(she/her) A suburban Canadian in suburban Finland. 70% heart, 30% kaiho, 100% complicated. Number 1 non-Finnish-speaking Vesterinen fan (go ahead, fight me). Miniature painting and sometimes miniature paintings. I also run @tabloidweather and @tabloidwalking. Reblogs at @tiikerikani-reboggles sometimes.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
"Taking things apart" is a very useful framework for understanding AI. How do we resolve the (seeming) paradox that some skilled workers report wonderful results from their work with AI, while others are full of dire warnings about the lurking defects in their AI-assisted outputs? Simple: the first group are "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by machines) and the second are "reverse centaurs" (humans who have been pressed into service as peripherals for machines):
What are we to make of the people who've been fired by bosses who replaced them with AI, in light of the fact that AI is demonstrably not able to do their (former) jobs? Again, it's simple if you separate out two distinct phenomena: "AI can do your job" is the first. The second is: "Your boss is a credulous dolt who is infinitely horny for replacing lippy workers with pliable machines, which made him an easy mark for an AI salesman who convinced him to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job":
This is also a useful move for understanding the AI investment bubble. It's not just billionaires who don't think other people are as real as they are and consequently their jobs can be done by chatbots. It's also billionaires who believe that bosses can be sold AI and don't care if the AI is defective, because that's your boss's problem after he buys the AI and fires you. They don't have to believe in AI in order to think it's a good investment: like an investor betting that Joe Rogan can sell millions of dollars' worth of peptides to desperate young men, they are assessing the sales potential, not the merits of the thing for sale:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/03/andor/#either
As useful as "taking things apart" is, "putting things together" is also a very important technique for assessing, critiquing and improving AI. In a stellar essay entitled "Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same" by the data scientist Lauren Leek, we get a top-notch example of "putting things together":
Leek's essay is one of those fabulous, wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary pieces, touching on urban design, music trends, synthetic LLM crowds, Netflix recommendation algorithms, and several other subjects, all seeking to resolve a(nother) (seeming) paradox: how is it that we have so much potential variety, but everything is so manifestly the same?
The answer is complicated and nuanced, but Leek's foundational point is that in a data-driven society, "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies. As Leek puts it: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want."
This is a pervasive issue across many domains. Leek says that economists call it "performativity," while machine learning researchers call it "model collapse" and urbanists call it "placelessness."
"Performativity" describes how, once a market has been modeled by economists, that model becomes the foundation for economic policy, which pushes the market to conform to the model:
"Model collapse" describes how machine learning models that are trained on their own predictions become incredibly bland, with all variety disappearing from the system's predictions:
This is hugely consequential: it's why bias proliferates through predictive policing algorithms: train a model with data from racist stop-and-frisks and it will predict that all the weapons and drugs in a city are to be found in Black and brown peoples' pockets. Turn those predictions into recommendations telling cops where to go look for weapons and drugs and they will double down on racist stops, producing even more biased training data, which turns into still more bias in the predictions:
"Placelessness" is the urbanist's name for "when everywhere optimises toward the same template." I think of it as Flinstones Syndrome, where the same background is looped behind Fred and Barney as they drive through Bedrock. In New York City, it's Citibank-bodega-Chipotle-Walgreens; in the Chicago suburbs, it's the strip malls with a Chili's, a gas station, and a big box store.
Leek proposes that these are all expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, a failure mode of data science that takes a world of "granular personal data" and arrives at a world where "personalisation produc[es] more sameness."
To these excellent examples, I'd add another one, from the world of monetary policy: Goodhart's Law, which holds that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Goodhart's Law captures a wide variety of phenomena. When Google first deployed Pagerank, they showed that by counting the inbound links to all the pages on the web, you could extract a signal about which pages were most important (because there was no reason to link to a page unless you found it noteworthy).
But once Pagerank became the dominant means by which web users found pages, counting links stopped being useful: first, because people used Pagerank to find the best pages and link to them, making it impossible for new pages to get the inbound links needed to supersede incumbent pages; and second, because it's easy for fraudsters to create inbound links for low-quality pages in bulk, once there's a reason to do so.
Counting inbound links was a world-beating retrospective way of predicting which page would best match a searcher's query, but once it shaped the world it sought to analyze, it ceased to be a good prospective way to predict which page would best match your queries.
Leek is a brilliant data scientist and an even better science communicator, with a knack for crisp, readily understood explanations. How can a world of granular, highly varied data turn into a world of homogeneous choices? Simple: start with a set of items ("cuisines, genres, shop types") and a standard algorithm for sorting them. Let users choose from those recommendations. The mode (average) of those choices "gets shown more, so it gets picked more, so the model grows more confident the mode is what people want, and the tails starve." Run this for a few rounds and the evenly distributed catalog of choices "collapses onto one dominant option."
This is intrinsic in the choices we make in designing recommendation algorithms, tilting them towards the likelihood of a successful recommendation. A recommender that wants to succeed every time will make the safest possible recommendations, "so an algorithm that is uncertain about you, and it is always at least a little uncertain, hedges toward the average."
Then she busts out a beautiful, perfect little statistics aphorism: "Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps." That is to say, "regression to the mean" (the tendency of varied things to become more standardized) cannot be avoided with the standard personalization algorithm. That algorithm is going to play it safe, showing you things that are broadly palatable, and because your choices are constrained to the average, you will choose average things.
This is how recommendation systems – and other analytical tools that produce predictions that are then turned into action – force so many diverse phenomena (streets, markets, media recommendations) into sameness. The fact that these recommenders are self-fulfilling prophecies means that "they don't have to be right," only "listened to."
This explains the sameness of so many of London's high streets. Leek examines 640 shopping streets, characterizing 18,000 food places spread out across them, flagging all the chain restaurants. Her analysis shows that any two London streets will, on average, share about half of their "food profile."
Obviously, this is most pronounced on streets with chain outlets, and it doesn't take that many chain outlets before a street's sameness shoots up: "A relatively small number of repeated names is enough to make otherwise different streets resemble one another more." So why do streets with chains resemble one another so much? Because the chains use an algorithm (weighting footfall, proximity to train stations, demographics, and competitors) to decide where to put their restaurants. If a street with a Gail's Bakery on it feels like every other street with a Gail's Bakery, that's because Gail's only puts its restaurants in places that have highly similar characteristics, measured to a high degree of accuracy and controlled by a narrow set of tolerances.
In other words, every street that feels like it should have a Gail's will eventually get a Gail's, whereupon that street will feel even more like all the other streets that have a Gail's, because it will share one more common factor with those other streets (a Gail's).
Leek points here to her earlier work on pub closures in the UK. The UK has experienced an epidemic of pub closures, with thousands of pubs disappearing since 2016:
Her research found that the biggest predictor of a pub surviving was its similarity to the median pub; which is to say that the more distinctive a pub was, the more "character" it had, the more likely it was to close. Pubs that are different from the average pub are harder to categorize, which means they're harder for a bank manager to assess for creditworthiness or for a landlord to justify extending a long-term lease to. The algorithms used to allocate capital and real estate are also recommenders, and they also drive variety out of the system.
This same phenomenon acts on culture. In an age of music recommendation algorithms, hit songs are changing; today's songs use a smaller vocabulary of unique words and repeat those words more often:
Vocabulary richness, distinct words relative to length, has fallen by more than a quarter since the early 1960s, while the share of repeated lines has climbed by nearly a third. The modern hit says less and says it more often, because the hook that works gets repeated.
But that's not the whole story! While each song resembles itself more ("saying less more often"), within that constraint, there's far more variety today than before: a given song's (constrained) vocabulary has grown more distinct when compared to all the other songs' vocabularies. Songs repeat the words they use, but the words repeated in songs are getting more different.
For Leek, this is the key to understanding the whole phenomenon and (more importantly) doing something about it. Music recommendation systems optimized for a singable hook, but did not optimize on any of the other variables in songs, so those dimensions acquired a broader range, even as the optmized variable got flatter and narrower.
This means that the tendency of recommenders to "flatten the world" isn't a single blunt outcome: it depends on which dimension we choose to flatten through recommendation, and who chooses to flatten that dimension.
A media recommender optimizes for consumption, showing you a tractable set of things it believes you'll watch, read or listen to. When you choose from among this limited set, the recommender takes note of that fact and shows you more of the same, pushing everything to a greige median. All the movies, books and songs you might have liked that were omitted from that initial set are excluded from being recommended in the future. The features of that media that you might have appreciated "decay out of consideration." They are never tested for desirability. The model collapses.
How badly does it collapse? Leek cites Movietweetings' data on which movies people watch: out of a million public movie ratings, half relate to the top 2% of movies in the set. There's 38,000 films in the set, but just 380 titles account for 40% of the ratings. Leek argues (persuasively) that this isn't because recommenders are good at "knowing your taste" – rather, they are good at "narrowing the menu."
Leek relates this to her work on creating LLM "personas" – synthetic populations meant to mimic the tastes and proclivities of real groups of people, that you can interrogate "before you spend money asking actual humans." While this would be useful for many applications, "it fails in exactly the way this whole essay is about."
Leek went to enormous lengths to reproduce the traits that make people interesting to study in aggregate, painstakingly replicating the ways that social connections, psychological outlook and demographic factors predict people's beliefs. The result was a set of LLM personas with "elaborate stories" about how they differed from one another, but whose survey responses about planned actions were homogeneous in a way that real populations are not.
This, Leek writes, is the same force that homogenizes other data-driven predictors. Because she'd ordered her LLM to reproduce the statistically validated relationships between different factors that predict a person's beliefs, each synthetic persona was a homogenized average. It's like the paradox of "The Average Man," where military uniforms sized to the average of all service personnel fit no one, because no one is average:
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0010203
The thing is (as Leek points out) the idea that synthetic personas are a good way to understand the preferences of a real population is not a harmless delusion: it's a product that's being actively sold to governments, campaigning politicians and marketers. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives governance, political campaigns and product design to the same homogeneous median that is making every shopping street in London feel the same.
This matters. As Leek writes, ecologists have long understood the importance of variety for systemic resilience: they call it "the insurance value of biodiversity." A diverse system has reservoirs of species and variation that may not be optimized for how things stand now, but that can move into niches created when things change in ways that lay waste to the previously dominant organisms. As anyone whose favorite banana went extinct can tell you, homogeneity works well, but diversity fails well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel
The brittleness of algorithm-induced homogeneity is compounded by the fact that recommenders obscure the true preferences of people. If you watch two Scandinavian crime dramas after Netflix recommends them to you, it will keep showing you more Scandy crime for the next decade – even if there's another kind of programming that you'd vastly prefer (if only you knew about it). This means that decision-makers who choose which shows will get made in the future will keep on funding their safe Danish detectives, to the exclusion of whatever might emerge from the same weird attractor that produced the K-Pop Demon Hunter fortune.
Transpose this failure mode onto states, bank managers and landlords, and we see whole ranges of policies, businesses and activities that never come into existence, despite the popularity, prosperity and joy they might bring us.
But Leek doesn't end with this worrisome note. Instead, she identifies this whole thing – model collapse, placelessness, performativity, even Goodhart's Law – as an expression of one of the best-understood tradeoffs in computer science: "exploration vs exploitation":
Any system learning from feedback has to divide its effort between exploiting what already scores well and exploring options it hasn’t tried, in case they’re better.
Computer scientists have long understood that focusing on exploitation to the exclusion of exploration is a trap that locks you into "the first decent option" so you can never discover the best one.
Which means that this algorithmic homogeneity has a well-understood corrective: "forcing exploration back in." The problem is that markets hate this kind of exploration. A company that lives and dies by how many clicks it gets is never going to sacrifice 20% of its traffic by showing its users weird, untested options that score worse than the median because these weird things have never had a chance to prove that they are desirable.
This is a classic market failure, and, as Leek points out, there are regulatory responses in the UK (the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act) and the EU (the Digital Services Act), both of which require the largest platforms to open up their recommendation systems, but so far, regulators have focused on "online harms" rather than variety (though the DSA does require platforms to offer algorithmic recommendations that are not based on your personal traits).
Leek identifies this willingness of states to set conditions for algorithm design as a means by which "exploration" can be forced back into the system. She's also bullish on interoperability, so that users can leave platforms with bad recommenders, without losing access to their media or social circles. As she writes, "the deepest discipline on a feed that has trapped you is the credible ability to leave it and take your data with you." I couldn't agree more:
She's less hopeful about individual responses. Demanding that you be an "adventurous consumer" is a way of letting systems off the hook. When every street has the same restaurants and every bookshop has the same books and the people in your life are all locked into one of two social media platforms, "choosing wisely" only gets you so far. Shopping isn't politics!
Leek is a superb writer. After reading this piece yesterday, I sent it to half a dozen people and then read everything else in Leek's newsletter archives. Not only is it all brilliant, but I also realized that she'd written one of the most memorable articles about cities and platforms I've read in the last year, "How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it":
I should have added Leek's newsletter to my RSS reader when I read that last December. I've rectified that oversight! What a fantastic thinker, scientist and communicator! If she isn't being relentlessly pestered by editors and literary agents offering her a book deal, then it really does prove that the recommender systems are elevating the bland median over the thoroughly, delightfully spiky outliers.
Highlighting a few especially key parts (bolding mine):
This is also a useful move for understanding the AI investment bubble. It's not just billionaires who don't think other people are as real as they are and consequently their jobs can be done by chatbots. It's also billionaires who believe that bosses can be sold AI and don't care if the AI is defective, because that's your boss's problem after he buys the AI and fires you.
[…] Leek's foundational point is that in a data-driven society, "predictions" are self-fulfilling prophecies. As Leek puts it: "Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want.”
[…] "Personalisation under a standard loss function is regression to the collective mean with extra steps." That is to say, "regression to the mean" (the tendency of varied things to become more standardized) cannot be avoided with the standard personalization algorithm. That algorithm is going to play it safe, showing you things that are broadly palatable, and because your choices are constrained to the average, you will choose average things.
Her research found that the biggest predictor of a pub surviving was its similarity to the median pub; which is to say that the more distinctive a pub was, the more "character" it had, the more likely it was to close. Pubs that are different from the average pub are harder to categorize, which means they're harder for a bank manager to assess for creditworthiness or for a landlord to justify extending a long-term lease to. The algorithms used to allocate capital and real estate are also recommenders, and they also drive variety out of the system.
This matters. As Leek writes, ecologists have long understood the importance of variety for systemic resilience: they call it "the insurance value of biodiversity." A diverse system has reservoirs of species and variation that may not be optimized for how things stand now, but that can move into niches created when things change in ways that lay waste to the previously dominant organisms.
“…billionaires who believe that bosses can be sold AI and don't care if the AI is defective, because that's your boss's problem after he buys the AI and fires you…”
↓
“…[sellers] who believe that [customers] can be sold [a product] and don’t care if [that product] is defective, because that’s [the customer’s] problem after he buys the [product]—”
fraud. you’ve literally just defined fraud.
a third of the economy is currently running on digitial snake oil peddled by billionaire tech quacks.
like. obviously everything else here is important. but tbh it all fades into the background compared to the scale of the blatant fraudulent scheme at the heart of it all.
How do I even start this post?? I can't spoiler alert the title.
I’m there my usual hour before the gate opens, but I go inside the restaurant to get some coffee while I wait. There was apparently some dinner and show combo thing, so a lot of the tables there had ”Reserved” signs on them. If you had the dinner service though, you’d miss the warmup act…
After finishing my coffee I went back outside to hover around the gate and soon a young-looking lady approached to ask if I was queuing.
(hovering includes peeking through the fence)
It was nice to have somebody to chat with at the front of the queue who was actually, like, more talkative and also not a rival. She recognized me from a couple of summers ago (when I still did the Viking costumes), and said that she'd only really been in the Facebook group for a year or so. Turns out that she knows Markus from the band because she was also in ornithology. So I guess he's the band's eastern Finland connection then. I told her about my quest and she was like "do you want me to message him about it" and I'm like if you want but I don't think it'll make a difference, I've bothered like half the band about this already and I'm probably 100% annoying by this point.
Sound check must have been super early because I'd missed it completely. The techs finish setting up and just my luck, the soundboard guy I talked to last time (his name is Ilkka, been ages since Senpai credited everyone from the stage so I had to look this up) happened to walk past, out the gate.
He saw me. "Mä muistan," he said. I remember.
Well that's one less thing I needed to do, since I intended to remind him anyway. But what did it mean he would do? I was like omg yes please ask please ask please ask
(More places should be so bold and take a stand)
The supporting band was Janne Suhonen & Surmanajajat and they were alright I guess? Reminded me of when Viikate was trying to sound (more) like Motörhead, tbh. So quite a different vibe.
The lady from the queue was up at the front with me, and had done up a big cloth banner ("Joensuu ♥ Vesterinen Yhtyeineen") that she wanted us to pull out for the last song. I can't tell if she's as crazy of a fan as I am (she goes to a lot of music gigs and has a whole side Insta just for those pictures) but I really do appreciate somebody else displaying this sort of youthful enthusiasm.
She was a little disappointed it didn't end up in the band's recap reel, but I explained that it's just really not their custom to spotlight fans (otherwise you'd think I'd have received a shoutout for my fan art by now). As a schoolteacher she probably has the experience to have a point suggesting that they could engage a younger audience if they acknowledged the ways people take part in fandom these days. Apparently iskelmä is becoming hip with the youth (again) (why not, it's fun music).
(what happened to Mikko's pink guitar??)
I previously said I'd take a selfie as a last resort sort of thing so I did. There weren't any groupies I recognized here (except merch guy, who, well, he's also there to work — AND!! I have been to more gigs than he has!!) so I did it myself
When the show was over, I immediately got moving to go to the sound booth as I said I would. But before I could even really move in that direction, I was ambushed by an old university acquaintance (who just ... knew where to find me, I wonder how /s). At the same time, Ilkka appeared as if from nowhere too. "Come with me." ("I have to go, this is really important," I told the other.) He whisked me past the barricade to where Senpai had just dodged behind one of the equipment trucks for a breather. I reflexively bowed with my hands together (maybe this is why sometimes people think I'm Thai, I have no idea where I got the habit from) and thanked him and handed my phone to one of the roadies and, well, here we are.
(friend says I look overwhelmed, I mean yes I was. It's not the perfect picture but it is like 99.9% given the circumstances.)
He needed to run off so that was all. I was backstage for literally at most one minute: consider the following timestamps. It's two and a half minutes between the moment they lined up to bow three times and leave the stage, the exit music to finish playing, and me getting that photo.
It happened so quickly that my brain barely registered it was happening. I'm not the kind of person who screams a lot but when I came back to this side and found my acquaintance again I definitely screamed a lot. (She kept telling her friends about my covers so I started singing a little bit and appear to have turned some nearby heads.)
(this is my barely-containing-my-screaming face)
Coda?
From the moment last summer when I decided to make this outfit, the singular thing that I absolutely wanted to get out of it more than anything else was a side by side photo. I knew it was going to be difficult, but I didn't think it'd be this hard. You have read here of all the tears I've shed praying, begging, shouting, and everything in between, cursing my luck and wondering if I'd spoiled all my chances at good will, for something that he himself would tell me he'd no objection to, and only lacking a way to practically arrange it.
But then you catch the right person's eye and you tell them and they maybe also sense your desperation, and know it is within their ability to do something about it...
I'm not retiring the outfit just yet, I'm just going to be more selective where I wear it to and use the budget version more often, and maybe even wrap it in different styles. I'll also have a new one for the fall (but not so special as to need to go through this all over again)
P.S. Still up for debate: which of my shades of purple is closer? (From the right angle and light either can be.)
Merch (table) update
I don't remember if I've mentioned that there's now a notebook where you can leave messages for the band. This can only be a good thing, so people don't have to feel so disappointed when they have something they want to tell them but can't actually get to speak to them. I wrote a suggestion about meet and greets but somebody remind me to write in about whether they could do a piano songbook.
(Merch guy caught me in the picture of the merch tent after I wrote in the notebook)
Now I have three bracelets, help
(But like I get it, offering a narrow version is a smart idea since wide bracelets don't look good on everybody. I'm not sure how often I'd actually wear it; it's currently on my shrine instead of in the accessories corner with the other two.)
Viimeinen
Två on kolme
Pitää sanoo ei
Antaisin kai mitä vaan
Kolme hyvää vinkkiä
Tummilla teillä
Nuoriherra
Paremman puutteessa
Kuinka lotto voitetaan
Rodeo
Kukaan ei koskaan
Muista hengittää (I'm really drawn to this type of very very minimalist song. Like, besides the middle "you've got 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' on your mind again" section which I have yet to learn, this is essentially a melody and a bass line.)
[You'll still be a part of me even if you don't want to be]
2026
Cold North Open 2026 commended, Diorama category
Taas sun täytyy mennä
Taas pihan portit kolahtaa
Jossain on maailma tulessa
Ilman sua ne on pulassa
...
Ei sun tarvii mulle mitään paljastaa
Edelleen mä yhteenkuulun sinuun vaikken tahtoiskaan
Ei sun tarvii kertoo mikset tullutkaan
Edelleen sä yhteenkuulut minuun vaikket tahtoiskaan
The model depicts the opening lines of the song Arlandan portailla but the inscription is from the chorus. Taken slightly out of context it has some personal significance to me about a fandom thing that's hard to articulate but regular readers here might have an inkling of what it might be.
I only started painting and building this in earnest on Friday the week before Ropecon (i.e. I made it in less than a week; there are so many mould lines and bad priming, -10000 points), though I've had the idea for over a year and was collecting materials and trying to solve the problem of attaching the diorama to the book without damaging it. It's not my personalized copy signed by everybody, but it's still signed by Tero so I treat it as a relic and I like to think that, in a way, my piece is therefore blessed with his energy.
This is more model railroad style construction (that is, very very self-aware that things are scratch built or off-the-shelf plastic tree) and obviously not on a technical level to get within 10 miles of a trophy; this place resembles a fine art competition and I stay firmly in folk art territory.
I'm pretty sure the commendation was for the concept more than anything. It's not a heroic or fantastical scene but a rather domestic and sentimental one and doesn't fit the mold of what you expect to see at Ropecon, and I don't expect most folks there to know the song or be really into this kind of music either.
(Both of these around mine got trophies. The card is printed on better paper than previous years, I guess there's that)
Commendations can be for anything (consider my not-even-an-entry last year) but trophies are for mastering the medium and form. Which isn't my goal so I don't feel bad about not getting one but I feel bad about still not having found the right arena to show my work in. Art is how I deal with big feelings so I'd rather somewhere I can hear about what feelings the works evoke in others and I can share background and context notes like this.
In the non-competition showcase I had also my so-called "self portrait with book" miniature with a tiny printout of the book cover as backdrop (and my name and a blurb on the display card, as ideally should always be with my work), and I kinda wonder how many people connected the dots between the two exhibits featuring the same book...
I also brought the Apostle of Fire, the elementalist/dancer, and asked my friend to let me show the red pandas I gifted him.
Extra notes and project details below.
Notes
How the stand works. A thin plastic sheet is tied to the book with a ribbon (and taped to the ribbon) and the diorama is attached to the top of the sheet. It still slides around but it's secure enough that the thing stays together when you just want to move it from one table to another. Then the book is fitted into the cutout on the stand and the background slides into the gap between the book and the supports on the back.
The picture of the house is NOT a watercolor, it's actually acrylics and then I went back over the pencil outlines with a softer pencil. I wanted to make sure it was the same palette as I used on all the figures. (I don't recommend doing this effect, it was a bad time because acrylics dry really fast and of course you can't re-wet them like watercolor.)
I realized after gluing the grass mat that I could attach the people with magnets so they can be removed for touchups, so I put magnets in the base and one foot but didn't *embed* them, and the metal figure (the man) was too heavy to stay upright. My primer job on him was bad anyway so he's glued to the base magnet (that is, if I'm going to repaint him then no need to worry about avoiding damaging the existing paint when I remove him) but the woman figure is resin and removable (and the varnish layer a bit delicate too). Hence the dirt is paler around them. It's maybe more realistic? a dirt path would be most worn down at the bottleneck, i.e. the gate
The figures are from Tabletop-Art (Nordic woman with baggage, chickens) and Dunkeldorf Miniatures (Wurt Kerter the Woodcutter). King Games throws in a freebie or two when you buy from them and I got the cow that way. (Think it's from the Warlord Games farm animals sprue).
The Zorn palette painting challenge showed me that a restricted palette helps me paint faster. I used mostly colors from the four John Blanche paint sets, so all the paints would behave in a consistent way than if I used colors from different brands and series.
It felt right to finally unwrap my brush set from the AvantGardeTools Kickstarter. They're the most expensive brushes I own and maybe too nice for the level I paint at but worked brilliantly on the figures (not a paid endorsement lol).
The inscription is actually also painted with the same brush. In olden days I'd have used a smaller one for the small lettering but the size 1 held its point and the paint so well. I sketched out the lettering in pencil first then went over it with paint. It's deep blue and gold to kinda match the book cover and foiling. There's only a couple of tiny spots that I had to clean up. Honestly the lettering was the easiest (and least messy) part of the whole thing.
To fill the space on the plate I used the band's monogram rune motif (as seen on their bracelets) and an adaptation of my own monogram mark to match the style (it's a challenging letter combo to do so with). Normally my miniatures are only initialed on the back of the rim (if they are at all) so if you don't know me (or my 2D work) you wouldn't know that's my mark.
If competition entries are to be shown with registration numbers only, then they should also commit to having folks cover their name if they've obviously signed or initialed it on the front, but that's just my take.
A couple more construction pics
More of the other entries, most of which got trophies (just saying)
#48 – 2026 Jul 10 – Eteläpuisto, Tampere (Ilta Eteläpuistossa)
at least teemu and tero have told me previously that it should be OK to arrange for a picture after a performance. but their bandmates won't take fan requests to them anymore (totally understandable, but i never got a response from their publicity manager either so who else are we supposed to ask) and i'm absolutely devastated (i tried to put on a 😄 face at the gig but i was 😭 inside)
and i know i've said that i'd be disappointed but try to put it behind me if i had a "no" in writing, but what i've got here is a blanket "no" to passing along requests, which isn't the same thing as saying that he won't have a picture with me
They really need to organize some meet and greets because everybody wants pictures with them and right now nobody can get pictures (unless you're super lucky, he apparently still makes the rare post-gig appearance at less populous venues, according to the friendly groupie couple from middle of nowhere). Like it'll just keep getting worse with fans pestering the band in emails and messages until they can provide a managed way to give us the selfies we want. They've done VIP meet and greets before, way way back I paid extra to attend one (and there was also the fan community meet and greet and charity auction), but they weren't yet superstars then.
Show notes
I arrived a couple of hours (or more?) before the gate opened and just kinda hung around by the lake shore. A security guy was sat in a lawn chair in the shade outside the ticket booth and would get up to direct bike and pedestrian traffic to go around the closed park. He came over to me so I showed him I had a ticket to the show and he was a bit like "well you're a bit early, at least the weather's good". He'd ride his little folding bicycle up and down the driveway to stretch his legs.
there were two ladies picnicking on the shore with their dogs and at one point they put Onnellinen mies on so I walked over and sang along a bit. they eventually left
the girl trying to read the barcode on my ticket couldn't get the reader to work and had to call a colleague over to try a different machine. (apparently she'd forgotten to toggle some switch.) I was going to sprint directly to the first row anyway and made up for the lost time, though there wasn't really much of a race (I have been so incredibly exhausted and sore from walking >10km a day for 7 straight days showing my folks around town I wasn't sure if my legs were going to carry me the hundred metres or so without cramping)
Amused that there was a live DJ spinning iskelmä tunes (by that I mean the sort of music they play on the Iskelmä radio station) while we waited. He was okay at his job, probably more hobbyist
a reporter from Aamulehti spoke to the two ladies on my right and took some pictures. The paper apparently published a little photo gallery online the next day but I'm sure I didn't make it into any pictures so I haven't bothered to pay for access to the article
the ladies to my left remembered me from the other shows in the area earlier in the spring
the friendly groupies were behind them
I had a surprisingly large amount of space to dance in, considering I was in the middle of the first row.
he was wearing the bracelet facing the other way (i.e. the same way as I do) so clearly some people don't think about this when they wear bracelets
possibly the only thing I like about a festival-like setting in a park like this is that you can dawdle and still buy drinks and food and aren't necessarily rustled out of the area immediately after the show. I mean, I still leave within a reasonable time but I can avoid feeling like I'm overstaying my welcome (like I often do because I am clingy like that).
RG was doing merch and I'd kinda wanted to go investigate the new wooden sauna meters and parking discs but she had been all like "i just work here i can't do you any favors" when I texted her about selfie grail quest earlier in the day so I was just not in the mood to talk. apparently the whole finnish thing about being able to get all sorts of things if you know the right people (and ask them nicely) works, except for when it doesn't
I missed a turn when i left the park so I ended up walking past the docks near Laukontori along with some other fans and there were a couple of guys sitting there who, coincidentally, also had Onnellinen mies on so I sang along with them too before moving on
I went to get something to eat after and found myself crying over my Hesburger AGAIN
Oh yeah this post needs some more pictures
Costume discussion
My outfit has morphed into a toga-like look what with all the drapery and I'm super satisfied with it. This trumpet-sleeved blouse is better for the warm weather than my other one. Having for the first time been able to compare the colors to his in proper daylight, I'm pleased that the stole I happened on at a thrift shop last week is an almost perfect color match. Though my original fabric color was a bit off, it looks good with the slight color shift vis-à-vis the stole. And so, disappointment aside, I can at least say that it's not altogether a bad thing that I don't already have my grail selfie.
One of the techs in the sound booth complimented my outfit colors (not sure if he saw the whole thing) when I hopped over after the show to nose around (and say hi to Mrs Teemu, I guess. she didn't converse with me (interesting person of last resort)). Naturally, I mentioned my quest to him and he seemed willing to ask about it, so my last-ditch effort (I guess) is to try to get a quick word in to him before the next show... provided I can get somebody to hold my spot in the first row and I can walk away to do that. And also again immediately after.
But like, I feel like I can't trust that anybody with anything to do with the band genuinely wants to help me out (regardless whether he is cool with having the picture with me), like are they just trying to make me go away, and that really sucks.
My last-resort option that I may have to settle for is having somebody take a picture of me during the performance so that Senpai and I are at least in the same photo. It's vastly less satisfying since there wouldn't be the side-by-side of the distinctive element of the outfit, i.e. the lower portion. I asked the friendly groupies if they'd help me out with this, but they like to go to these shows on last-minute tickets so they don't know if they'll be there the next time I am (presumably the last time I'll see him in the purple outfit until next summer).
Fan costumes at gigs are not unusual for acts that have distinctive costumes/aesthetic of their own. Think of black metal facepaint, or Käärijä fans in homemade neon green tops/boleros, and how people notice those. Considering I've not met anybody else as enamored with Senpai's outfit to do up a tribute, it's interesting that I haven't had more questions about it and continues to be somewhat disappointing. Is "dude in a skirt" too generic, I don't know.
Cosplayers love it when people recognize the creativity and time they put into their cosplays. Unlike other arts where one can argue that you can make things purely for your own enjoyment without showing it to others, I feel that the sharing is a more integral part of cosplay (and costuming/fashion design more generally) because wearing the work and looking at it on yourself in the mirror isn't the same as viewing it as a spectator, and an outfit is, more often than not, designed with a context in mind of a place or time you (or someone else) would wear it to.
This post is too long so the set list is under the cut
[Concert write-up archive and master calendar]
Viimeinen
Två on kolme
Ei se rakkaudesta mitään tiedä
Antaisin kai mitä vaan
Kolme hyvää vinkkiä
Tummilla teillä
Nuoriherra
Paremman puutteessa (they've changed the ending a bit)
Kuinka lotto voitetaan
Rodeo
Kukaan ei koskaan
Lee van Cleef (there's apparently been some wildcard old songs like this in the set lists this summer, clearly they're practicing for the 20-year anniversary gigs in August)
Reppana
Turisti
Pöllöille kyytiä
Kohti sydänpeltoja
// Hetken ikuinen
// Ei voittajaa
// Onnellinen mies
Fun bonus off-topic bit
There was some Italian festival thing on during the weekend and they had these hilarious inflatables
At the far end of the westbound platform at Ruoholahti metro station is this old schedule board. It was kept as a museum piece when digital screens were installed in 2012. The clock still works.
Here's a picture of yours truly on her first trip to Finland. I am a partly-skimmed milk person so I can't tell you why I have both that and a box of skim milk (maybe for my roommate?). You get a virtual gold star if you can pin down which K-Supermarket this is. The walls are rather different now but were still more or less like this until 2017 when the Kesko branding changed (according to Google Maps).
Anyway, turns out there's a weather headline on the Ilta-Sanomat poster on the door!
Hellelakkiaiset!
I was in Tampere during lakkiaiset and I do remember it being quite warm during the day, but maybe not helle. We'd missed the last train and the last bus back to [REDACTED] that evening so we spent the whole night wandering around downtown and sheltering in random corners in the Finlayson block until the railway station opened in the morning and then finally going to the bus station to get out of town. I remember the air being somewhat chilly overnight.
"Kun vain uskallat lakata pelkäämästä, paratiisin saat takaisin." —Marja Mattlar, "Lintu"
["If you just dare to stop being afraid, you will get paradise back"]
(the song is probably best known via the cover by Timo Rautiainen/Trio Niskalaukaus.)
At a specific gig in... 2022 I'd noticed several middle-aged women with song lyrics tattooed on their forearm and/or bracelets with some "live laugh love" type of affirmation. IMO turning 40 is kind of the start to middle-age, so I decided I'd combine the two. (My birthday was a little while ago but why not celebrate the whole year like countries or businesses do.)
Maybe it's surprising that it's not a Vesterinen lyric, considering, well, … me, and that I asked Paula Saunamäki, the same artist who makes their jewelry/accessories. She does a lot of music- (-obviously-) and bird-themed work, so it seemed like a good fit.
Besides the text, my main specs were the shape and that it should have a bird of paradise (long floofy tail). I may have had some design ideas of my own, but paying an artist for custom work isn't just about them making the item but allowing them to do their art thing. Or that's what I'd prefer if anybody commissioned me to paint something for them. (please ask me to paint stuff for you.)
I wouldn't have come up with the asymmetry (apparently being into symmetry is kinda autistic) but it works: In the song the line is spoken by a character who turns into a bird so it's like a speech bubble (the quotation marks are appropriate) and the text is exactly where it should be to be readable when I look at my arm.[1]
Another pleasant surprise in the design was the Norse style knotwork in the tail. I suspect she may have gotten the idea when we met last summer to discuss the project. I'm pretty sure I talked about my Viking costumes since I was wearing one 😅 Getting to know your customer a bit is probably helpful for coming up with a design that suits them 😃
___________
[1] In contrast, the Vesterinen bracelet is "upside down" from my perspective (in the photo at the top) so the rune is upright to somebody looking at me. I don't think there's a right or wrong orientation for a bracelet, but Tero wears it facing the other direction 🤷♀️
sometimes when i really need to ground myself i pick up my stupid little marker and my stupid little sketchbook and write down @dagenssvenska’s random posts
