The night prior to inspiration

My expectations of the coming weekend are high. It's the first conference for this year, and it's a good one, Mediespråk (media language). Two years ago, the chief editor of a Swedish evening newspaper, Bo Strömstedt, made fall in love with language and poetry again. On an early Saturday morning no less. I completely forgot the hangover and instead, I came to terms with the grudge against classic French literature (long story). I'm still impressed by the man. This year's main speakers are the journalist and fashion blogger Ebba von Sydow and the award winning journalist and author Mustafa Can.

Link herbarium

I shouldn’t really be doing this, currently being on vacation and all, but I simply have to put down some links and decompose the Hemavan conference a bit. I'll keep it light though. There was a debate regarding the exact phrasing of the Finnish sentence, that once won a European contest for being the most pleasant sounding sentence. After a bit of googling, I'm naturally a lot wiser. It appears to be Aja hiljaa sillalla (which means "drive carefully/slowly on the bridge" and is taken from a road sign), an option that wasn’t even mentioned by us Finns :) I really like the sound of it, but this one is a lot better:

-Kokko, kokoo kokoon koko kokko!
(Kokko (surname) build up the bonfire!)
-Koko kokko?
(The whole bonfire?)
-Koko kokko!
(Yes the whole bonfire!)

There's no denying, Finnish is a great language!

Monique de Haas has a blog on cross media communication and she recently blogged an interesting project that awakes the gamer in me. Anyone can sign up for co-creating a game from scratch and once it’s a huge success, you can look forward to loads of royalty revenue. I’m kinda curious on the work methods though, as there’s a risk that the game will be a mosaic of the contributors’ compromises. Karin Danielsson told me about a BBC TV format that is now to air on SVT, called Slutet på historien (end of story). Established writers and authors provide the beginning of short stories, the ending is up to the viewers to write. Evidently, it’s a massive success in the UK. Mattias Arvola pointed me to Comikit, a creative software for children to train language among other things. I need to tip my colleagues working on the Space Trainees format on that.

Phew, now, the vacation may start!