Author: furamo

I updated the blog to instantly accept comments. So that I don’t have to approve each one manually, they just appear right away.

Hopefully my spam detection system is sophisticated enough to prevent Furamo from being overrun with illegal activity.

But – in case you always had something to tell me and couldn’t be bothered – now is the time.

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Underbeer pressure

February 6, 2025

I was out with some friends and we were discussing what kinds of beer cocktails there are.

My first idea was the classic Submarine cocktail – having a shot of Jägermeister submerged upside down at the bottom of your beer glass. I used to have these decades ago at my regular bar.

Apparently there are more cocktails that you can make with beer, but the alluring idea of a Submarine swam around in the air and we were googling around how to make it.

At first we didn’t have a clue – how to get the shot of Jägermeister at the bottom of the beer glass without spilling any of it.

But eventually one of us – who also happened to be a professional barman – found the how-to instructions for this marvelous abomination.

So we went to the service personnel of the establishment to order one.

Apparently the art of making a Submarine is lost in time, only to be found in ancient tomes. Just as our barman initially couldn’t concoct one, neither could the officials of the premise.

So our own barman, albeit on his day off bartending, took the matter to his own hands and assembled a Submarine, teaching the young’uns while doing it.

It was finally there with us. The Submarine.

And I started to sip on it.

At first the only thing my tastebuds sensed was the cheap flavour of the cheapest beer we used in making it.

But eventually the shot glass at the bottom of the beer glass tipped over, and my drink slowly bled brown.

And the taste transformed from one of shabby beer to that of serious booze.

It was marvelous.

Got any tasty recipes we could cook the next time? Let me know in the comments.

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Hire or be hired

January 20, 2025

Hi, welcome back and here’s a low effort blog post for you because I haven’t managed a better one for too long.

I’ve had the hobby of developing my own video games for years now. I have started and abandoned a bunch of projects. But this time I’m the furthest I’ve ever been with a game.

So, I was looking for a background image for the game, to make the negative space in the game look more polished. The Internet nowadays sucks, you can’t find shit on Google, so I just browsed Reddit which is one of the few places left with reasonable human created content.

I found this image that I liked: https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/1bgspon/town_with_a_view/

And I posted a request to the PixelArt community asking whether someone can create a similar piece of art for me.

I got a ton of replies – looks like there are a lot of hungry artists out there looking for work. The prices for this kind of art ranged between $80 and $160.

Finally, the original author of the exact picture that I used as an example contacted me and asked if he can do it himself.

I was embarrassed – I could have just asked him first if he wanted to make a similar one for me, but instead went out looking for others.

So yeah, I did hire him in the end. And I am pleased with the result – it is pretty much what I envisioned for the game.

The final result for the art:

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They say there are five senses. Vision, touch, smell, hearing and taste. My nose hasn’t ever really worked well, so I’m lacking the smell one. But even though I am lacking the sense of smell, I’ve noticed a kind of a sixth sense. For each object, location or person – basically anything – I have this specific feeling that fully encapsulates massive amounts of information and memories about the thing into one compact feel.

It is hard to describe it – there aren’t really words for these kinds of things. But I’ve just called that sensation a “feeling” for myself. The “feeling” feels kind of like a color or something. Or a taste. But not quite. And you feel it with your whole being. I haven’t talked about it much nor known if others experience something similar.

Today I started a new book, “Focusing”, written in 1981. It describes the exact same experience I’ve had of sensing everything through an inexplicable “sixth sense”. Since there are no words for these things, the book’s author also made up their own words for them. They gave my “feeling” the name of “felt sense”. For me it’s a wonderful discovery, really validating – knowing that what I’ve been sensing all this time is a real thing and has been written about.

I am pretty bad at explaining things, putting my thoughts to words. But the book explains the “felt sense” pretty well. It feels nice reading a clear description for a thing you always felt but could never fully describe yourself. Now, knowing what to look for, I found even more books about the same topic.

I wish there was way more research about human minds, not just biological, but also psychological, to get some of the current theories to a level where they become scientific truths. Understanding how your mind works would be extremely helpful, especially nowadays with ever increasing rates of mental illness. And the help you can get for those illnesses is currently questionable at best, because we are only still figuring these things out.

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I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. He lives in the Russian district of the city, close to where I used to live in high school, so it was kinda nostalgic to walk around there.

He has a small, super friendly dog. The dog was really interested in my beer and constantly tried to sniff it and lick it. Later, someone actually gave the dog a drop of beer and after that it lost its interest in mine. I guess he didn’t like the taste, just the smell.

We played board games and video games, hours passed. I got way too drunk and lost control over what I was saying, telling some pretty cringe stories. At some point, me and another dude at the party left for another event – a night time gaming convention nearby.

The gaming convention was fun as hell. There was so much stuff to do and see there. I was really drawn to the stand that sold anime merchandise – a highlight for me that they had was a hand painted picture of Marin Kitagawa.

People always tell me when they visit my place that my walls are so empty – that I should put some pictures up. I thought about buying the waifu picture at the stand for decorating my home, but ended up not getting it.

They also had a bunch of figurines for sale – the most interesting ones being those of Rem, who is particularly relevant at the moment since the show she is from is currently airing another season. And she’s also a character in the mobile game I play daily.

The only souvenir I got in the end from that stand was a Bocchi keychain.

The event had many arcade machines, pc-s and consoles around for playing. Me and a friend played a few games of Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, which has been my favorite game ever since I played it for the first time in 2004, on my Nokia N-Gage with an emulator.

While playing that game there, I started at difficulty 5 and my friend at difficulty 1. I was too drunk for the speed and concentration it required and lost. So I kept reducing the difficulty each game, and finally won when we were playing on the same level. Later we came back to that machine, I was more sober, kept increasing the difficulty and managed to win up to difficulty 4. It was quite an experience, playing my favorite game for the first time on an arcade-like machine.

The event also had a cosplay competition. There were various cosplays from Genshin Impact and some other IP-s I don’t care about. And the highlight for me – a cosplay of OMGkawaiiAngel from Needy Streamer Overload. I loved that game – its protag is a girl with severe mental illness and personality disorders and drug addiction and you gotta manage her mental state to get through the game. All of which is relatable to me.

That cosplay was well executed. When the cosplayer stumbled on stage, it actually seemed in character, which was cute. I voted for her in the competition. But I wasn’t there when the competition results were announced so I still don’t know who won it.

Around the time I was in university I used to hang around with people every single day. I had energy to go to multiple social events in one night. Nowadays I meet people like once a month at best. But the amount of stuff experienced yesterday almost made me feel young again.

So. Have any suggestions what picture I should put up on my living room wall instead? Leave a comment if you do.

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