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This summer, I asked mommy to get me Richard Dawkins' the God Delusion which I've only now started having time to read. It's really interesting and well-written so far. But fortunately, saving me from getting a too one-sided, dogmatic, atheist picture of reality, some christian fundamentalists decided to bless me with their christian student magazine. The hot centerfold article is a criticism of naturalism by Tapio Puolimatka, who's a professor of pedagogy and docent of practical philosophy. I am often annoyed when people make long, unintelligible expositions to support their view of something so I'll try to just list some of the useless points made by the good professor:

- He claims that science dogmatically excludes other explanatory models and compare their descriptive power objectively. The paragraph doesn't make it clear what these other hypotheses would be, but since the article is in a christian magazine and tries to criticize atheism and naturalism we may assume that he's talking about the God Hypothesis. The stumbling block for this is that a hypothesis involving something that doesn't follow any Rules cannot be scientifically explored.

- It's also silly that people like Professor Puolitie are trying to act like they are the radical thinkers these days (In an Expelled Ben Stein way). He's playing the "Big Science is dogmatic"-card. This seems to completely ignore the fact that their medieval world view was the only accepted view for about one and a half millennia. And that science has had to work hard to build up this natural world view.

- The combination of these two is also expressed in the statement (again similar to Expelled) that scientists are afraid of publishing results that go against the natural world view. But of course science isn't afraid of anything. It's just that science cannot work with hypotheses or objects that cannot be said to follow any rules.

It's sad that people at universities are engaged in this kind of bad thinking.

Splatterhouse

I re-discovered one of my old arcade favorites Splatterhouse when looking through the game roms we had on our old computer. They had this game at Vasa's good old theme park Wasalandia and I must have been around 10 years old when I saw this game the first time. I was completely awed by the level and monster designs. I also remember when I was watching some older "juvenile delinquents" or something playing it and they got to the level where you're fighting a bunch of poltergeist chairs. I must have been really impressed by that because I said in swedish something like "Whoa, chairs". I remember the big guys made fun of me or something so I felt a bit embarrassed and scared. But that's the power Splatterhouse has on a little kid like I was back then. These days, I can beat this game pretty easily myself but I am always reminded of my stupid "Whoa, chairs" line when I get to that level. Below follows a few pics of some of the coolest scenes from the first five of seven levels.

Hot meat-clever action in the first stages. The baddies always die in gory ways. You can't really see it as well as I hoped in the first pic, but I am chopping that zombie alien's head off clean.



A crazy dual chainsaw-wielding maniac!


One of my favorite boss encounters. First we find this girl lying on this couch here. I think it might be the girl you enter the Splatterhouse with in the short intro. But i am not sure, I haven't really tried to figure out the story.


But then she changes into this really cool freaky clawed monster.


This should be level 2, there's a really cool sound when you hit these gray ooze monsters with the short baseball bat-looking wooden stick. The monsters splash all over the wall in a really cool way too.


Encounter with a poltergeist. The room will shake; chairs, knives and even the painting will attack you.


This is a really gross freaky blob monster that tries to slime its way all over you.


All in all a really cool game, it's a bit on the easy side though. Not a lot of strategy required. But great graphics, monsters and music.

If you wanna see this game in action here's a two-part movie of somebody going through the game at a pretty fast pace. Unfortunately in the first stage he doesn't use the meat-clever so no decapitations there.

Part 1:



Part 2:

Sega Mega Drive Twin Pad Player

Look what the postman brought me a few days ago. It's a clone of Sega's old 16-bit mega drive video game system. This one has 20 built-in games. They are all by Sega I think. I even think the thing is an official Sega product for the chinese market or something. It has some pretty nice games. You can check out the games list here: http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-6z-49-en-70-2sf4.html I've only had time to play Gain Ground and Eswat a few times so far.



This is the main menu screen you are greeted by when powering up the machine. It looks kind of craptastic. The box it came in was pretty ugly as well. But who cares. The games work really well. It just seems that some pixels are stretched a bit. Not sure if it's my TV or the mega drive-clone.

Greetingz from Stockholm

I am sitting in my friends' kitchen right now and writing a crappy blog post on my super cool Asus EEE PC. We have just had a wonderful lunch made by K. It was a kind of noodle shrimp vegetable stirfry. Yesterday we walked around in a lot of shops until our feet hurt. I bought a new sleevelss "wifebeater" (not really a wifebeater, they have those gross little fishnet holes in them so the upper body almost looks naked when wearing one). It was yellow, it will match my yellow sandbag boxing gloves perfectly. The clerk also told me that yellow was a good color and more guys should wear yellow. Apparently yellow is one of this spring's colors along with purple and tourqoise. Last night we also watched the latest episodes of lame Lost and gosuuu Trumppi. Trace Adkins was being useful as usual.

We are soon going to take a walk to some station somewhere and then go to a ramen restaurant. I haven't eaten ramen in a looooong time. I hope it's good.

Taste of Japan part II

I cooked up some more Japanese food today. Two very simple things here that were just godlike. The egg thingies on the left are a sweet omelet roll thing called tamagoyaki, the little soy cup in the middle is for dipping the tamagoyaki. It was just sooo good. The recipe is simple: you need at least a few eggs and a tablespoon or two of sugar. If you are a pro you can put in a bit of dashi and soy or mirin or whatever as Yasuko of Yasukon Keittio told me. I followed this really awesome youtube video for the cooking technique. It has a really cool electronic song that plays in the background that I was listening to many times while making the tamagoyaki. Strangely about 8/10 youtube commenters seemed to hate the song. Well that is just more proof that the only people commenting on youtube are 'tards. Anyway as you'll see in the video the tricky part is the cooking technique where you have to re-oil the pan and roll the omelet up a few times. You should also ideally have a special frying pan like this.

The other thing that was really awesome was the sesame seed salad dressing I put on the salad. I haven't tasted that in like 4 years. It was just as good as I remembered it. The blue soup plate just contains some simple tanki udon, they're the same thick tapeworm-y noodles that I made a stirfry variation of in my earlier blog post.

Yakiudon

Recently I went to visit the Helsinki University of Technology to talk about some stuff related to my work. It really isn't interesting enough to blog about. But before I went back to Turku I took some time to do some quick shopping in the center of Helsinki. I went to Tokyokan and spent about 60 euros and walked away with two medium-sized grocery bags full of japanese food items. I bought mostly noodles but also finally found the sesame seed salad dressing that I haven't eaten a single time since I was in Japan a very long time ago. Today I cooked up a yakiudon dish. It's incredibly easy to make but so good. You basically stirfry some vegetables and meat if you like, then you add the noodles and the sauce that the package contains. The noodles aren't dry and crappy like the instant ones you can buy in just about any shop here. You also don't have to boil them in water, just put them in the frying pan and add a small amount of water. I think maybe it's the sauce that makes the dish so good. If you don't have pre-made sauce you can make your own. I've gotten the best results so far by mixing a bit of soy sauce, some sugar and a bit of worcestershire sauce.

The picture you see above is the result of my godlike cooking skills. What you can also see is the DVD box of season 2 of the Ultimate Fighter that I got today from Amazon. I'm watching it right now and drinking a beer out of one of those new style plastic bottles that Finland is apparently switching to. I guess we'll see a lot of less broken glass all over the sidewalks after the weekends from now on. Smar decision.