Friday, September 2

My prophecy came true. My interest in Pokemon Go has changed, but not disappeared. I did not spend time this morning walking from Kalasatama, taking detours to gain points from every pokestop I could conceivably pass. Instead I got the tram from Sörnäinen. I did, however, level up to Level 16 through saving five potential evolutions until an egg was due to hatch. I then used a lucky egg to double my points for thirty minutes, sat on the tram evolving all the pokemon I had saved up, walked five minutes around Arabia to hatch the egg, and then captured a few pokemon.

I will have to gain 20,000 more xp to move up another level, and I will take that at a more leisurely base, using different tactics.

I spent most of the morning in a meeting with Gunilla and Daniel discussing three projects that I have dreamed up, in combination with Liisa and Jutta. These include Bryan’s planned visit in November, the Open Knowledge Library, and Stories Of…, the event no longer known as The Future North. I left the meeting feeling that all of them might lead somewhere. I got back to my desk to discover that I will not now present my read-my-paper-for-me session at the Embodied Methodology conference in London in November. However, I received a very nice rejection letter that went out of its way to credit me for “your excellent proposal, which was a pleasure to read”. I still like the idea, I would have not have had it without the call for papers, and I shall certainly try to use it somewhere else in the next year.

At 12:10 I walked to the mall to see if S-Market stocked the Polish vegetable juice we sometimes get from Prisma. Caramba, they do! I have a carton in my bag and I decide to walk an extra ten metres to the Arabia sign, a local pokestop, to collect 50 xp points. I spot a tram about to leave and decide that it looks photogenic against the bright blue sky. So I photograph it. In an hour’s time I will look out the window at the rapidly darkening cloudy sky and treasure the photograph as a sunny memory.

I will spend the afternoon thinking and writing. I have changed my tack: content first and website second now seems the logical order. The first content that needs writing will describe Peter Small’s idea of virtual cafes. I think this will provide a solid method for the task of updating the manifesto for cultural democracy, since it itself embodies an idea of culturally democratic co-creation.

I will try to find Peter on the web and almost fail. I will find traces of him on the web, but nothing to suggest where I might contact him to ask if he would like to involve himself in this adventure.

At 17:30 Irma and I will enter the Indian Embassy for a talk by Swami Santatmananda Maharaj Ji from the Ramakrishna Mission in New Delhi. Initially we will play the part of the entire audience but before the talk begins a Finnish woman and man will make separate entrances, and some of the embassy staff will file in. When he enters he will observe an audience of twelve. He will speak for an hour or so in general terms about life and death and what happens in between. He spoke in a way that made clear that he thought atheism a fine approach to the issue of living a genuine life so that when the ambassador gave his lengthy speech of thanks and declared himself an atheist who had outgrown both marxist-leninism and readical humanism, the Swami simply chuckled and grinned.

Afterwards we tucked into the delicious samosa and pakora that the Embassy staff had made and vowed to come to the next event, even if it revolved around dam-building in Hydrabad. We simply can’t resist the samosa.