Duty is heavier than a mountain, death is lighter than a feather

So it is. Keeping up this blog is weighing heavily upon my shoulders and its death would not be grieved by me nor by any other clearheaded being.:)
But a jedi's gotta do what a jedi's gotta do...
So here's your routine update of the year:

My life is like ever it was, or at least since I've been enrolled at the University (of Helsinki). Nothing important has happened recently (i.e. I haven't got any new Miyazaki movies, although by now I've seen most of his Ghibli-productions, only Porco Rosso is unseen as of yet; unfortunately I haven't seen any other Ghibli/Miyazaki-related movies), just some parties, concerts etc.

A short, massively incomplete list of minor happenstances is hereby provided:

-Coeurage, one of the groups I play in, and the only one active at the time (unless one counts Coeurage's alias King Eats King, which is reserved for everything we do, which is fun but too embarrassing to associate directly with Coeurage) has progressed some - at last we have some songs in playable condition (at least the acoustic versions are) and we even had a small acoustic gig at a corner bar in Kamppi, Helsinki - Eerikinkulma it was called if I'm not mistaken (we also played for friends a week before that :P)

-I got to watch a concert of the final round of the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition, and it was very good, although sadly the winner, Alina Pogostkin didn't play that evening - I saw part of her performance on TV and she seemed put so much of herself into the Sibelius, yet never detracting anything of the original - such creativity deserves praise; well, at least I saw the winner of the second prize, Jiafeng Chen, and his performance was no less magnificent, he really lit up the audience with his Tchaikovsky, and of all the performances I saw either live or on TV, his seemed to show the greatest technical proficiency; combined with his skillfull interpretation it made me think I'd seen the certain victor, and I sure was a little baffled when he only came second - until I saw aforementioned part of Alina's Sibelius (it was only after the winners had been announced) - that really made me stand with the jury after all, tired as I was, I almost wept for the beauty of it..;)
(oh, what an unorganized mass of spittled babble I've produced)

-I've been lazy at school, but somehow I've still managed until now - it really makes me wonder

-Aspekti RY, the student organization for linguistics/computational linguistics (or whatever it's called, language technology or whatever) students at the Helsinki University celebrated 'pikkujoulu' ("little christmas" - an excuse for drinking too much for most finns - or in the case of Aspekti, for playing games like actionary or hopscotch while drinking more or less moderately) the same evening Coeurage played at the bar, which caused me some minor inconvenience, such as missing the IPAri-game (everybody gets a piece of gingerbread (pipari in finnish, short for piparkakku) in the form of an IPA-sign (International Phonetic Alphabet) and has to explain what sound the sign represents - how it is produced, where the articulation takes place etc. - and then has to try to produce the sound themselves - an alveolar voiced implosive, anyone?).

-Probably something else, but I can't remember


Yeah, well, bye then.