Teemu - Title

Guh, I guess I haven’t posted anything since Chara-expo and even that one had a really narrow scope. It’s time to get you guys dated on what has happened. Please excuse the structure of this post, I’ll just write down whatever comes to my mind. Some happened events are from time prior to my last post and not everything will be chronologically accurate, especially given that I would rather talk about matters such as the project or food as a whole. Bear with it.

Project:

The Monday after my first post we got our final team member: the French designer. He’s a decent guy, though it’s a bit of a shame that the designed could only arrive after we had finished the basic design of the game. It’s not like he has no work to do, but I can imagine it wasn't really what he was looking for. In the same week all the final year teams (including us, obviously) had a quick presentation about their projects, and once we were done with it, we could finally start working for real. It felt really good to be in a team with proper project management for once. 

Afterwards the work has been fairly simple comparing to the previous chaos, we have a certain amount of tasks every week as well as larger milestones and it is our job to see those tasks done on time. I'm struggling quite a bit to keep up with my seniors. In fact, I sometimes have to ponder whether I am more trouble than worth, there’s not really a problem with my code working, rather than in how it fits the framework. I do technically know polymorphism and state machines, but I haven’t utilized them like this before as opposed to writing big lumps of individual code that manages to get the job done. Thus I have some catching up to do and I feel like I'm gradually starting to see at least how I should do things. Resulting from my stress and failures (and the nine-hour-long days) I can’t really say I have enjoyed the project and the school days but that, to me, is secondary. The important thing is that this is definitely useful which means the trip was worth it: I tend to value gaining useful experiences more than gaining fun ones.

Food:

Aside from school, food was probably what I was most excited about when I got here. In most parts it has lived up to my (rather high) expectations but there are some quite disappointing factors. I expected the local food to be hot. I've been warned that ordering spicy food abroad is close to dangerous. Apparently I've already eaten the spiciest dish available at food courts (with some added chili and wasabi) in the country and it wasn't really hotter than what I normally cook at home. I did also complete the task of eating ghost pepper wings. Based on their taste they may have indeed been touched with one. I recently heard some locals decided to get me some ghost peppers online after I completed their weird instant noodles flavoured with something quite nasty (I admit that was hot). I'm rather scared (as well as excited) of that, I have eaten naga morich before and it was not entirely pleasant experience… OK, I can get the food spicy if I add raw chili peppers to it or throw in a large spoonful of chili powder to the sauce (which almost makes it divine), but I’d sure like a genuinely well-made food that makes me sweat and gives me the burn that echoes in my throat, nose and ear canals.

I’m also getting a bit tired of rice and noodles, and while there are dishes with neither, avoiding both rather limits your courses. I have managed to find bread (it wasn't that hard as I thought), which is rather helpful in the evenings. Too bad it’s a far cry from Finnish jaw-breaking rye bread: This one is about as dense as cotton-candy, and due to the locals’ weird customs, probably has about the same amount of sugar in it too (a mild exaggeration.) Some of my favourites here have been: anything with curry, barbecue sets, Indian and Korean food.

I'm fairly confident there is no Pepsi Max in the entire nation; I have found Coca Cola light and Zero, as well as Pepsi light and twist, but the divine liquid is ever so absent. As for coffee, there IS good coffee available, but it’s pretty much only in cafeterias: The coffee in stores often has pre-added milk or sugar, though there are black versions available. We don’t have a coffee maker in our apartment, but coffeebags (like teabags, but with coffee), seem to be fairly popular here, and I occasionally make some for myself. It’s all right, though lacking. In school we have a wide variety of different poisons labelled as coffee available. At first I didn't even notice there was a simple black coffee available and had the misfortune of drinking coffee with milk and sugar, and one with sugar. I don’t know which one was more horrible: the one with milk tasted like cocoa a five-year-old kid with a stage 2 diabetes would like, the amount of sugar was atrocious. The black one tasted more like coffee, but I'm not sure if it was a good thing or not. The horribly sweet flavor made it very difficult to swallow down. Luckily I only had to try both once before I noticed the normal coffee that seemingly interested no one. The best part was that it only costs 40 cents per cup. It tasted like poison, but at least it was honest poison, delicious sticky dough that has been sitting still for hours. The only thing better than an honest horrible coffee is an excellent one. I drink two cups every day.

Activities:

It’s been a while since this happened, and Sami has already touched on the subject briefly, but we got a change to playtest some games from local start-ups. It was obviously highly confidential since they weren’t announced or released yet so I won’t be talking about the games themselves, but I can touch the experience. Basically we got three days off school to do eight-to-ten hours of testing out all sorts of games for various platforms and filling out forms. Most of the games weren’t really targeted for us but some felt genuinely exciting, one was abruptly mortifying. Aside from the atrocious two hours we spent playing the abruptly mortifying one, we had a pretty good time: the developers were cool people, one bunch even bought us drinks after the day. Aside from playing, it was a good experience to see how the startup dev-scene looks like here in Singapore. They had a pretty cool system where the startups shared a building/environment called game solution centre, which provides them with software and mentoring and is actually managed by NYP (our school here.)

My apologies to the people who couldn't care less about magic: the gathering or otherwise have no idea about the following content: feel free to skip the rest.

The week after Chara-expo we participated (not in the main event) in mtg Grand-Prix held here in Singapore. It was actually the first official magic: the gathering event I ever attended, as Kajaani and much less Pieksämäki never hosted fnm. Needless to say, the place was crowded with people. The day passed quickly as we enjoyed the event and participated in a team-sealed with Sami and Toni. We got pretty trashed in it though Sami did quite well. I might have gotten my ass kicked in the Grand-Prix team-sealed, but I regained my honor as a limited player last Friday. The three of us (Sami, Toni, myself) went to a local game-store that held Magic origins prerelease. I somehow beat everybody with a rather mediocre deck by what seemed to have been blunt willpower and some dumb luck, thus winning the event. I will probably start going there on Fridays to play some modern now that I've gotten some upgrades from the grand-prix. I’ll let you know how I do, probably.