Rememberment

Back in the eighties, ski jumping was massively popular in Finland among people of all ages. Our hero was Matti Nykänen , who seemed impossible to beat and broke every record. His namesake and I were also huge fans, and as soon as the first permanent snow covered the land, we took out our skis and ventured out to build our own slope in the woods between our houses. It was easy enough, given that the whole piece of forest was located on a hill. We also had toys like this one, which allowed us to have somewhat safer ski jumping competitions. Mom also had her own skis, and asked if Matti and I could create some ski tracks in the woods for her to do some cross-country skiing. We were happy to oblige. I wasn't a fan of cross-country skiing at school, but it wasn't too bad when you could practice it at your own pace. We made the tracks so that they circled around the whole piece of forest, going alongside the train tracks on one side and the Road of Death on the other. The center of ...

Since my birthday is so close to Father's Day, we tend to celebrate both at the same time each year with my children. Since they are all adults now and whatever successes and failures there are to be had as a parent are mostly in my past, it seems like the perfect time to take a brief look at the subject (not to mention that a whole lot about my blog is about dealing with my own upbringing). So, how much does it even matter how you were raised? When I look at my own kids, they turned out quite different from each other. It's hard to think that I would have treated each of them so differently that I could be held accountable for that, at least entirely. According to studies, personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness are somewhere between 40% and 60% heritable, and intelligence is around 50% heritable in childhood and up to 80% in adulthood. For many psychological traits you have as an adult, only about 5% to 10% can be accounted for by the shared...

There was once an incident - two drunken men came to our home and started ranting about something. I'm not sure who they were, but I have a vague memory that they might have been Dad's old acquaintances. What I do remember more clearly is how swiftly they were escorted out. Neither my dad nor my mom tolerated drunkenness in the house. Tapio sometimes showed up drunk after partying with his friends, and when he did he was properly scolded for it. Ari and Esa got drunk too sometimes, but I can't remember seeing them that way when I was little; I think they either just quietly went to bed after a night of partying, or stayed at someplace else until they sobered up. I didn't like seeing people drunk either and when me and Dad once had a talk about the subject, I told him I would never drink. But Dad wasn't as strict about alcohol as one might think. "There's nothing wrong with drinking alcohol" he said. "But it is a drink for the wise, and one must kn...

This is it then - this Friday I'll be 50 years old. Dad's birthday is in the same month, only a bit later. He would be 90 years old now. I still remember his 50th birthday celebrations: it was a big party with lots and lots of people, and it was held in the club area on the Free Church premises. A journalist from the local newspaper also came to our home to interview my dad, who had lived almost all his life in our small town and was also its first electrical draftsman. The job gave him a unique perspective into how our town had developed through the decades. As for me, I have also lived here almost all my life. But there won't be anyone interviewing me for a newspaper, nor will there be a big party. I thought about it, but I'm just not very much into big parties, especially not into ones where I'd be the centerpiece. Instead I'm going to spend the day with my children, who remain the most important people in my life. How do I feel about it then? In many ways I...

Although I was more and more interested in videogames, my passion for comics didn't fade. There was a new magazine called "Groo the Wanderer" - a parody of Conan the Barbarian - and I fell in love straight away with the hero and the art style of Sergio Aragonés. I've still got a couple of Groo books, and they remain brilliant. One of my favourite pastimes in the summer was to grab a sturdy stick, wield it like a sword and march into battle against the jungle of fireweed and nettles that emerged behind our small potato field. But reading about the adventures of the ill-witted Groo gave rise to a dream: perhaps I, too, could wield a katana when fighting my neverending war against the green menace? I brought my comics to Dad and showed him what I needed. "Hmm" he said as he took a closer look at what I had been reading. I sat beside him, waiting as he kept going through the pages. Unable to hide his amusement towards the brainless barbarian, he finally gave the...

Right now I'm quite occupied with work and travel, so just a quick one this time. Last week, the global cryptocurrency market suffered a "flash crash". During a single hour, as much as 500 billion dollars worth of assets melted away because the USA and China reignited their trade war. How much money is that? To get some idea, the M0 measure in 2025 estimates the total amount of physical money in the world to be around 8.3 trillion US dollars. In other words, the amount of monetary value that just vanished in an hour equates to around 6 percent of all the cash in the world. Yet somehow there was little in the news about it. Also, a single mystery trader seemed to be in the know what was going to happen, and made a pretty nice profit from it: SOMEONE JUST OPENED A #BITCOIN SHORT 30 MINS BEFORE TRUMP'S TARIFF ANNOUNCEMENT AND JUST CLOSED WITH $88,000,000 PROFIT HE OPENED THIS ACCOUNT TODAY 👀 pic.twitter.com/GZuzLba1Op — Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) October 10, 2025 May ...

Up until the fourth grade I was pretty much a model student. My grades had been high across the board, I was respectful towards my teachers and never skipped classes. But that started to slowly change - I spent more and more of my time just daydreaming and drawing during class. My classmates often bought my drawings from me, paying with erasers that smelled like candy. Those were all the rage at the time and I soon had quite the collection of them. I was often feeling down. I thought winter was pretty boring and I hated the winter sports at school, especially skating. After school I would often just lay in bed with our cat (we got a new one - her name was Misse and I loved her more than any of our previous pets) until Mom told me to get up and do my homework. We had some problems with the house. Our water came from our own well and some of the pipes were rusty. We often got brown water from the tap and showering gave our hair a subtle red tint. Our peat-powered heating system also some...