ve got a fair bunch of books on it by now.

But it’s not available for delivery to Finland. 

What’s more, they had no information anywhere about whether, or when, they were going to make it available for delivery to Finland. And, most infuriatingly, I only found out after clicking the checkout button on the Amazon website.

This on top of the political reasons I’m not a huge fan of Amazon – their dominant market position, the big cut they take due to it, the pricing that often makes Kindle books more expensive than paperbacks, the DRM that locks me into their ecosystem and stops me from lending or giving away my books, and so on. 

So I jumped ship. Now I have a Kobo Glo e-reader. It’s almost like the Kindle Paperwhite, only a bit rougher around the edges. Overall it’s a big improvement over the Kindle 2 I had – better screen, smaller, lighter, more responsive.

Fortunately Amazon’s DRM wasn’t exactly draconian, and I was able to remove it and convert my books so I can read them on the Kobo. From now on, I’ll only buy e-books from Amazon if they’re not available anywhere else. And no, I do not intend to pirate or distribute my now-cracked library.

DRM must die. Writers and other creators must be paid for their work, but the current model just isn’t working. As things stand now, writing is a lottery: if you get a winning ticket, you can get very very rich, but almost nobody does, and the losers simply cannot make a living off it. The DRM and IP system that currently exists simply bolsters this structure. It’s not working. Not for readers, and not for writers. There’s got to be something better out there.

Could a Kickstarter type model work for writers? I’d certainly be willing to pre-pay for a novel yet to be written by one of my favorite authors. What if a writer started out by self-publishing short-form stuff for free or a very low price in order to build a readership, and then convinced the readership to pre-pay to support his writing on bigger works? This seems to working for things like music and computer games. Why not novels?

The set-up. You just know there’s something nasty behind that door, so you carefully position your party in front of it and get your rogue to sneak it open to get a peek. And BAM! you’re in a cutscene, which ends up with your entire party standing in the middle of the room completely surrounded by baddies getting the drop on you. If I did that as a DM, I doubt my players would stick around very long.

Loot inflation. Let’s see, what should I wear today? The armor of an dead king I recovered from a battlefield, the dragon scale armor I inherited, the magical knight armor I won in battle, or the ancient armor of a leader of an order of legendary knights I stripped off the demon-possessed body of said leader? Hmm, maybe I should sell a few of those, to make room in my inventory for the runic dragonbone broadsword of an elder king. Seriously, it’d be way cooler if most stuff was just mundane, and exceptional items really were genuinely exceptional.

Cack-handed level scaling. Funny how gremlins magically develop in abilities at exactly the same pace I do. A while back they were throwing very small bolts of cold; now the same guys are casting hexes and slinging around fireballs. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes level scaling does contribute to the game, especially with open games where there’s genuinely no preset order to visiting the areas – but it has to be done well, for example by throwing in badder baddies rather than just making the feeble baddies less feeble. Baldur’s Gate 2 did this relatively well.

Push-button romance. Jump through a set of hoops to get your elf into bed. Meh. Romance in cRPG’s is really tough to do well. I can only think of one really stellar example, actually – Planescape: Torment. The Witcher games did pretty well too, especially the second one. There was some actual depth to it there, not just gaming the system to get to the prize.

The grind. Defeating endless numbers of identical enemies in near-identical circumstances is boring as hell. It’s pointless if easy, and frustrating if difficult. Fights should serve a purpose just as much as lore or dialog. If they don’t, you might as well leave them out.

Now that Project Eternity beat all the records in its funding drive, I sure hope it’ll be able to avoid at least some of these. My hopes are high; the team behind it is behind some of the best stuff in the genre ever.