I don’t really have anything worthwhile to report, but I don’t want this blog to look like it’s dead either.

So what have I been up to? Art-wise, nothing. Niente. Nulla d’importante. Non so che dire.

Io amo molto italiano. E una lingua molto bella. Si semplice, pure, logica. Delle lingue che so parlare, italiano è per vero la lingua la piu bella, eccetto finlandese.

Oh, I did buy a book, the Art of Mass Effect.

It’s got beautiful pictures, but I wish they’d put in more discussion about how they actually designed the characters and levels of the game. I’m interested in reference pictures and theme design and such. It was worth the moderate price though.

Fairly recently I also bought Videogames and Art. You can check out some pages at Google Books, over here.

I haven’t read it very thoroughly as of yet, but  I have mixed feelings towards what I have read. It’s a collection of articles pondering on whether videogames can or should be considered art – very academic, and no pictures! Well, actually the style isn’t always that high-brow, and some articles were badly edited. A couple of sentences were completely incomprehensible because of bad English grammar! You don’t see that too often.

Overall though it’s reasonably respectable writing, despite being aimed at the general reader. You can’t make much sense of it without some background in university-level literary analysis. Besides, it was published by Intellect Books. Books with intellect to those with intellect.

The topic is very close to my heart and topical to anyone interested in video games. There should also be another book on videogames coming out this year, written by some people at the Hypermedia department at the University of Tampere. I’m so looking forward to that!

Hal’s term, actually an Incandenza-family term, actually not inappropriate here because like most Incandenza-family terms put into family usage by Avril, who’s an expatriate Québecker, “whinge” is some east-Canadian idiom for vigorous high-pitched complaining, almost like whining except with a semantic tinge of legitimacy to the complaint.

David Foster Wallace is (or was, rather) amazing. I get enormous kicks from reading him, especially the footnotes. (I do have a minor complaint with his slight misuse of the term semantic.) He’s a genius. Infinite Jest is exactly the kind of book I would like to write if I was more talented, if I were a genius and if I wanted to write a book.

In fact I’ve been wanting to write medical poetry in English. Or “poetry”, let’s put it that way. I was pre-cleaning my apartment (necessary in order to be able to actually clean anything) and found some old notebooks with English natural sciences and medical terms. I used to love memorizing them, for no real reason.

Let me illustrate to you just how wonderful and delightful all those Greek and Latinate scientific terms are.

I have been wondering why I have been feeling light-headed and even nauseous at times. I don’t really feel ill anymore other than that. Then I figured that it must be the ear infection I had. Since your sense of balance is partially determined by the fluids flowing inside your ear, I thought perhaps the disgusting pus from the infection has messed up that delicate function in my ear.

I was right in my self-diagnosis. My mum told me that it can take months until my sense of balance, or equilibrioception, is recovered. Sometimes you never gain it back, which is what happened to my dad 15 years ago. Of course he has two ears, so he’s not falling and stumbling all the time.

The coolest part about this (except for the nausea) is that I learned a new term, equilibrioception. Don’t you just love the way it sounds? I love the stress pattern, a bouncy threesome.

Well, the reason I started writing this is I had to take a break because I was getting nauseous again. I think I will write more about Wallace in the future, and also about this book that I bought in Munich. It’s a dissertation on Canadian English as a newly forming dialect. It’s a nearly perfect book, and the topic is immensely fascinating.

I’ve kind of given up on my ambitions for an academic career. The only reason I still feel pulled in that direction is that I’m getting more and more interested in Canadian English. To make it even worse, I have a wonderful, hard-to-get-your-hands-on source on my very own laptop, ready to be exploited. Pfff.

Then again, I’m fairly certain I could settle for keeping it as a hobby. “So, what kind of hobbies do you have Elina?” “Well, I’m really intested in variation and diachrony in the dominant Englishes, especially with regard to the phenomenon of infinitivitis and the distinction between the infinitival and prepositional to particles with -ing clauses.”

Somehow that doesn’t sound so cool. Well, I’d never use with regard to in my speech.

I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

I feel a certain affinity to Henry David Thoreau. I can share a lot of his thoughts on solitude, nature and the society, even with the 150 years (or something to that effect) between us.

He sounds like a grumpy old luddite when he claims that we should simplify our lives and refuse the comforts of modern living standards and new forms of transport. Sometimes I am exactly like this: I hate having to learn how to use some new thingamajig, and I complain how I’ve been perfectly happy before they invented it.

I also agree on his ideas about solitude. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a hermit. As soon as I made friends on the first grade at school, I started making excuses so I didn’t have to spend every day with them. I just needed a lot of time alone, and I still do.

The only reason it is a problem to me is because it’s a problem to everyone else, or so it often seems. The society cannot approve the fact that people sometimes prefer being alone to keeping company with others.

I don’t hate people. I don’t hate having company. I enjoy being around people, a lot too. But for some reason, my  natural instinct always tells me to seek solitude. Being around people for too long at one time makes me very nervous. And honestly it also makes me a really annoying person, and since others don’t deserve that kind of treatment, I try to prevent that.

A very small part of me envies Thoreau for his life style. He built himself a cabin away from the town, by a little pond. He explains how little money you need to earn if you don’t crave luxuries in food and living. After he’s taken care of his beans and vegetables, he spends the rest of his time on educating himself by reading. Such a simple, satisfying life – until I realize that they didn’t have Tampax back then.

He mentions that some Latin classics haven’t been translated into English yet – in the 19th century! I wonder how come he’s so well educated himself. He scolds his fellow men for not being very well educated. Sound like a familiar complaint?

Postscript. I know this post is kind of random, but I wanted to blog something, and I haven’t been doing anything else lately but reading Thoreau and playing Mass Effect.

Yeah. Sad.