End-of-year 2023

So it's been another year. I'll get the grim stuff out of the way first.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote about the way the Marin government simply decided to stop trying to suppress the pandemic, and overall deaths surged from 1 500 to almost 9 000. As I write this, the World Health Organization has us at about 11 000 cumulative Covid deaths. Earlier this year, we elected an extreme-right government with neo-Nazis and sexual predators among its ministers, so you can easily believe that we're still strongly invested in pretending there's no pandemic. Here's one estimate of how that's going.

I don't really know what to say, except to repeat that the necropolitics of the pandemic are unbelievably grim. Eleven thousand people have died, and the media and what at least feels like the majority of the population simply don't care.

But then some 20,000 civilians have been brutally murdered in Gaza over the last couple of months, and it's not just that people don't care, but in fact actively support massacring children. Our government certainly does.

In the face of all this, I've become a lot more active politically this year. I had a very memorable time marching against our travesty of a government this summer, and I've taken part in a bunch of protests against Israel's slaughter of civilians in Gaza. Here's a picture from one.

The problem is that I'm quite convinced that things will only get worse. The indifference to mass death that we've seen during the pandemic and the butchery in Gaza is one sign of that. Another is the rising popularity of fascism, whether it be the orange oligarch in the US or the almost ridiculous performative cruelty that is UK immigration policy, or indeed our own government.

At this point, I think it's impossibly naïve to believe that the resurgence of fascism has nothing to do with the deepening climate crisis. It's amply clear that the powers that be are not going to take any effective action to stop the planet overheating. The farce that was Cop28 was yet another nail in the coffin of the biosphere as we know it. What they seem to be preparing for is mass repression. Witness, for example, the ludicrously draconian anti-protest laws being enacted in the UK, or for that matter, the actions of the Helsinki police this independence day. I took the following snippet of video there, to give you an idea of what it was like.

I participated in the antifascist protest at Töölöntori, which was broken up by mounted police. As I said elsewhere, it's certainly an interesting experience for a military historian to be charged by a mounted formation, but it's not really one I'd have chosen to have at a totally peaceful antifascist demo. The cops certainly picked their side, and it's difficult to not think that in addition to trying to provoke and intimidate us, they were also practicing for future protests.

What strikes me more and more often these days are the parallels I see in our society today to ancien régime France, or the country my grandfather was born in, czarist Russia, we then being a grand duchy of theirs. In both societies, it was quite obvious to so many contemporaries that the system was badly broken, and the needs of the many were being thoroughly neglected in favor of the endless greed of the few. Faced with peaceful attempts to reform their societies, the rich and powerful in both countries absolutely refused to make the slightest concession. They would give up nothing, not one penny to anyone, but rather use violence to suppress anyone trying to change anything.

We all know how that worked out for them. Today's political elites are too busy worshipping billionaire oligarchs, imposing austerity on the poor and inciting ridiculous culture wars to protect the rich whose reckless overconsumption is literally destroying the planet. There are so many sensible things we could be doing to create a more ecologically sustainable, more just society. They'd rather send out the riot cops.

As a historian, I do not believe this will end well. Our societies are facing one of the most extreme tests ever endured by any organized groups of humanity, in the form of the planetary ecological crisis. We are comprehensively failing that test, and it's only going to keep getting uglier from here.

**

So, that's the heavy stuff. On to more frivolous things, because in the middle of all this, ordinary life also goes on. It has to, because if we're going to try to do something about the big problems, we need to get energy from somewhere. Rest and relaxation are political and part of activism. Indeed, one of the popular ways to try to discredit activists is to set impossible standards for anyone who claims to care about anything, and then call them a hypocrite. It's a purely cynical maneuvre to maintain the status quo, when the reality is that no-one is perfect, and the goal of activism is never to be a perfect individual, but to do what you can to make the world better.

Last year I blogged about abandoning my so-called academic career for good. None of the above has exactly made me feel worse about my decision; on the contrary, the decision by the University of Helsinki to summon the police to violently clear people protesting Israel's war crimes from its premises on 29.11. made me feel quite confident that I did the right thing. Our academia is divided into two parts: the people holding actual power are far too privileged and cosseted to care about anything, and everyone else is too busy being torn apart by the inhumanity of neoliberal academia to be able to do anything even if they wanted to. And let's face it, most of them don't want to. So I'm tremendously happy to leave that nonsense behind me.

Instead, I've been working on a video game: Goblin Camp. You can read our blog here, if you're interested. It's a follow-up to the shareware Goblin Camp I was involved in over a decade ago, and we're kinda excited about it. Do check it out! It's certainly been an experience diving into a totally different job, but I do get to use my professional skills. I've done historical research into things like wooden armor and farming, and I'm quite proud of the way our game takes inspiration from Finnic paganism. We'll see how it goes!

**

In even sillier hobby things, it's been a good year. I got to play a game of Warhammer 40,000, where I got my ass kicked by space wizards. I tried Battletech, and we played two whole games of Twilight Imperium, one of which I actually won! I made a golden Knight, and started collecting little ships. We've also played a lot of Darktide.

I'm very grateful I got into the miniature hobby again years ago, because frankly, it's really helped my sanity. Having something immersive I can do with my hands is such a wonderful experience when everything I do for a living involves thinking, writing and talking.

I'm running a tabletop campaign again as well! Our Rogue Trader campaign has been on hiatus for a while, what with the pandemic and everything, so I was persuaded to start a Dark Heresy campaign set in the same fictional universe. I'm trying to run a more focused campaign than my earlier sandbox efforts: this is a far more plot-oriented mystery-solving campaign with a definite structure and end point. Once it's done, I hope we'll be able to resurrect the Rogue Trader campaign and actually finish it. I've really enjoyed the Dark Heresy, we have excellent players and it's just been so much fun.

Speaking of finishing things, way back in 2019 I made a sort of new year's resolution to actually try to finish hobby projects before starting new ones. It's been going  variably, but I feel like I am actually getting better at thinking about my hobby activities in manageable chunks, and at least trying to finish more chunks than I start. I'm buying much less stuff, and actually, fuck it, it's time to extend my resolution.

In 2024, I will not buy any more miniatures.

I was going to come up with all kinds of exceptions to this, but I'm just not going to. No new minis in 2024, and that's the end of it. I will use next year to make a dent in my gigantic pile of undercoated miniatures.

**

So there! Happy New Year, everybody.

Farewell to my so-called academic career

You could never consult Archival Records in a straightforward manner. Much of the interpretation which emerged from that source had to be accepted on the word of the ones who brought it or (hateful!) you had to rely on the mechanical search by the holosystem. This, in turn, required a dependency on those who maintained the system. It gave functionaries more power than Taraza cared to delegate.

 - Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

It's now been four years since I quit my PhD, and this September, I returned the pile of infantry regulations I had on loan from the National Defence College library, which I guess marks the ultimate end of my "academic career". I wrote a little bit about this back when it happened, but now that it's been some time, I want to take a broader view of what's happened.

**

The subject of my PhD was the development of Finnish military doctrine as a process of nation-building. Very briefly, in the first two decades of independence, a lot of the things the Finnish military did had a lot more to do with building a very particularly racialized and gendered kind of Finnishness than with national defense. I started understanding this when I did my master's thesis on Finnish armor, and took a preliminary stab at this with a peer-reviewed article I wrote on the jäger way of war.

I worked as a freelancer in defence journalism for a decade or so, so I knew a thing or two about the national defence scene in this country. Our history, and especially our military history, are still captive to a very nationalist, triumphalist Story of the Nation, where heroic Finland overcomes huge odds and difficulties to become the greatest country in the world. The military history of the early years of the republic is invariably written from the viewpoint of the 1939-40 Winter War, which is still framed as a literally miraculous victory over the dastardly Stalin's Asiatic hordes.

So I knew going in that anything that challenges these views is going to have a hard time. That difficulty is compounded by the fact that military history in this country is largely monopolized by the military, in the form of the "cadet school", i.e. the National Defence College. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, it's classed as a university, even though the master's degree theses they produce in history would barely make the grade as bachelor's theses in most actual universities. The academic publications the cadet school produces aren't much better; they almost exclusively refer to research produced inside their own institution, with a smattering of random international non-fiction works thrown in.

The military took exception to my research efforts surprisingly early. Way back in 2014, a seminar paper of mine was published in a collection of undergraduate gender studies papers. I wrote about how recent military publications on conscription talk about gender. This led to a faculty member at the defence college looking me up on Twitter, belittling me and berating me for writing "unscientifically". This was absolutely not true, but also a remarkable intervention for an undergrad student to experience. I still don't think I wrote anything particularly incendiary, but I was still sought out by a senior serving officer and abused for it.

That was the most direct military intervention into my academic career, if you will, but certainly not the last one. While I was working on my PhD, I also qualified as a history teacher, specializing in adult education. That led to me teaching some lecture courses at several adult education centers.

One of the first courses I taught was a history of the Jäger movement. Military history is pretty popular around here, and it was packed. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive - except for a couple of people, one of whom called me a communist. At least one of them started reporting on my lectures to a military heritage foundation, whose head (a retired general officer) then got in touch with my superiors at the institute.

It was a very silly game of broken telephone, where whoever was reporting on me was exaggerating what I said, and in some instances straight up lying, and the aforementioned retired general then put his own gloss on things. It would almost have been funny, if the foundation hadn't directly demanded that I no longer be allowed to teach. I'm happy to say they were not successful.

Like I said, I've worked in defence journalism in this country, and I know what these people are like. It was very unpleasant to have to defend myself against malicious lies, but on the other hand, I couldn't help feeling that these extremely hostile reactions meant that I was doing something worthwhile. I was also quite cheered by the fact that so many ordinary, non-academic people responded so positively to my teaching. What I didn't expect was that I would also encounter this sanctimonious military patriotism in civilian academia.

**

During the editing process of one of my publications, I was directly told that I shouldn't criticize deficiencies in published research by military officers, because it would be very bad for my career. I was also heavily pressured to remove references to published university-level research that was uncomfortable for the army. I had made what I thought were fairly uncontroversial references to research published in the previous century, and I was treated like I was trying to sneak Erich von Däniken into my footnotes.

Eventually I complained about this, and this person - a fairly influential academic in my field - exploded at me. They angrily denied saying any of the things that they said in the emails they sent me, and were very insulted that I had the nerve to make these kinds of accusations when they were only trying to help me. The editing process was eventually completed, but there were times during it when I thought I was losing my mind. I had physical stress symptoms like I'd never experienced before.

I feel it's fair to say that by this point, I was feeling fairly heavy pressure to conform to the military-patriotic line in my research. The trouble was that I had almost no resources to fight back with. Quite frankly, no-one at my university cared about anything I did. These things were happening in some of my first ever teaching experiences, and my first encounters with academic publishing, and I didn't really have anyone who could help me with them. Apart from some advice from my academic friends, I had to figure everything out myself, and it really multiplied the stress.

Like I think most PhD students in Finland, officially I had two supervisors. I never even met one of them. I've also heard people tall about a "university community" or a community of researchers. If there is such a thing, I certainly never encountered it. I haf great trouble figuring out even the most elementary parts of things like funding applications, because there were times when I couldn't get any answers to my questions.

During my time as a postgraduate at the University of Helsinki, I did not once feel that anyone there even remotely cared about anything I did, or indeed whether I was even doing anything or not.

**

An article in the Finnish journal of adult education divided PhD researchers into four groups. Studying PhD researchers' accounts of their academic careers, they saw these defined by personal and systemic conditions. Personal conditions were things like age and gender, but also research subject, skills and abilities, and so on. Systemic conditions include funding, supervision and "networking".

Those researchers for whom personal and systemic conditions apply are labelled "golden boys and girls", and are highly likely to succeed. I strongly appreciate the authors' remark that when the "golden boys" talked about their careers, there was often at least one, if not several, key points where an academia gatekeeper had given them an opportunity, and they were very reluctant to talk about how it happened. Gatekeeping in academia is very real and very significant, but people who pass the gates don't want to admit it, and those of us who are shut out are dismissed as embittered.

The article identifies three other groups. Those who get systemic support but experience adverse personal conditions are labelled the imposter syndrome sufferers, and those whose personal and systemic conditions are adverse are called the downbeaten. Excluded from support and funding, with severe doubts as to their abilities and a very reasonable skepticism of their chances of success, the downbeaten tend to quit.

I strongly identified with the fourth group: the phantom researchers. In terms of personal conditions, I was fine: as a white cis dude, I'm undoubtedly privileged, and I was quite confident in my abilities. I also think my skills were not entirely lacking. However, I had next to no systemic support. I couldn't secure funding and doors were very determinedly shut in my face. I saw people who had started after me getting opportunities I never had. There were events directly connected to my specialization, where researchers younger than me were invited to participate, and I heard about them afterwards. Apart from the personal support of some of my peers, for which I remain grateful, I was basically left to figure everything out for myself. It's impossible to "network" when you don't have any opportunities to do it. Even though I managed to produce several peer-reviewed articles in this situation, nothing changed. The gatekeepers kept the gates shut.

According to the article, this kind of thing leads to a feeling of being taken advantage of, and eventually bitterness. I'll say.

This is especially compounded by the fact that, as I've said before, the whole gatekeeping process is totally opaque. I certainly never even got the slightest hint as to why none of my funding or work applications were succesful, and I have no idea why the ones that succeeded did so. Rather unsurprisingly, I've found that people who succeed in this system think it works, and those of us who don't have the opposite view.

I raised this question of the opacity of funding for early-career researchers on social media once. I was directly told by a somewhat famous academic to shut up and stop being so bitter that I didn't get funded.

**

So, to recap. I tried to do a PhD on military history. The Finnish army and some of its associated organizations were openly hostile. No-one at my university cared about anything I did, and I was shut out of any opportunities to demonstrate my abilities.

What I expected from academia was a place where I could do work that was meaningful, and where my career prospects would largely depend on the quality of that work. What I found was a system where, unless you know the right people and they're willing to open the right doors for you, it simply doesn't matter what you do, because no-one gives a shit.

I'm sure that many of the people doing research and teaching at universities in this country are as good or better at it than I would have been. What I know for a fact is that that has never actually been determined in any way.

So yeah, you're damn right I'm bitter. It's a terrible system. My time as a PhD student at the University of Helsinki was some of the worst of my entire life. I would rather go back to prison than start a PhD again.

I am deeply grateful that I've since had opportunities to work for employers, both public and private, who actually care about the quality of my work. Right now, I have the great privilege of being employed on a project that's genuinely exciting and delightfully distant from the absolute bullshit that was academia. Whatever happens with that, wherever I end up, at least I know that one chapter in my life is closed for good.

Pandemic diary: March 2022

This is the two-year anniversary of my first ever pandemic diary, and here we are in the third year of Covid. Last fall, Finland more or less decided to abandon our very successful covid strategy, and our government decided that it's time to "live again". There's a good summary of events here. Last time I wrote about this was December, when cases and hospitalizations were rising so fast that there was serious talk of a new lockdown, which mostly came to nothing.

It did affect us in adult education, though, as we were abruptly ordered to change everything in January to online teaching. Our heresy lectures, which would have included my Tolkien lecture, went with that weird pseudo-lockdown; we're now trying them again in October. Who knows what anything will be like then.

Since, though, we've returned to pretending there isn't a pandemic. You can see the results in the graphs below, which are from our government broadcaster. Hospitalization figures are, shall we say, alarming.

And deaths even more so.

I direct your attention to the fact that on New Year, some 1 500 people had died of Covid in Finland. On Friday 25.3. the official count was 2 985, and at this rate we may already have hit 3 000 by the time this post publishes. Sure, that's nowhere near Sweden and their 18 000 deaths; Finland has roughly half the population of Sweden, so we would still have to triple our death toll to get anywhere near out neighbors. But it's pretty sobering to think that half of Finland's Covid deaths have come in just three months in 2022. All because this fall, we decided that containing the pandemic is just too boring and unprofitable for our restaurant industry.

Judging from what I'm seeing on my Instagram, case numbers are only going to go up. It's just bizarre that we're back in a situation where nobody in authority seems to know what to do or want to do anything, and we're all out here trying to work out what kind of risks to take on our own.

End-of-year 2021

Here we are, then: year 2 of the pandemic is drawing to a close, and we're looking at a third year of masks, restrictions and deaths.

I did my previous pandemic diary in August, when it looked like we were experiencing a fourth wave. Since then, we certainly have been: we've hit records for daily infections and hospitalizations, and the pandemic isn't even nearly over. The omicron variant is spreading like wildfire and we're looking at possible lockdowns again.

This is what I wrote in February.

Right now, I'm afraid we're going to be presenting Act 2 of this fallacy: to spare our hospitality industry some short-term loss, we've abandoned suppressing the pandemic - which means the long-term losses are going to be much greater than they would otherwise have been. In money and in lives.

So far, Finnish pandemic policy has been a weird ride. First we were very slow to take any of this at all seriously; we even had officials telling us that Finland won't be affected at all. We were very late to recommend facemasks or anything like that. Then our government did take action, and as a result of that, the total deaths and economic damage are still of a different order of magnitude than, say, Sweden. But now it looks like our social democrat-led government has decided that the hospitality business is more important than national health, and we'll all be paying for it.

We're also making a fairly big bet on the vaccination program being a success. If it isn't, we may still be dealing with this pandemic next year.

I think at this point it's safe to say we're heading into the third year of the pandemic, not least because the vaccination program hasn't worked out the way people were hoping. In our case, there are two failures. First, obviously, is the potentially disastrous parochialism and greed that left the pandemic running wild in poorer countries, which is going to keep birthing new wonderful variants for as long as we have Greek letters left.

The second failure is a national one. Our government had decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that an 80% vaccine uptake would be enough to reopen society. The trouble with this is that 20% of our population is still over a million people. It very much seems to me that this was exacerbated by overoptimistic messaging that once everyone gets vaccinated, everything will go back to normal. We even loosened mask mandates and other restrictions before actually hitting the 80% mark, and have been inexplicably reluctant to reimpose them. This fall, infection and hospitalization graphs can look like anything, and apparently we still can't interfere with the sacred right of the restaurant business to host karaoke nights.

I didn't expect a crisis would play out with a government first taking strong and decisive action, and then seem to completely lose the plot as the situation continues.

At this point I'm wondering how many more years we can stretch this out to if we keep failing to actually eradicate the virus. Even if we end up taking stronger measures next year, in the summer case numbers will fall, everyone will once again decide the pandemic is over and we'll start reopening everything. And then everyone acts shocked when it's October 2022 and case numbers are rising.

I want to be wrong about this.

**

Luckily, there are other things in life. Obviously the pandemic continues to prevent us from boardgaming as we'd like to, and Here I Stand by email continues; we've been in the fifth turn since May!

In matters Warhammer, last year I talked about my ongoing efforts to finish projects, and I have indeed finished some! I painted my machine cultists, and a Mechanicus Knight to go with them; a bunch of Deathwatch and tanks I had lying around; and my Necrons. The number of unpainted miniatures lying around on my desk, and unopened boxes on top of my bookshelf, is trending downward. Most importantly, finishing things has been very satisfying.

Luckily, I'm feeling quite alienated from a lot of the new GW products. I think the new orks/orcs are mostly terrible; they've ditched the iconic GW orc look and replaced it with something that just looks like an uninspired knockoff of the deeply silly Peter Jackson fantasy movies. The new Kill Team Sisters and Tau somehow manage to make both factions look bad. The trend of putting characters on higher and more complicated bases is incredibly silly.

I could go on, but suffice to say that there's a lot in the current GW aesthetic I just don't like, coupled with the fact that they're doing more and more effectively monopose plastics. I've also become thoroughly disenchanted with the way so much of what they do is now built around new box mania, where everybody in the social media community goes completely bananas over whatever the latest big box is, queues up in the online store to preorder it - and then you never see a single model out of that box ever again after the unboxing video.

On a more positive note, my three regular readers will have noticed that in October, this blog transformed into a Blood Bowl blog, and I'm not even a little bit sorry. On the contrary, I'm delighted that we got so many people to either try Blood Bowl for the first time or get back into it. Next year, we'll try to have a proper yearlong league! I was also very happy that so many people wanted to play, because it gave me a reason to finish painting several teams I had started or at least primed.

I'm not going to stop buying miniatures; collecting them is my hobby. But I am trying to narrow down the amount of projects I'm working on, and concentrate on the ones that make me happy and the ones that are actually likely to hit the tabletop. I'll be showing several of both off next year, I hope. I'm going to try practicing a sort of project management from now on, where I not only have a limited amount of projects I'm working on, but I'm also not buying anything new for a project until I've finished what I'm working on now.

Last summer, I started work on a truly long-term project: my model railroad layout. I hope to be able to provide some updates next year.

And speaking of projects, I did finish my Let's Read series on the Lord of the Rings. I still can't quite believe it's done. It was fun enough, though, that I did decide to continue it. Stay tuned!

**

In personal matters, I have to say I'm damn tired of this pandemic. I've been quite depressed and lonely, made worse by a frankly strange episode this fall when several of my friends cut me out of their lives altogether. On the other hand, I've been quite lucky to have at least some work teaching history to business school applicants. Last spring, we taught remotely, and quite frankly I hate it. Alas, with the pandemic continuing into next year, it looks like we'll be remote next spring as well. It's exhausting and frustrating, but better than nothing.

The trouble is that teaching is a terrible profession to be in right now. As I've said before, the notion regularly peddled in the English-speaking world that teachers are valued and well-paid in Finland is a total lie. For many of us, our job prospects are terrible. As the rural population shrinks, so does the school network, which means that for most subject teacher positions, there are dozens of applicants, many of whom have years if not decades of experience. I haven't even made it as far as a job interview for a single public sector position I've applied for, and I'm not sure if I ever will.

So a priority for next year is figuring out what to do for a living. This is really kind of annoying, since I like teaching history and according to the feedback I get, I'm good at it. Unfortunately, our public school system doesn't care if we're good at our job, it only cares about years of experience accumulated. It's not exactly fun to discover that no-one cares if you're any good at being a PhD student or not, and then go into teaching and find out that no-one there cares either. You start to wonder what the point is.

To end this part on a positive note, though, at least I've been able to find some work. Last summer, I even spent two months working full-time as a sort-of project manager, putting together material for polytechnic prep courses. This coming spring, pandemic situation permitting, I'll be giving two lectures as part of a series on the history of heresy; one of them is on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. Later on, I'm very much looking forward to delivering several lectures on environmental destruction and history with my colleague. We're in the middle of a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis, and we're trying to do our part to fight them. So there's lots to look forward to as well.

**

So, once again, I hope the two or three people who read this blog are well, and that everyone has a lovely holiday season. One day the pandemic will end.

Pandemic diary: August

Last time I did one of these was in April, when we were coming down off the totally unnecessary March peak. We've since been suffering through an absolutely tortuous summer, with new heat records and everything, and also the second summer in a row where we pretend the pandemic is over.

At least we're learning something about stuff that went on earlier in the pandemic. There was a really good Twitter thread on masks that I thought really nailed some of the initial confusion on them. We also had so-called experts in this country suggesting that mask mandates could even be dangerous, and the thread I linked goes into this failure of thinking very well.

The Finnish Safety Investigation Authority found that the mixed messaging on masks confused people and delayed the adoption of facemasks, which you can argue led to people dying. It's really worth remembering how much of a shitshow our pandemic response was at times; the mask confusion was preceded by some of our chief health officials telling us the pandemic wouldn't affect us at all, which then led to people flipping out and buying all the toilet paper when they realized the truth.

**

Speaking of shitshows, here's the pandemic situation from last Friday.

On July 20th, our health authority guys figured that this is effectively a fourth wave, so, y'know, yay. As you can see, we were well on our way to actually suppressing the damn disease - until some of our countrymen decided that they absolutely have to travel to Russia to see the Finnish men's football team play. You know, Russia, where the delta variant was running totally out of control at the time because they were taking basically no safety measures.

Once these idiots had seen their football game, the Kymenlaakso health authority decided it would be too much of a hassle to actually test all of them when they returned to the country, so they just let them all in. No testing, no quarantines, nothing at all. For some reason we have refused to implement any kind of quarantine measures for people traveling abroad, and now we're facing the consequences.

As a result of these, shall we say, decisions, we are now experiencing a fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic. As cases exploded, the authorities banned most cultural and hobby activities, but, of course, the bars stayed open. Right now, it looks like the wave may have peaked, but schools have barely started, and hospitalizations (blue line below) are ticking upward.

What this amounts to is a colossal human experiment: if we let thousands of young people catch the virus, how long will the epidemic continue, and what will the long-term effect be? It's salutary to remember that we still don't know a whole lot about long Covid in young people. Well, we're going to. Also, I guess if you can't get the vaccine, or are at high risk even if vaccinated, then the current policy is apparently that it sucks to be you.

**

As far as I know, adult education will be resuming with masks and distancing, like we did last fall until the situation got way too bad, so we'll be trying to finally deliver our heavy metal lectures this September. We'll see what happens. Personally, I'm quite concerned; it's not just that we have a lot of people acting like the pandemic is over, but also the authorities are asleep at the wheel, or have decided that we're just going to let this go and hope that the vaccines are enough to keep everyone safe.

I'm very much afraid this won't be my last pandemic diary.

Pandemic diary: April

So here we are, over a year from my first covid diary. Just a couple of days after my previous post on the subject, the government announced we would be going into a sort-of-lockdown for most of March, and a week later, the municipal elections were postponed until June. The government then wanted to introduce draconian restrictions on movement, including a curfew for some of the worst-affected areas, but their proposed measures were struck down as unconstitutional and pulled. Luckily, toward the end of March cases started receding, and suddenly, barely over a week since the curfew failed to pass, we started talking about opening everything up again. It's enough to give you whiplash.

As you can see from the graph of confirmed infections, we've brought cases down to approximately where they were before we started opening up again in January. Restaurants and suchlike are now opening again. I think you see where this may well be going.

What's getting lost is that there was no reason for either the December or March-April spikes to happen at all. The only reason they did was, frankly, short-sightedness and stupidity, and of course greed. People died for it.

**

I've mentioned this before, but what I find quite personally hurtful is that I know people who are ostensibly liberal, maintain they support free speech and deliberative democracy - and also believe I shouldn't be writing any of this, because they're on social media sharing messages that say "unless you're a fully accredited academic expert, shut up". I absolutely agree that the vapid opportunism of the right-wing opposition is shameful and stupid, but at the point where even supposedly progressive people are lumping everyone critical of the government with far-right covid deniers, well, I guess authoritarian technocracy doesn't look so bad to you after all, does it?

We transitioned from this directly to the discourse on the postponed elections, which immediately became more of the same. The extreme right tried to spin moving the elections into some kind of communist plot against democracy, which was ridiculous. Quite a lot of people across the political spectrum, however, were very unhappy with how the move was handled, and the apparently total lack of preparation by the responsible state agencies. This then got the government loyalists to declare that these two criticisms are exactly the same: if you think the state hasn't done everything perfectly, you're a far-right extremist. It's really been something.

So yeah, we're certainly learning a lot about our fellow citizens during this pandemic, and so much of it is so much worse than I would have ever expected. I ended up taking a bit of a break from Twitter because of this bullshit, and I feel much better for it. I understand that people are tired and stressed out, because I am too, but some of this behavior has still been absolutely appalling.

**

Anyway I don't have much to say; as I predicted, I'm pretty sure I'll be teaching remotely for the rest of the semester, and I really dislike it. Not being able to see or properly interact with people makes teaching incredibly difficult, and at worst reduces it to a filmed monologue. That's not what I do or want to do. However, the way the employment situation for teachers is, it looks like teaching, whether remotely or in-person, isn't going to be my problem for much longer. There are next to no job openings, and when there are, they're inundated with dozens of applicants. I keep applying for everything I can, and have yet to land a single interview. In several cases, there have been 20-50 people applying for a temporary position of one year, only for the school to give the job to the same person who had it the previous year. So it's hard to see the point of applying at all. The logic seems to be the old classic: you can't get a job because you have no experience, therefore you can't get any experience. I have nothing except a couple of lecture courses to look forward to next fall.

The unavoidable logic seems to be that I need to find another profession. Again. What makes this particularly frustrating is that I keep getting excellent feedback on my teaching. Unfortunately, as in academia, so in teaching it doesn't matter one bit whether or not you're good at your job. I would dearly like to find something where it does matter, but I have no real idea what that could be. Quite frankly, this is all incredibly depressing.

Pandemic diary: February

It's almost been a year now since the pandemic started; my first diary post was last March. The previous one was my end-of-year post, where I talked briefly about the moaning from our event industry. Sadly, a far bigger problem is the restaurant and tourism businesses, who have actually succeeded in lobbying government so hard that despite infections constantly going up and the UK variant of the coronavirus now spreading in Finland, bars and restaurants are open, and there are no effective border controls in terms of testing or quarantine. The result is that cases have barely receded from the Yuletide peak, and are going up again.

It's been demonstrated over and over again that the choice between suppressing the pandemic and protecting the economy was a false one; the countries with the most deaths also took the biggest economic hit, and quite frankly, you do need to have a very strange notion of what the economy is to be very surprised by that. All our economies run on private consumption, after all, and we're not very likely to consume much if it comes with a significant chance of catching a pandemic disease. Right now, I'm afraid we're going to be presenting Act 2 of this fallacy: to spare our hospitality industry some short-term loss, we've abandoned suppressing the pandemic - which means the long-term losses are going to be much greater than they would otherwise have been. In money and in lives.

So far, Finnish pandemic policy has been a weird ride. First we were very slow to take any of this at all seriously; we even had officials telling us that Finland won't be affected at all. We were very late to recommend facemasks or anything like that. Then our government did take action, and as a result of that, the total deaths and economic damage are still of a different order of magnitude than, say, Sweden. But now it looks like our social democrat-led government has decided that the hospitality business is more important than national health, and we'll all be paying for it.

We're also making a fairly big bet on the vaccination program being a success. If it isn't, we may still be dealing with this pandemic next year.

In personal terms, I've already had one lecture course cancelled, and have started teaching business school prep online. The way things look right now, I feel like the only reasonable course of action is to assume that we're not going to be able to teach live all spring. Which absolutely sucks, but here we are. The worst-case scenario in terms of my work is that we're going to stay remote all spring, spend another summer pretending the pandemic went away, and lock down again in the fall. Quite apart from my working life, I would also really, really like to have a social life again, thank you very much, but at this rate that'll be something to look forward to in 2022 - or later.

To finish on an upbeat note, though, at least we've had a proper winter for once! We've had actual snow for well over a month now, with surprising amounts of sunshine. It's been a real joy, especially after the previous winter, which literally felt like five consecutive Novembers.

Stay safe, everyone.

End-of-year: 2020

It feels so weird to think that last December, when I wrote my previous year-end blog post, nobody had any notion of a pandemic, and I just complained about Warhammer. In March, the coronavirus really started to hit, and my teaching for the rest of the spring was cancelled. We eventually got the virus sort of under control, and I was able to do some teaching (with appropriate precautions), until we got into the second wave and I was back distance-teaching over Zoom again.

I did a couple of pandemic diary entries on this blag, but I couldn't be bothered to write one for September, and then decided I might as well do the November one here. There really hasn't been that much to tell, to be honest. We've mostly been keeping to ourselves; our entire social and board-gaming life is on hold, we wear our masks, and are incredulous at the constant bullshit some people keep coming up with to complain about the restrictions. We're very lucky and privileged to be able to live this normally, but I can't wait for this shit to be over.

One of the most striking things that's happened throughout has been far too many people showing their true colors, so to speak. People on the social media have just come up with the most ridiculous nonsense, from sharing whiny posts by superrich promoters angry they can't make even more money to, sadly, totally irresponsible corona trutherism. The end of the year is sort of crystallized for me in a moment from November, when cases were going up dramatically and new restrictions were coming into force. I was having two simultaneous but separate conversations on a messaging app. One was with a person who was very irate that bars were being closed and gigs were being cancelled. The other was with a friend who hadn't been able to spend time with their dying father because of the pandemic. He sadly passed away while the visiting restrictions at the hospital were necessarily draconian, so his family could only be there for brief moments.

I really cannot bring myself to shed any tears for the nightclub owners. You read some of the stuff our event industry puts out, you'd think that the pandemic was something the government invented to make their lives miserable. The selfishness is astounding.

But even more than that, it has at times been unfortunately enlightening to see who can deal like an adult with having to tenporarily restrict your behavior to protect other people. Like I've said before, we are a nation with a permanent hardon for "exceptional circumstances": our nationalism is thoroughly militaristic and dominated by fantasies of past and future wars. And then when people brought up in this culture suffused with imagining collective hardship actually encounter a real-life situation that calls for the virtues that we, as a people, supposedly cultivate, they panic-buy all the toilet paper and peanut butter, and throw a tantrum when someone asks them to wear a simple facemask.

Turns out a pandemic is a hell of a mirror.

**

On to more frivolous things. I already complained about Warhammer last year, but it's only gotten worse since. I talked about Chaos Marines then, but I think it's the loyalists who really underline how absurd 40k is right now.

The first Space Marine codex for 8th edition came out in July 2017. Fairly shortly, they came out with codexes for the Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves and so on as well, which referred back to the vanilla Marine codex. The campaign book Vigilus Defiant came out at the end of 2018, and it had specialist detachment and other rules for Marines. At least some of these rules were then incorporated in the second eighth edition Marine codex, which came out in August 2019. It was shortly followed by the Psychic Awakening book Faith and Fury, which revamped rules for Marine Chaplains and came with a bunch of other stuff as well, and the previous single Chapter codexes were replaced with a line of Codex supplements. Until, of course, 9th edition came along, and the very first codex to be announced was Codex: Space Marines, coming out in 2020.

So from 2017 to 2020, i.e. four years, there have been three Space Marine codexes, two sets of supplementary codexes, and two campaign books with Space Marine rules. This is completely ridiculous. I'm a collector more than a player anyway; the only reason I'm really interested in the rules is because I like the units I build to make at least a little bit of sense. But frankly, at this point the investment required to keep up with the constantly changing rules is way too big. So I'm sticking with eighth edition for the time being.

**

Obviously the pandemic put a stop to all our boardgaming activities; when the best way to catch the virus is in confined spaces with lots of talking, gaming is definitely out. So instead we've been playing Here I Stand by email; we started in March, and the game is currently in its third turn (!). Frankly, at this point we can hope that the pandemic will end before the game does, and we can finish it live! However, with next to no social contacts in real life, the email game has been a blessing, and I think I like play-by-email enough to want to do more of it. I'm very grateful to everyone who's participated.

I also managed to play a game of Blood Bowl, and with our Turboleague rules, that's enough for a season! So for the first time since 2012, we have a Turboleague champion. I'm hoping I can keep playing at least one game of Blood Bowl every year - and maybe even win the league one of these days!

**

Finally in hobby matters, I want to return to the sort-of New Year's resolution I made last year, to finish modelling projects before starting new ones. I feel like it's been working for me. Hell, I even managed to finish the project that got this whole Warhammer-and-whatnot spree started in the first place. I also made some Renegades and Heretics infantry and tanks, a whole detachment of Adeptus Custodes, and decided to not collect a Sisters of Battle army. It's felt really good. I've still got quite a few unfinished projects lying around, and in pursuit of this notion of finishing things, I've decided to make an additional resolution: in 2021, I'm not buying any new models unless they're part of a project that I already started. So I'm going to stay on the lookout for new figures for my Blood Bowl stands, for instance, but I'm really going to focus on getting stuff done.

Since my several jobs are all academic and mostly social, I've been very grateful to have a hobby where I can work with my hands. It' very therapeutical to concentrate on building or painting something physical and tactile. Next year, I hope to get started on building a proper-sized game board and terrain, just in case we ever actually get to play something again.

I'm also very pleased to say that we managed all of a single session of Cyberpunk 2020 this year! Our Rogue Trader campaign is still ongoing, but because it was 2020 we thought we'd roll up a couple of characters just for the fun of it. We played one ex tempore session before the pandemic. I really can't wait for things to get back to something lile normal again.

**

So that was the hobby and pandemic year of 2020. In personal terms, it's now been two years since I quit my PhD. I'm still angry and bitter about the conditions that led to my decision, but I couldn't be happier that I made it. Sure, any kind of financial security or even quasi-semi-permanent employment is nowhere to be found, but at least I now have several years of actual teaching experience that I've gotten paid for, and quite frankly, based on the feedback I've gotten, I'm good at it. This coming spring, I'll be teaching high school history to people applying to study business, and lecturing on the history of heavy metal and the environment - in separate courses! Conditions permitting, I'll probably be giving my first lecture on Tolkien and theology next fall, but it isn't official yet.

To give you an idea of what it's like to be a teacher in Finland, this past year I've worked for seven different employers, and I'm not really making anything like enough money to actually support myself. All that talk about how teachers are supposedly valued and well-paid in this country is, frankly, complete bullshit.

However, this is the trade I have, and I'm going to see if I can make something of it. It's not like switching careers to IT seems to be possible. It's worth reminding myself that when I started this blag in 2007, an unimaginable thirteen years ago, I had no job, no degrees and no notion of any kind of future for myself. Now, several shall we say interesting years and a prison sentence later, I have a university degree, several peer-reviewed papers to my name, a professional certification, and I'm good at my job. Back in 2007, any one of these things would have seemed unimaginable. Life in 2020 is so strange and precarious that it's easy to feel like nothing matters, so I think it's worthwhile to remind oneself that we've come a ways.

On that note, I'd like to wish the three people who read my blog a very happy holiday season, and an excellent new year. I hope we all stay healthy and take a few steps forward next year as well.

Pandemic diary: July

Everyone is acting like the pandemic is over, and I'm not one bit okay with it.

I mean yes, case counts in Finland are way down, so almost all of the official restrictions have been lifted. Restaurants and bars and so on are operating at lower capacity, but to be honest, I'm seeing people flocking to night clubs and karaoke bars and whatnot on the social mediums, and it looks like a recipe for complete disaster. One person in that karaoke bar has the virus, and in about a week or so you've got a lot of contact tracing to do. I just think we're being reckless with this. We've had such a strange trajectory with this: first the official powers told us we'll be fine and the virus won't affect us; then we shut down everything, including an entire province; and now it's like we're pretending the whole thing never happened.

This affects me personally in that I'm due to resume teaching, well, next week! At this time we're cleared to hold public functions with up to 50 people. Given what we now know about how the virus spreads, I'm going to do what I can to make sure we have good air circulation, and I intend to continue wearing a mask on public transport, even though no-one else is. In September, I'll be restarting some of my lectures that usually get an older audience. I'm not qualified to judge if it's safe for them. I hope it is.

Anyway, this is the thing, isn't it; I'm not so much worried about myself, as I feel like I can take precautions and maintain social distancing and so forth. It's other people I'm worried about: not just myself having the virus asymptomatically or something like that, but someone in my audience having it and giving it to others. Obviously there's nothing I can really do to stop this from happening, but it doesn't mean I'm not worried about it.

We're scheduled to start returning to more or less business as usual in August in general. I just hope it isn't too soon, or we'll have a second wave in the fall.

Pandemic diary: May

I didn't write one of these things for April because frankly, I was quite depressed; nothing much was going on; and toward the end of the month I started my university prep course, and it took up all my free time. So I guess this is a bimonthly diary? I hope there won't be too many entries.

**

This past month marked my first adventure into online education. This is my fifth spring teaching university prep courses, but with the pandemic, the decision was made to switch to distance education, specifically Zoom. Teaching online is in some ways easier, obviously: you can do it from the comfort of your own home. But in several ways it's much harder than being there in person. I feel that the main issue is the lack of human contact: I spent the vast majority of my time talking to a screen showing my own slides and a picture of myself. Even as a lecturer, you get so much feedback and energy from the audience that it's really draining to teach without any of that. Another issue I find is that students seem to be less engaged with the class at a distance: this year a lot less people did their homework assignments, which showed in the mock exam. Some people didn't even do that! Distance learning may be the future, but it's not here yet. Even in adult education, it takes away so many of our tools as teachers that I am not very enthusiastic about doing more of it. To say nothing of the way in which it magnifies all pre-existing inequalities.

The entrance exam book they chose for the degree program on social change or whatever the faculty of social sciences officially calls yhteiskunnallinen muutos in English was Dr. Paige West's book From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: the Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea. It's a really good book and was a delight to teach.

Tuomas Tammisto of the University of Helsinki reviewed the book (PDF), and identified a key unresolved tension in it, so to speak:

West gives a very powerful critique of neoliberalism and especially of certification schemes, which seek to solve problems created by neoliberal practices by adhering to the very same practices that brought the problems in the first place. However Harvey’s theories of accumulation by dispossession could have been problematized more in the light of West’s own rich material, as the Gimi are – as she herself notes (p. 246) – owners of their own land and means of production and incorporate commodities into their own moral economy that does not follow a capitalist logic.

I think the same is true for several other sections of the book as well: there's a very well-argued theoretical case and really good ethnographic material, but the two don't always meet like you'd expect them to. I was slightly puzzled by the seventh chapter, where the author interviews several Western coffee marketers, who sell Papuan coffee with fantasy images of primitive Papuans. Several of them explain this away by saying that they have to do this, that this is just how things are now.

Dr. West takes this as confirmation that the advent of neoliberalism changed the way coffee is marketed, and I think she's right; but I can't help but think that there's a real missed opportunity here. Personally, as a social scientist, whenever someone says they "have to" do something a certain way, that there's no choice, I know I've found something interesting that needs looking into. In the earlier chapters, and indeed later in the same chapter, the book talks extensively about virtualism: how coffee marketers produce consumers. This angle is entirely absent in the interviews with the marketers; suddenly instead of consumers being produced, the marketers are simply responding to the dictates of the marketplace. I at least was left with an uncomfortable uncertainty as to whether we were meant to be reading this ironically, or whether the author was momentarily abandoning virtualism to hammer home a point about neoliberalism. Either way, there was a an opportunity there for an interesting analysis, which was not taken.

In her account of the pacification of the Papua-New Guinea highlands, Dr. West drops a reference to James Scott. Now, I'm a big Scott fan; discovering his work made a huge difference to my master's thesis back in the day. I had several thoughts about possible intersections of Papua-New Guinea and his work, but the biggest one is that I think the role of the state in coffee in Papua ends up being somewhat neglected in the book. We hear quite a bit about the Australian state's activities during the colonial period when they were in charge of Papua-New Guinea, but after independence, the focus of the book shifts to neoliberalism and global capitalism, which is certainly necessary, but the state drops out of the picture.

In one of the chapters, we had a look at the economic programs envisioned for an independent Papua-New Guinea, that stressed development on national terms. What happened to all that, and how did the state then end up running an economy driven so strongly by mining in Bougainville that the rebellion there apparently crashed it altogether? We then get the all-too-familiar story of the various international financial instìtutions stepping in with their structural adjustment programs, miring the country in permanent recession. But where was the Papuan state in all this? In general, the "development state", the idea that the state's job is to ensure economic development, is a thread that runs through the history of coffee in PNG. I think the overall argument of the book would have been made even stronger by highlighting that the British-Australian colonial state, the independent Papuan state and the structural development programs are a continuity of Scottian "schemes to improve the human condition" forced on the people of Papua-New Guinea. In a sense, isn't that what coffee certification is as well?

This is part of my fundamental disagreement with the various Marxist-derived world system analyses: they generally tend to neglect the state. Obviously for Marx himself, the state was simply a tool of class interests, and this carried over into the work of his followers. As a military historian, it's quite difficult to accept a worldview in which the state is elided from politics and the economy. I think we can see the influence of this in the way that we treat climate change as a global, corporate and individual problem, but seem to really struggle with treating it as something fundamentally driven by the development state.

**

In addition to the prep course, I will say I've got a bunch of painting done! I finally finished painting Star Wars: Rebellion, a project I started in the summer of 2018 and that got me back into all this nonsense in the first place. I also finished a Renegades and Heretics detachment and some Custodians, all of which were a lot of fun. I've referred back to my new year's resolution to actually finish projects several times, but I feel like it's made a difference, and it's made me feel better about my hobbying.

We also got the news that there's going to be a new edition of Warhammer 40,000 again, amd to be honest, I really don't care. We've played eighth edition a couple of times, it's been fun; I'm sticking with it. So far, I've played 2nd, 3rd and 8th edition; maybe that means I'll eventually cave, play 9th ed and then get back to this in what, 15th edition?

We also started playing Here I Stand by email, which has been very interesting. As I write this, we're in the middle of the second turn; a report on the first turn is here. We're currently almost managing a turn a month, so unless the game ends surprisingly early, we may be at it for quite a while...

**

Anyway that's it from us for April and May. I have a whole bunch of lecture courses arranged for next fall; it'll be interesting to see if we can actually make them happen, or if I'll be doing more Zooming. Again, I hope everyone's staying safe and healthy.

Pandemic diary: March

Now that there's a pandemic, several people have said we should write diaries. I already have this blog, so why not.

In my mind, our pandemic experience starts on March 9, when we took the boat to Sweden. We'd booked the trip on Silja Serenade ages ago, and there was no official word at the time on any travel restrictions. I was also quite keen to visit our friendly overseas gaming store and pick up a copy of Star Wars: Armada for 75% of what it costs in Helsinki. Given that it was a Monday departure, the ship was surprisingly crowded. We mostly kept to ourselves and tried to practice good hygiene, and had a nice, quiet trip to rainy Stockholm and back. I had an excellent lasagna at Michelangelo's in the Old Town, where they have a printout from Puma Swede's Instagram on the wall.

The trip turned out to be kind of a blessing in disguise. I had a regular cold shortly before it, but with all the talk about covid-19 and so on, I was a little bit nervous about continuing my teaching. Next Monday we were due to start the second run of our history of heavy metal lecture course in Kallio, and that Wednesday I was supposed to give my next lecture on the history of Britain in Hamina. The course in Hamina is specifically for pensioners, and the average age is well into the risk group for covid-19, but I was already anxious enough about giving them my cold. I loved giving those lectures, they were a great crowd, so I didn't want to skip out on them either. The issue was resolved when our government advised that everyone who's been abroad should quarantine themselves for two weeks. Shortly after my lectures were cancelled, both the Helsinki and Hamina adult education institutes were shut down.

Speaking of our government, the current cabinet has really risen to the occasion. At first both our politicians and civil servants took a very bizarre and frankly irresponsible line of trying to assure everyone that we would be fine and nothing was going to happen. One of our chief health officials even said we would only have "some individual cases". Of course, in a country where no-one is ever responsible for anything, you can say anything. There's a far more learned critique than mine here (in Finnish). After this initial nonsense, though, they've done very well and been decisive. I can't sufficiently express how delighted and relieved I am that we kicked the previous clowns out. Had the elections gone differently, we might still be ruled by the most incompetent peacetime prime minister in history: a religious fanatic and idiot. Not to mention his buddies the fascists. They'd be setting up concentration camps.

It's difficult to not feel a real sense of horror at what's going on in the UK and US. If anyone had written a satire say five years ago, where the president of the United States is a completely debile reality-tv con man who seriously suggests forcing Americans to go to work in a pandemic to save the stock market, and his sycophants solemnly declare that maybe the elderly need to die for the great leader's hotels and portfolio, I would have thought it vulgar and unrealistic. Shows what I know. I'm so sorry for everyone who has to live in these idiocracies, and genuinely terrified of what might happen.

A lot of people are struggling with social media and news in the middle of all this, and I get it. It's a fine line for media to walk between keeping people informed and stoking panic. For example, I read the Guardian online regularly, and I have to say I don't like the entire front page being nothing but coronavirus news. I mean yes, it's a pandemic. But there are also other things happening in the world, and I don't think it does much good for anyone's mental health to be bombarded with black backgrounds and huge headlines on the latest covid mortality.

The social media have been interesting. I'm happy to say I wasn't following anyone on anywhere who spreads disinformation, but what I didn't expect were the people who took this occasion to unleash their inner authoritarian. It's quite something to see people who previously self-identified as whatever particular shade of left-anarchist or something like that take to the social mediums to scream "shut up and obey" at anyone with the slightest criticism of the official response. Even a pandemic is not a time when we suspend democracy and discussion, no matter how badly someone's inner commissar wants to. The serial trolling and disruption the far right get up to even in these times is another thing entirely, but if you can't tell the two apart, well. Like the Finnish joke goes, if you can't tell the difference between a cow's ass and a mailbox, I'm not sending you to post a letter.

On a more personal level, we've effectively been self-quarantineing since we got back from Sweden. I made one last trip to the university library the day before it closed, and since then it's been groceries and the occasional walk, all while maintaining social distancing. We've obviously cancelled all our board- and tabletop gaming and are trying Here I Stand by email; it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I'm experimenting with shopping at the 24-hour supermarket nearby. It's a bit of a walk, but it's very quiet there after midnight. The infuriating thing is that there are constant shortages. Not because of any disruptions in supply, but because my idiot countrymen are hoarding everything. On one particular day, the bastards had cleared out all the peanut butter. Peanut butter! The only thing more ridiculous was the great toilet paper panic, which as near as I can tell was based solely on news and social media posts of people hoarding toilet paper abroad. We as a nation have a permanent hard-on for "exceptional circumstances", and then when they actually come about we go berserk over toilet paper. We are a very silly people.

I'll admit that I've been feeling some anxiety, and apart from midnight walks to the grocery store and the occasional spot of cooking, have struggled to be particularly useful or productive. I'm obviously worried about my parents and some of my friends, especially my colleague in lockdown in Italy, but I also have some very bad childhood experiences related to calling in sick, and having to cancel lectures brought them back very strongly. Even now with my employers shut down and my courses cancelled, I feel like I should be working and everyone is angry at me for skipping out. I know it's stupid, but there you are. I've already rescheduled some lectures for August, but we'll see. I think we're in this for the long haul, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some movement and socializing restrictions in place well past summer.

But at least for now we've been reasonably healthy, and I'm getting some painting done. Some parts of my previous life, which has always mostly felt wasted, turn out to have been surprisingly good preparation for a pandemic. Keeping very late hours and walking around deserted suburbs at night? Now useful experience for midnight grocery runs. Mentally habituating myself to extreme feelings of loneliness? Incomparably useful, and also now there are no social events to feel left out of. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to past me for buying boxes and boxes of miniatures without the least inkling of when I'd ever have the time to build them, let alone paint them. Well, that time is now.

Anyway I expect I'll be doing several more of these. I hope anyone who reads this is well and stays that way. Happy quarantine, everyone!

End-of-year thoughts: Getting back into Warhammer

As a byproduct of our by now largely moribund Rogue Trader tabletop role-playing campaign, I've gotten back into Warhammer, kind of. At least to the extent that I have opinions on it again.

**

Rules bloat is getting completely out of control in Warhammer 40,000. Let's take my Chaos army as an example. Back when we decided to get (re)started with Warhammer 40,000, my players were going to have an Imperial army, so the obvious thing to do, both fluffwise and based on the models I had at hand, was to build a Chaos army for them to fight. Since I have a theology degree, clearly my legion choice was Word Bearers. We got through the first and second games just fine with the Imperial Guard and Chaos Space Marine codexes.

For our third game, we wanted to use my old Space Marine vehicles and some Imperial Knights, which meant more codexes, but I'm fine with that; especially since at the time, the Renegade Knights codex was a free download.

However, since I'm playing Word Bearers, I was interested in the new Dark Apostle rules in the Vigilus Ablaze campaign book, and I bought it so we could use the new prayers in our game. I had also planned to field some Obliterators, but the Shadowspear boxed set came out around that time, with new rules and points costs for them. I was completely perplexed by the idea that a boxed set could suddenly change the matched play rules for a unit, and ended up not using them.

The next thing that happens is that a new Chaos Marine codex comes out. I was a bit annoyed by this, to be honest! I felt like I'd shelled out over 60€ on two books, only to have them immediately superseded. I was around for 3rd edition, when they also released two codexes for some armies - but it was explicitly done because a new edition was coming, and the new codexes would be "forward-compatible". This time they've said no such thing.

Then it turns out that the new codex actually doesn't include the specialist detachment rules in Vigilus Ablaze, so I guess I didn't completely waste my money. Should I still buy the new codex, though? Absolutely not, because right on the heels of the new codex they announce the next line of campaign books, the first of which, Faith and Fury, will include new legion rules for the Word Bearers! So do I get Faith and Fury, or do I wait for a third codex that maybe incorporates the legion rules in Faith and Fury, or maybe doesn't? I'm also delighted I didn't buy the new loyalist Marine codex, because guess what? They're also getting a pile of new rules in Faith and Fury!

Back in third edition times, we got quite a few rules updates in White Dwarf, and they also came up with Chapter Approved books, so if you wanted to do something clever, it was quite possible you'd have to lug around some WDs and a Chapter Approved book in addition to your codex. People did complain! But what makes eighth edition potentially much stranger is that now rules are popping up in all kinds of places, from 40k boxed sets to expansions for other games, like Kill Team and Blackstone Fortress. You can make a whole battalion with Blackstone Fortress rules, although I think you'd be better off with Renegades and Heretics from the Imperial Armour book. This can be a bit confusing.

By the way, in the middle of all this, Chapter Approved comes out once a year and they keep tinkering with the points values. I had some success with Chaos Cultists in our first games, but when they went up to 5 points each and lost access to legion traits I started looking at Renegade Militia instead - only for Chaos Cultists to drop back to 4 points in CA 2019.

But really, the worst thing is the new codexes. I like codexes! I own most of the 3rd edition ones, I think, and at least the CSM 3.5 codex. But the fact that the current ones might be superseded within the same edition has just completely put me off buying any. I know I want some Machine Cult units for my Imperial army, and now that we've been playing Munchkin 40,000 and enjoying some Necron-based humor, I might even like to look into Necrons - but why buy a codex when for all I know, a newer version is coming out next month? And why buy a campaign book if the rules in it are going to be reprinted in a more convenient book later that year?

To take another example, I really like the Adeptus Mechanicus Archaeopter that was shown off at the Warhammer 40,000 Open Day, and I'd like to make an AdMech detachment for my Imperial army. But again, what's the point of getting a Codex if a new one might appear at any time and make it obsolete?

The lesson seems to be to only buy new books if I'm going to be using the rules in them imminently. Saves money, I guess. I can't imagine this is the outcome GW had in mind.

**

Then there's Age of Sigmar. Apparently when I wasn't keeping up with things, they decided to blow up the Warhammer Fantasy world, the chief objectives seeming to be to make Sigmar into Fantasy Emperor, introduce his tremendously boring Fantasy Space Marines and change all the names into something easier to trademark. So instead of orcs you now have Orruks, dwarves are Duardin, and so on. It all feels more than a little silly, like calling the Imperial Guard "Astra Militarum" (which means "stars of the soldiers" but never mind), but all over the place. The fluff is also kind of weird, because they've kept so many of the old Warhammer Fantasy units but changed the backgrounds. For example, you still get Black Ark Corsairs, but now Black Arks are just ships, rather than magically floating elven castles. And so on.

On the other hand, they're doing a bunch of interesting things with it, like flying sharks and steampunk dwarves with flying ships, so I'm actually kinda on board with it. Also, with the Cities of Sigmar army book, I can have an army with elves, dwarves, humans and flying sharks, which sounds like a fun thing to collect. It's just that I'm not one bit interested in any of the new fluff.

On top of all this, though, last month GW announced they're bringing the Old World back. To be honest, I don't really care. I'm getting bored with nostalgia.

**

Finally, though, there was this blog post, published after the author died of cancer. In a moving post in general, what really stuck with me was his admonishment to stick to projects and finish them, both as a way to control your spending and, well, to get things done. With more modelling projects underway that I can count, I felt that. So I think that's going to be my new year's resolution for 2020 and indeed the decade in general: I will finish modelling projects before starting new ones.

So in practice, that means building up tournament-sized Imperial and Chaos armies for next summer, and actually finishing all the damn models! Once they're done, I'm going to see about turning my very eclectic Warhammer Fantasy collection into something Age of Sigmar-ish. Luckily, Cities of Sigmar makes that look surprisingly likely. Even though I very rarely play and am mostly a collector, I still prefer collecting an army that would make at least some sense on the tabletop, in some more-or-less current edition of the game. And I do enjoy playing when I get the chance!

Especially when working on abstract things like lecture courses or academic articles, I've found it thoroughly relaxing to be able to work with my hands and concentrate on building or painting something. I'm going to try adding the additional dimension of actually finishing projects. We'll see how it goes.

Decisions

This fall, I made the decision to quit my PhD, and I couldn't be happier.

Looking at the past few end-of-year blog posts I've done, the themes have been the futility of trying to engage with society and politics, and the hopelessness of my attempt at an academic career. I've finally been able to draw the appropriate conclusions from this, and I've pretty much stopped trying to be in any way politically active, and faced facts on my PhD project.

There are two principal reasons why I've quit: I believe the postgraduate system is completely unfair, but even if it wasn't, working conditions are so bad that I'd much rather do something else.

For background, it's vital to understand that the Finnish academic system has no transparency at all. Decisions on who gets grants and salaried doctoral candidate positions are totally opaque to those of us on the receiving end. The only obvious thing is that they're not based on any kind of publicly visible merit like publications. The same goes for decisions like which doctoral candidates get to participate in publications, research groups or teaching.

After several years inside the system, my impression is that from the beginning, doctoral candidates are divided into those whose careers will be advanced, and those whose won't. I don't know what the criteria for this selection are, but the split seems to me to be fairly clear. If you're in the first group, you will get funding and opportunities to demonstrate your abilities, and a way up into the academic hierarchy. If you fall in the latter group, you will get nothing, and nothing you can accomplish on your own will matter. I'm very much in this second group, which I believe means that in practice, even if I went on to finish my PhD, I would have no chance of getting any postdoc work or funding. More than that, though, I believe the current system is unjust and wrong, and I don't want to be a part of it.

The other reason is that even if I did know the right people and I had an opportunity to advance my career - which would probably effectively blind me to the nature of the system - working conditions are so bad and employment so precarious that I don't want to do it. Under some definitions of the word, people my age count as millenials; I was more skeptical of this until I realized that one of my fondest dreams right now is to get a steady job with a monthly salary. I don't think that's at all a realistic possibility if I pursue a PhD.

So I've officially quit the PhD, and next year, I'll be doing something completely different with my life. And I'm very happy with my decision. I taught a university prep course and a lecture course at the adult education center this year, and I've got some more teaching work lined up for next year. I'm also getting back into programming, so we'll see if anything will come out of that.

To conclude, I'd like to wish all three of my readers a very happy new year, and a succesful 2019!