Drifting diary (musings)

Last weekend I took a few days off from the computers and set off to enjoy a few days in the countryside to enjoy the summer and to test a buggy build of Hoodo ;P.

As the point of hoodo is to be able to look at things from a different perspective, I tried to get into a different frame of mind when I hit the start button and put the phone in my pocket. Game on. Forgetting about the game is the name of the game.

I rode along on the Hasturped (the groovy summer moped), heading north for our Juhannus (Finnish midsummer) party. So there was the definite goal for the trip, to go there and come back again, the premise. Normally I would drive up there on a car.

Thinking carefully, the car trip doesn't bring anything new on the table, it's just a repetition of a thing I've done a million times that triggers nothing and there's no time to observe anything and in case you observed something, you already passed it on 120km/h speed and it's too boring to turn back. The moped is great, it's fast enough and it's slow enough for this kind of rural area exploration.

At one point I discovered a riverbank that I could ride. The road took me to an abandoned facility, I noticed the top windows had been smashed in and some kids had piled a shaky stack of these huge cable reels so you could climb up and get in. Brilliant. The stack was very shaky indeed but in I got. Exploration!

I took my time inside the abandoned building. It completely took me away from my premise of going to the party, I got into this exciting breaking and entering mindframe. Well, the place was abandoned for a reason. Anyway, interesting time was had and I took a few pictures too. Moving on, the party happened and we talked about the place I had found, my cousin said you're too cool for such and old geezer. =)

Maybe somebody else could elaborate on many details about the trip and the tripper and so on but I tend to look at things pragmatically. For the purpose of this blog anyways. So the observation was that the discovery and being able to share it was important. My movement and time and so, the stats hoodo client keeps track of, were quite irrelevant to me but are fun to watch later. The premise is everything.

I had an external premise with the party happening. With hoodo, the game will become the premise at one's convenience. The main deduction.

Riding back after 2 nights, I took a different route (hoodo encourages that) and discovered another interesting abandoned place. Won't go into too much detail here but there was a field with many sheep near it. I had to stop and just watch these sheep. It was bizarre, they were all staring at me. It had been many years since I had seen a flock of sheep and now I got my Jeff Minter moment, it was pretty cool. Another memorable moment and a life lesson, sheep stare at people.

detritus inside abandoned building

graffiti probably written by a teenager

the sheep

it's all about the human aspect and sharing

There's a big topic of fusing art and technology to be dealt with at a later point. I'm quite pleased with the range of experiences one can have thru hoodo. You can play it on a very superficial level or dive right down on the deep end and use the game as a tool to confirm or disconfirm surrealist theories.

We've got something special here.