1) Music: My current active projects include
game music and my revived DS project. An epic doom metal project has also been bubbling under for ages, and it still remains to be seen when I get that one worked further from everything else going on in my life. Instruments I play: keyboards, kantele, e. guitar, e. bass. Currently learning analog synths. Other activity: composing & arrangements, singing, writing lyrics, rudimentary level mixing and mastering. I also used to be a freelance journalist for one of the biggest Finnish metal medias (
impe.fi/) and I wrote album reviews between years '03-'17, my main genres for reviews were black, folk and viking metal in the earlier years and later doom metal + stoner rock. Additionally, in the past I've been a guest participant in some random songs for Ensiferum and Moonsorrow, to name a couple of more known bands out there.
2) Indie game development: As a gamer for life, some 5 or so years ago I finally got into making one of my childhood dreams come true and now in my adult years I started learning proper game coding. Ofc, back in the first half of the 90's I made some simple alternative-based text games with QBasic, but for some reason it took this long to possess proper tools, knowledge, motivation and vision to take it all further into building a real game at last. The game under development is an old-school narrative/text heavy adventure that playingwise reminds a bit of f.ex. Sierra classics from the 80's and early 90's and comes with plenty of sci-fi references, DOS era geek humour and absurd events. The game is built in Godot engine (
godotengine.org/) which is simply incredible; the native GDScript is based on Python thus easy to get into, the IDE is compact in size, lightweight and just perfect for minimal & classic style 2D games. My game world is divided into 20 main levels (and ~10-12 sublevels) and everything is already playable as far as the content goes. Just started working on the 11th level yesterday evening by the time of writing this.
Here's an in-game screenshot to give a bit of idea what on earth I'm working on:
3) PC stuff & gaming: We got our first computer in my childhood home back in '87. It was an IBM AT 286 with a CGA monitor, no mouse, just one 5,25" floppy drive and PC-DOS 3.0. After that we had a 386SX machine, followed by a 486DX2 and then came the Pentium era. Later on I've been on the team AMD all the way up to these days. Since my early teenage years I've built my own PC setups, and as a ray-tracing geek since '93 (POV-Ray ftw, still using it!
www.povray.org/) I've always aimed for the raw CPU power first and foremost depending on what my budget has happened to allow. My latest rig is already some 5-6 years old, rocking with a 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, 32GB RAM, and a Radeon RX 5700 XT which replaced the RX Vega 56 card that I originally had in this setup. Now when looking at the markets, it'd perhaps be time to upgrade again soon, but I'm not in a hurry, as this one's still working nicely. As already stated, I've always been an active gamer; classic adventures and point & clicks are my most beloved genre, then comes a varied bunch of pretty much everything: FPS games, side scrollers / platformers, isometric strategies and RPGs, dungeon crawlers, beat 'em ups, shoot 'em ups, kill 'em ups and don't kill 'em ups.
I'm a WoW veteran since the summer of '05 and still playing. From time to time having also nostalgy trips with many classics of the past: current games in replay are The Dig and Sam & Max Hit the Road by Lucasarts and, as I just recently finished Space Quest I-III, IV is naturally next in line. As for new games, I'm waiting for the
System Shock Remake that should finally come out in May this year. =)
4) Wing tsung kung fu: Been practicing martial arts basically my whole life ever since I was a kid. Now, a bit over 7 years of training so far in this system and absolutely loving it. Due to my background with other stuff, I've managed to advance and learn quickly, thus also been one of the help instructors in our group for the last 4 years or so. Graduated my 1st "technician grade" (our equivalent for black belts) in summer '22, and 2nd tech coming up in summer '24 if all goes well.
5) Birdwatching: Yes.
Just an amateur bird enthusiast though, not having any high-end equipment or deeper knowledge to f.ex. identify every single birdsong or special marks on feathers etc. But enjoying going around with my old binoculars and a comprehensive guide to birds of Europe, observing everything out there in the nature and check from the book what I just happened to see. Important to have some calming, relaxing and therapeutic activity in these troubled times.
6) Reading: Something I should do a lot more tbh. Got plenty of Discworlds in my bookshelf that I still haven't read. Further reading at hands consists of science (mainly cosmology, physics), arts (f.ex. composers of the renaissance era), animals (animal intelligence in particular) and linguistics (I've got master's degree in Finno-Ugric linguistics, University of Helsinki).
I'm a WoW veteran since the summer of '05 and still playing. From time to time having also nostalgy trips with many classics of the past: current games in replay are The Dig and Sam & Max Hit the Road by Lucasarts and, as I just recently finished Space Quest I-III, IV is naturally next in line. As for new games, I'm waiting for the 
Oct 13, 2023 23:33:12 GMT -5