Ei Mitään, Edith Södergran

watching my surroundings listen to tortured poets department like i haven’t stopped listening to all music in favor of cha cha cha by käärjiä after the eurovision 2023 because i gotta respect a guy with that many ä’s in his name.

Kirsti Simonsuuri (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 26 December 1945  

RIP: 29 June 2019

Ethnicity: White - Finnish

Occupation: Professor, writer, poet, researcher

Note: Partner of Pirkko Hämäläinen until her death

Poets of the Fall - 20th Anniversary tour - Nottingham Rock City - 10th November 2023

Excellent gig, the band had super energy and rocking the house down.

Yes, I wined and I dined on that cyanide.

i love it when friends have such a strongly memorable accent / way of speaking that everytime i read their texts or posts i automatically hear it in their tone of voice

This post about Finnish pronouns crossed my dash today, and it reminded me of a Poets video where Marko explains the lack of gendered pronouns in Finnish like this:

Tua Forsström

Tua Forsström was born in 1947 in Porvoo, Finland. Forsström has won all of her home country's major poetry prizes. Her writing has been translated into several languages, including French, English, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Serbian, and Albanian. Forsström has won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize, and she is a two-time winner of the Swedish Academy's Bellman Prize.

Image source

finnish is actually a poetic language and that explains why learning all the ways to write a single word was absolute hell

Edith Södergran (finnish poet, 1892-1923)

just in a couple of months three very young celebrities have died from suicide its so horrible mental health issues really are such demons like it really breaks my heart

The beautiful @kinolaika hosted the cast and crew of YÖTÖN YÖ for a special, world premiere screening of the final cut of the short film available to watch in Alan Wake 2. Kino Laika was founded by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki and writer and poet Mika Lätti, and felt like the perfect setting to show the cast and crew the final product of their hard work. Thank you to everyone from @angelfilms.fi for lending their expertise to the production! Thank you to the staff of the cinema for being excellent hosts! (x)

Oh my god, y'all. Forgive me if I'm being redundant, but I think i may have forgotten to post one of my BIG projects?? I just tried to look for this in my archives, and it should have gone up around March 17, but I... can't find it, it's not in my mdzs tag, it doesnt show up when i search yapp, and I was, uh. Arguably very distracted because I made this as emergency distraction material right before a big family funeral! SO, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO. My first take on single volume Mo Dao Zu Shi

One main goal: rigid yapp edges. Some people may quibble about whether that's the right name if they're rigid, but shhhh shh shh, bookbinding already has reached a critical volume of unsearchable key terms, like 'square' and 'shoulder,' I deserve this one, and not the unbearably generic term that slides right off my brain. And resources on how to do any edge overhangs are... thin on the ground, so hell yeah, let's smash em together.

Like one person online, a Finnish poet bookbinder or something, had an example of crisp rigid edges like these, but no clues on the how-to other than that 'yapp' term. I was only a baby bookbinder. I'm not even sure I was backing books yet when I saw it. But i REMEMBERED. And after figuring out boxes a little bit, i felt confident enough to go for it! I used guidance from one of my box making books for how to cover the edges nicely, and heyyyy, it worked!

Now.... mistakes were made. I was looking for trimming alternatives for chunky books that weren't chisels or sanding. Trying to fit different halves of my book into the guillotine then sand the sin out of it was... not the answer. Faux suede was also a mistake. I love it to bits, but it is possibly the LEAST forgiving material in the world for glue squishing onto the nice side of your material, and I sure picked some complex surfaces to cover with it. And also, the yapp edges are a little large. A little intrusive! I wanted them to be proportional with the thickness, and neglected proportional with my hands XD

It's no biggie, this whole thing was something I chose as a learning project, and man, I learned a LOT. I do love it a lot too! The faux suede feels great, the endpapers are great, and red foil on maroon fabric worked out super cool. I'm not going to repeat myself, which is why new mdzs is partially re-typeset, the binding will be different, and my next yapp edge project will be something new. But I'm so fond of this silly thing! Especially the surprise skeleton hands on the back, ahahahaha

Now I'm curious cause of your tag. What did Swedish media say about the eurovision thing?

Oof yeah, here's a post detailing it ... here another... Basically they've absolutely flipped over the fact that Finnish public didn't give Loreen points at all (which I find absolutely hilarious) and suddenly started wielding such rhetoric as "the former eastern part of our kingdom" referring to Finland, which is???? like??? do I even need to say how Not Okay that is?

It might seem to some that the Finnish people are reacting to Sweden's (unfair) win and them being sore winners (which, points to them, I didn't know was possible!) with too much drama, but it's all tied to our history together. Finland has traditionally seen itself, and has been seen by other countries (Sweden included) as the sort of "little brother" to the more advanced, better-faring, glorious Sweden. While Sweden to my knowledge doesn't much care about what Finland gets up to (perhaps overlooking/ignoring us and our merits), Finland is always comparing itself to Sweden and trying to live up to it. It's a very common rhetoric and sort of, the atmosphere over here. We know more about Sweden than Sweden knows about us; we're constantly conscious that Sweden exists. Sweden gets talked about in international news; Finland, if mentioned, is often tied to - you guessed it - being Sweden's neighboring country.

We used to be part of Sweden for 600 years. During that time, Swedish was implemented as the language of the culture and the "civilised" whereas the finns living in the eAstErn pArT oF tHe kiNgDoM were seen as "wild" and "uncivilised" and just, generally a lesser people to the Swedish speaking population. We haven't been under Sweden's rule for some 200 years and STILL we can't seem to shake their influence on us. Swedish is still a mandatory language to learn at school (and I have many opinions on that, but that'd be another post). Finnish as a language has been disregarded for its whole existence. Our leading national thinkers and poets in the 19th century, who were the first ones to really push for the Finnish identity instead of us seeing ourselves as part of Sweden or Russia, wrote in Swedish. The first novel in Finnish was published in 1870.

So this is monumental to us, to have the whole word watching Finland and not Sweden. Finland has a lot of merits, especially considering how small a people we are (just 5,5mil). To have a song in our language, in Finnish be this popular, is something we couldn't have imagined. We as a people are humble to the extreme, so much that we might easily scorn anyone who is too successful (not a good thing!), and this is the first time in my life that I'm seeing the whole country rally behind someone like this. When we say "Our Jere" we mean it with our whole hearts. We're so so proud of him, everyone is, and for once Finnish people seem to think in unison that someone deserves all the praise and the success.

SO, to have Sweden in this UNIQUE moment of Finland raising its head and being "we're so amazing", with the rest of Europe going "yes you're so amazing!!", spew rhetoric like this, is just, unbelievable to me. Like I can't just believe that in the 21st century there are people in Sweden who hold up 200 year old thought patterns of our country. It's been shocking 'cos though there's always been rivalry, it's felt more... tongue in cheek. We "love to hate" Sweden over here. It's been "I hate Sweden (affectionate)". But now we find this unbelievably condescending and belittling attitude towards us raising its head, and we wonder, we thought we two were okay?? But have they always held these beliefs???

So there's a sense of betrayal in the air as well. And just, full on disbelief. And maybe we're starting to see that it has been like this all along, but we've decided to turn a blind eye to it? True colours shining through? Perhaps not... but yeah.

Sweden not looking good here!

(here's one more post that says the same that i did but was better at making it SHORT oops)

Alan: So you created me based on your own looks.

Tom: Yes.

Alan: So I'm an American novelist looking like a Finnish poet/filmmaker/actor.

Tom: Yes.

Alan: And because it would be implausible if I had a Finnish accent, you gave me a different voice from an American voice actor.

Tom: Yes.

Alan: How did you come up with all of that wild stuff??

Tom: *points at Sam Lake who's sitting across the table, sipping coffee*