C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS: cHApTER #0x9B

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0x9B  -  Oulu  -  myXTer  -  1999-05  -  183 lines
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Now I'm officially an adult. Jussi turned eighteen around the same time as I, and Masa did last fall. The other group members will become adults a bit later, over the summer and fall.

I don't know about the others, but since turning eighteen, I've been fascinated by everything I could do with this new freedom. I definitely don't want to stay in Finland. The world is big, and I really want to finish high school as soon as possible so I can go exploring!

To start the adventure I will only need a backpack full of stuff, like when I left Lietevesi in 1997. I'm planning to sell the rest of my belongings at huuto.net. It seems like anything sells there, unlike on the sfnet's marketplace newsgroups. At least if you leave the price reservation completely out.

The matriculation examination will be in September and October, and there's also the Helsinki CWU meetup in September combined with Meka's 18th birthday party. I'm going to the meetup, but after that, I might take a bit of a break from "CWU life". Maybe a few months, possibly even a year. I really don't want anyone reminding me about that culture while I'm out exploring the world and finding myself! I want to keep as far from it as possible!

It would be amazing if I could go straight from the CWU meetup to a ferry to Estonia or Sweden, but more likely I'll only be able to leave in October or November, with Oulu as the starting point. I'll hand back my apartment keys to PSOAS first, and then head to the train or bus station with my backpack. The initial plan is to get to Sweden, but I haven't decided yet whether to take the north route via Haparanda or the south route via Umeå (or even straight to Stockholm). Once I'm in Sweden, I'll continue south, either by train or hitchhiking.

I don't even want to draw up a detailed itinerary. I'll keep going wherever my heart takes me. Hopefully, I'll have saved enough money by the summer that I won't have to come back right away. I already have the money set aside for my passport and a 30-day Interrail pass, but it would be nice if I didn't run out of money for food during the trip. I don't need money for accommodation; I'll be sleeping in a tent unless someone offers me a free place to stay somewhere. And if it gets too cold with the winter coming, I can always travel a bit further south. Freedom and independence above all!

Finland is increasingly annoying me with all its hopelessly anemic cultural quirks. Take this glorification of "nerdiness" that you see online and sometimes in newspapers. Especially the "Irti Elämästä" association, which constantly organizes pathetic "nerd attacks" to highlight the patheticness of their members. I find this completely incomprehensible: in my opinion, "nerd" is a derogatory term that brings together all kinds of negative traits, and I definitely want to get rid of them myself. Like shyness, social ineptitude, and wasting intellectual resources on all sorts of pointless interests.

I don't think I'm the only demoscener who's pissed off about Assembly events being called "nerd conventions". I'm not going to any single Assembly party anymore. It was enough for me to go enter cHAOS wORLD uNKNOWN's first demo in the compo back in 1995 and get annoyed by the Doom nerds. On the Ropecon side the folks were luckily a bit less nerdy. But I hadn't come to Helsinki for just nerd events at that time, but to meet Schistic (with whom I lost my virginity AS THE FIRST IN THE WHOLE GROUP! It makes me laugh that Meka is still sometimes bitter at me for that!)

Things didn't exactly go smoothly with Schistic, and later, after Generator '96, she got angry at the whole group. Now she seems to have mellowed out, because she returned to #cwu in early spring and said she was also planning to attend the CWU meetup. I guess I can risk meeting her again, even though she brings up painful memories. It would be good to clear the air with her before leaving Finland. And with the other CWU members as well, so I won't have anything hanging over me during my self-discovery trip.

But let's think about the CWU members. Jyri has probably been closest to me among them; he used to hang out and ally with me even back in elementary school against the List Gang, the predecessor to CWU. During the CWU era, he was my closest friend, the one I dared to tell things to that Meka would immediately condemn (like he condemned that poetry file he found in the summer of 1995).

On the other hand, Jyri's ideology has been increasingly strange to me year after year. Why hasn't it been possible to log on to his Amiga occult BBS, DECREPiTUDE, from the Internet, even when it was literally connected (like during the CWUnet era)? Apparently, it's somehow important to Jyri to keep the BBS "clean". Jussi, of course, supports this ideology with his own BBS, even though he generally considers Jyri's ideas to be utter nonsense.

Both Jyri and Jussi believe that the essence of a BBS is to make some kind of "sacrifice" when using it. So, when you pay per minute for the connection, the time spent on the BBS is somehow more "sacred" and focused than if you just hang around on a fixed internet connection. I understand Jyri's point, because if you can leave connections open carelessly here and there, you become rather scatterbrained, but I don't think it's inevitable. You can still make a fixed internet connection time "sacred and focused" if you just want to.

Another annoying ideological extremism in Jyri is how he always has to optimize every piece of code to the last detail, even if the whole optimization doesn't achieve anything. For example, the CWU website had to be painstakingly implemented as an Apache module using C and Assembly, and definitely not, for example, with PHP3, even though no one even noticed the speed difference or anything. Jyri even managed to sell this ideology to Meka, who actually works with PHP3. Meka's view is that you can give "lamers" as crappy and sloppy code as they'll pay for, but "elite" things always have to be done optimally so that one's scene reputation won't suffer.

And it doesn't stop there. Jyri even ended up believing that HTML and HTTP are completely suboptimal compared to, say, Telnet, so the cwu.net server should respond on both the HTTP port and the Telnet port. Behind the Telnet port, he buillt a completely text-based version of the website with a BBS-style interface. Jyri gets easily obsessed by all kinds of small details and gets stuck tinkering with them while forgotting the big picture. Maybe that's a nerdy trait he refuses to admit in himself.

A more disturbing trait in Jyri is his way of putting people into rigid hierarchies (and always being at the top elite tier himself). Meka has a very similar way of thinking, even though his "lamer order" is somewhat different. Although I used to believe in a strict lamer-elite hierarchy as well and still consider people who are free from nerdy traits to be better than those struggling with them, I'm convinced that declaring yourself "elite" is a complete flight from reality and even prevents you from seeing your own flaws.

It's almost impossible to try to convince Jyri and Meka of this point, but luckily, Jussi is pretty much on the same page with me. That's quite something, because I haven't been on the same wavelength with Jussi before, but maybe we've managed to mature enough to understand other people's childishness without explanation. On the other hand, Jussi is also much better at justifying his opinions now than he was in junior high, when he blindly believed all sorts of old-fashioned dogmas from his parents about the existence of God or the dangers of drugs and the like.

The most important joint project we've had as a group has been assembling texts for "C00LeS WaReZ UNiON MeMOiRS." It's progressing at a crazy pace in some respects, but some parts have required slow and painful memory trips. Processing some of the Hönttölä meetups has been stuck because someone (usually Meka) completely disagrees about what we even discussed at that time. Even though everyone else remembers things correctly, Meka's insistence has resulted in large chunks being left out of the dialogues and event descriptions. Especially ones where Meka had some really embarrassing misunderstanding (and there's been plenty of those!).

Despite all that, we've managed to finish our memoirs up to the autumn of 1995. That's when we made a revolution in the group, ousting Meka and changing the group's name to cHAOS wORLD uNKNOWN. Oh, what a torment and wrangling it was to get that part finished! At the same time, I was reminiscing and working on the events of early 1996, which hopefully won't be detailed too much in the final history. I'm so embarrassed by my neo-Nazi antics at the time (even though it was probably a formative life experience, and at least I'll know how to stay well away from anything remotely right-wing in the future).

Even though the memoirs are progressing, nothing is coming of the joint demo. But that's more because of lack of free time than disagreements. I haven't had much free time lately, as I've wanted to focus on my studies and getting a job, and Meka also seems to have his work as the main thing in his life. Jyri still manages to work on non-commercial projects (like that BattleLynx browser), but his problem is the nerdy perfectionism I mentioned. Plus, he keeps focusing exclusively on the platform which his ideological fanaticism happens to point to. It seems like this demo will end up like the others, where we'll throw something hastily assembled together from what's ready at the time of the meetup.

Fortunately, I'll be able to take a break from CWU this year! I hope that I'll be able to find better, more accomplished, and less nerdy company abroad, in order not to miss the CWU members or even Finland for a few years. The world is big, the Hautataipale scene is small!