All right, time to stop procrastinating and start writing again! I was not working (as in, at the office) in January, which means that I’m running late with finishing Muster and even this newsletter. As we learned last year, the name of the game after newsletter hiatus is to write extra issues until I catch up to the weekly pace, so expect two issues a week for the next while.
The Tale of the Lost Month
All right, the basic gist of the story is fairly simple: I worked a bit too hard in December, apparently, and reacted to that by taking an impromptu 2-week vacation in early January. Just didn’t feel like writing back then, too content with life. I know I was planning to finish with Muster back then, but that’s what you get with the best plans of mice and men. Self-care takes precedence, as they say nowadays.
Interesting congruity — well, only really interesting to myself — is that I wasn’t too productive early last year either, when I wrote the classic piece on bears and cold depression. I’ve been looking forward to using this diary to self-diagnose for patterns of what the fuck is wrong with me as a human being, but I think this one’s just coincidence, not that I’m just doomed to be tired and gloomy in January. You see, this January was pretty much the opposite of last year: I wasn’t tired so much as I was happy.
Being happy is not very usual for me, so I was admittedly blindsided by that a bit. I think it was because I was getting so much positive feedback on the Muster ashcan, and I was relieved about having been able to put the book on paper. (It’s still not quite finished, but it’s finished enough that there is no longer a question of whether I can even do it. Clearly it’s all done but the editing.) I haven’t been publishing much over the last decade, so I guess I’d forgotten what it feels like to finish something.
So there I was, being content with life, and — this doesn’t come as news to me, I do understand myself that much — my being happy pretty much means that I stop being productive. Writing only happens due to discontent, in my world. I suspect this is true for most people, and I do like characterizing authorship (just in general, as a thing apes do) as basically a highly-functioning form of slow-burn existential crisis. The way I just lost all motivation to write the moment I got a little bit happy casts an unflattering spotlight on that.
Anyway, two weeks was about the amount of time I could spend being happy, so around mid-January I was getting back to work, but then, well, I caught some non-covid strain of influenza, and a week after that my tooth started to hurt, and I had that removed, and now I’m pretty much recovered from that, and here we are.
I’ll discuss the roadmap for what I’ll be working on next in the next newsletter. For now, I’ll just grace you with a few January anecdotes. Just some little things from last month.
My Italian booties
This might not qualify as much of a news item for most people, but I rarely buy new things, so it’s news to me. Late last year I got a pair of new winter boots. Called furoshiki in analogue to the Japanese gift-wrapping art, these Italian booties unwrap cleverly. So you place you foot on the sole of the book and then wrap the felt parts around the foot. Works as advertised, but I guess it’s more of a gimmick than anything else; it’s not faster to get the foot in the boot, so the main advantage ends up being that the book has great ventilation when it’s not in use.
I was a bit slow in breaking in the booties, but I’ve now gotten my feet to fit in them comfortably enough. I’ve been going about in winter in beach shoes over the recent years like a crazy person, so winter boots are obviously a great improvement. These are clearly what I would characterize as urban booties, though; on the short side and no sealing. Not a work boot or general wilderness boot, more like something you’d wear on snowy streets or maybe during transitional season.
The biggest difference from Finnish winter boots for me is that the sole is both fairly shallow-profiled and made of a fairly hard rubber. What this amounts to is that it’s unexpectedly slippery on the streets. I don’t know shit, this is literally just my imagination projecting things, but I imagine that this kind of sole might be fairly normal in like northern Italy, southern France kind of regions? I could see them using little booties like this in the autumn, with water more of a concern than ice and snow. As it is, I’m the most stylish lumberjack in this here inner-Finland mildly disturbing Twin Peaks analogue of a horror show.
Also, because my brother got the same pair of boots, I customized mine. I even went as far as to take a phonograph (a phone photograph, I invented a totally new word) of my booties after sewing on a canvas patch. Such high fashion!
The harrowing whodunnit
So let me paint the scene about my flu. Maybe you can tell me who I got the disease from:
Mise-en-scène: We had a rpg session in mid-January at the home of one of the players. Fairly normal in all ways; no masks, people around a table, about how you’d expect it.
Suspect #1: The host had had some kind of seemingly ordinary winter flu over the week before the game. Sore throat, runny nose, mild fever type of deal. Not Covid according to home test, and seemingly over for a few days by the game time.
Suspect #2: Had actually had covid, and the quarantive period had just ended the day before the game.
Suspect #3: Came to the game with a fairly noticeable cough. Had been suffering of a sore throat for the last week, no doubt worsened by a job involving a lot of talking.
Victim: My flu started with a sore throat, progressed into runny nose territory and probably involved just a little bit of a fever. Not covid according to a home test. I’m confident enough about having caught the disease at the game night to stage this little whodunnit here. One of them is surely guilty, but who…
Teeth are your friends, until they aren’t
I take reasonably good care of my teeth, but that didn’t stop the damn traitor, bottom-leftie, from getting holed and starting to ache late in January. And he was supposed be a wise tooth, too. This was, of course, a long time coming, but you’d surely still prefer your teeth to stay in line.
As a generally healthy specimen I’ve been living with the naive illusion that a public health service actually exists here in Upper Savo. (It’s easy to keep living in this impression if you never actually use such services.) I soon found out the following data points about the situation:
Non-critical dental care might be available at “some point”: The way I understood the nurse over the phone, the dental services in the region are currently so overloaded that they do not take reservations. Instead, they’ll take your contact information and call you when they are in fact able to schedule an appointment. The nurse didn’t know when this might be, but they seemed to think that it’d be surprising if it was six months; I assume more like three in that case? I did ask them to call me, so I guess we’ll find out later in the spring.
This was on Monday, when I was sufficiently annoyed with bottom-leftie to call the dentist, but not so much as to call the issue critical. Over the next two days the tooth kept aching, motivating me to call again on Wednesday about those fabled emergency options; the nurse on Monday had given me the impression that they have some resources for available urgent care.
Tooth-ache is no excuse for urgent care: This time I characterized the tooth-ache as persistent, relatively mild, but sufficiently insistent as to prevent sleeping. The nurse wanted to know if I was eating pain medication for it, and apparently wasn’t impressed when I was not; with the urgency of other patients seeking succor, I was advised to grin and bear it until further notice.
The phone system worked nicely both times, I’ll give the Upper Savo health services that much credit. If getting somebody on the phone would have been of use with my traitorous tooth, that would have been just about perfect.
I sat on my crushed illusions about the Finnish health care system for a few hours, and then decided that if my options were to wait for some distantly glimmering future, or go pay a private practice for dental care, I might as well try the latter. Here’s what I learned:
There’s a lot of private healthcare service in Finland: For a country that claims to guarantee necessary care, there sure seems to be room for several large private dental clinics in Iisalmi alone. I guess it makes sense that there would be patients to be had if the public dentist is receiving patients sometime between Easter and never.
The service is prompt and professional: I picked one of the private dentists on the basis of them happening to have an open slot in their net-based reservation system for the same day. Drove to the premises and got to see a dentist who confirmed my suspicions about bottom-leftie and took an x-ray image of my teeth (apparently something of a regular routine nowadays). The dentist thought that bottom-leftie had to go, so she reserved me a time for Friday, two days thence, for a teeth surgeon. The overall experience of going to a private dentist was simple and professional; no excess chitchat, these people were clearly on a mission to get patients in and out efficiently.
Teeth surgery is clearly routine: The check-up on Wednesday didn’t take long, and the teeth surgery on Friday was also over in under 30 minutes. I imagine that wisdom teeth removal is fairly routine for the dentists, seems to me like I know a lot of people who’ve had these tooth removed (albeit usually at a much younger age).
Private care is fairly expensive: The checkup, x-ray and tooth surgery altogether clocked in close to 500 € in various fees. Actually entirely affordable for me, and I’m happy about the experience, but I can’t help but be upset about the idea that there could just as easily be some poor guy out there who also has an aching tooth, except they don’t have half a grand to drop on it all of a sudden. I guess he’s still waiting for that phone call, which is such a completely unfair situation; everybody deserves to have healthcare.
So, a political segue here: this thrilling story in dentistry was happening at the same time that Finland was enjoying its first cycle of provincial elections. The new system is fairly weird in that despite the name, what we actually elected was less of a provincial parliament and more of a provincial commission for revision and reformation of the health and social services. (No, I don’t know why it was considered a good idea to form a provincial parliament for that sort of technical question. Doesn’t seem like anybody else really does either.)
If my experiences are anything to go by, though, I think I’m forced to flip on my long-held support for collectively organized public healthcare. (This would be the left-to-centre position on the matter in Finnish politics; entirely mainstream.) While the theory is sound, there seems to be just a tad bit of a lack of responsibility in the system; for whatever reason, the Upper Savo health care service organization is failing to maintain a quota of dentistry capacity actually capable of servicing the population. I’m sure there are reasons for that, shit happens, but the damning part is that as far as I can tell, nobody’s responsible, nobody’s accountable, and nobody cares. I guess the rich go to private practice and who cares for the poor, so it’s no big deal if the service is down for the foreseeable future.
Instead, my new favourite structural theory of health care is the service voucher, no doubt familiar to anybody who hasn’t tuned out from this thrilling story in medical services quite yet. It would be a great improvement in the current system if public healthcare services guaranteed care by either providing required medical care or paying for private care from the public purse when such care cannot be arranged for whatever reason. The benefit of the voucher setup (indeed advocated by some political parties in the country) would be that the public service provider could not avoid providing obligatory services; they could choose to run down the public services, yes, but that would just leave the populace free to seek medical care from the private sector at the public expense. This would be an improvement, as the way things seem to stand now is that healthcare is maybe available. I don’t think that healthcare can be a “maybe” commodity, not when there is in fact plenty of dentist capacity in the region, even if the public dentistry office has shat itself to the point of inoperability.
I’m worried about any system where a critical failure like this can occur without it triggering clear, unavoidable fiscal consequences for the municipality (or province, I guess, in the brave new world). It’s concerning that the way things worked out here in my case, the public health care service ultimately saved money by refusing service. I went and paid for my dentistry myself. This is such an obvious perverted incentive that I’m surprised we actually still have public health services (as far as I know we do, anyway); the municipalities would make wonderful savings by simply turning away any patients and letting them get their health care from wherever they can, and there is apparently no particular reason why these kinds of saving cannot be had as things stand right now.
Anyway, back to my teeth: after bottom-leftie faced the execution squad, I’ve been taking that pain medication and eating kinda carefully. Recovery went well, and now a week afterwards I’d characterize myself as having survived the loss. The loss of the tooth, anyway; time will tell how I’ll survive the loss of my faith in public health services.
AP report pile: Coup de Main #69
All right, it’s been a while since I’ve been reporting on our play. I’ll just keep writing these reports in chronological order, we’ll catch up to the present with time.
This session occurred in early January, and directly followed upon the spectacular conclusion of the Elfquest in the last session. We’d been waiting for Tuomas to continue with the tense events of Coup-de-Gnarley, but with his home-moving and Christmas stuff in the way, there was one more session of something else to be had. Lacking any better ideas, we decided to return to Castle Greyhawk for another spin.
Our recent adventuring at the Castle had been under the auspices of the elven prince Viusdul Daro, whose death in the last session before Christmas had sent us careening into uncertainty. The players had plenty of time to think about what to do over the holidays, though, so they pretty much patched up the relations between the elves and the rangers and adventurer murderhobos who might or might not have been responsible for the death of the valiant elven prince. It wasn’t the cleanest break, but it was clean enough for us to set it aside and focus on a new venture.
Selintan Rangers is the local lodge of the Ranger Circle, the continental brotherhood of grim orc-botherers. Adventurers had earlier managed to set up the Rangers with a permanent fort at the Castle, namely the barbican at the drawbridge; a central location that enables the rangers to monitor the comings and goings of the evil humanoids that seem to infest the Castle and travel back and forth with impunity thanks to the Mouths of Madness, the many holes and crevices in the Castle’s foundations.
The Rangers seem to now allow new adventurers (of suitably human persuasion) to descend into the Castle dungeons via the barbican tunnel in exchange for any maps or other information such adventurers learn at the Castle, so it seems like the setup is working fairly well for adventurers at this time. The setup being so clear, it wasn’t that hard for us to gather an appropriate crew of second-string characters (the first string for most players is adventuring in Gnarley at this time) to descent into the depths.
The players are starting to have enough of a sense of the Castle dungeons that they can make more or less rational choices about what directions to explore in the hopes of actually advancing their goals. I think the main objective this time was sort of a speculative attempt at completing the Elfquest after all, despite the prince dying and most of the elves abandoning the quest: if Frida the Teenage Witch could nevertheless find the Oracle of Zagyg somewhere in here, perhaps the fabled princess Sarana of the elves could yet be delivered from her peril!
What ended up actually happening in practice, though, was some minor maneuvering around local gnolls, flirting with the idea of fighting with them. Not managing to get entangled in that, the party’s further exploration plans were derailed when they noticed that the green mists blocking the grand staircase deeper into the dungeon were gone! Said seeping mists, full of magical dread, had been blocking the grand staircase in the past, only allowing ascending the stairs upwards into the burned library. Now, with the stairs inviting descent, how could the party say no to that?
Now that we were deeper in the Castle dungeons that ever before, things have the potential to get strange. The Castle has so far been a notably boring, basic “Gygaxian naturalism” adventure location that is full of small bands of humanoids and treasure vaults full of coils of rope and other worthless knick-knacks. Realistic and non-fantastic for all that it was once the home and sanctuary of the Mad Archmage himself!
To start though, business as usual: the party stumbled on a small gnoll hunting party right when they descended to the 2nd floor, but managed to overcome those handily. The gnolls got scattered to both left and right branching corridors from the staircase, prompting the adventurers to follow the lone escapee to the right.
The party Thief, apparently in a bout of temporary insanity, managed to notice a branching side corridor that led to a very suspicious-looking place. It was great how they insisted on exploring…
… through a gratuitous open porticullis with a switch next to it…
… to a new corridor going sideways further in…
… with careful study of the corridor’s end, a variety of scratches and dents could be discovered in the stone…
… and as the Thief creeps forward, they notice that the corridor is inclining increasingly upwards.
It was funny how the Thief was happy to very carefully, very methodically examine the circumstances, conclude them to be very suspicious, and therefore something worthy of further investigation deeper in, step by step. Seemed like everybody thought that it was a trap, but it was kinda inconceivable that this would be a reason to not go in there. After all, if we know that it is a trap, then surely it’s going to be OK? In fact, we’re pretty certain that it’s a rolling boulder trap, right? What with the scratches in the stone, and the inclining corridor that I’m advancing in here?
Well, it wasn’t a rolling boulder, but rather a lovely, massive rhino-shaped juggernaut (a large statue on wheels, basically) that rolled down that incline straight at the Thief. Absolutely the most ridiculously over the top trap I’ve seen in years. The porticullis went down, obviously, trapping the Thief in the corridor with the rapidly approaching stone monstrosity. The other players were quick to keep cramming the switch next to the porticullis, apparently under the mistaken impression that the trap was fair and the switch would actually do something.
In the seconds the Thief had to live there was actually some fairly quick thinking and a critical success in a Strength check, so the party Fighter managed to hoist the gate in a quick feat of strength, which then allowed the party to almost draw the Thief out of the harm’s way before the thundering juggernaut rolled over both of his legs. The mangled Thief wasn’t in any shape to recover, so he was allowed to pass away in dignity after his spectacular encounter with the insanity of the Mad Archmage.
What makes this trap so impressive to me is that it’s such an ostentatious display of the Mad Archmage’s power. So far the Castle has been rather on the minimalistic side, but clearly things change when you advance to the lower levels! It was also a rather nice touch how the rhino juggernaut outright blocked that porticullis doorway with its bulk, after crashing at the wall. Kinda a neat way to block the entrance.
By the time we were done with the juggernaut it was time to wrap things up, so we had the party retreat from the dungeon with what little they’d found. Not much, but at least they were now aware of the passing of the mists, whatever that might signify…
This was the last session in Castle Greyhawk for the moment, as next week Tuomas would come in to run Coup-de-Gnarley for us. There was a quite interesting situation brewing there, left unfinished earlier last year. I also got to join in as a player on this! I’ll tell more about it in the next installment of the AP series.
Session #73 is scheduled for tomorrow, Monday 7.2., starting around 15:00 UTC. Feel free to stop by if you’re interested in trying the game out or simply seeing what it’s like.
State of the Productive Facilities
Well, I haven’t been doing anything much over the last month. I’ll discuss the future plans in detail in the next newsletter, though, so let’s pick this up then. I do have a clear plan, just need to get up and start actually executing it.