Me? I like talking about myself, but I feel uneasy doing so unless I feel people listening are comfortable with hearing me just go on and on about myself. I also am no good at free introductions. When someone says "tell me about yourself" to me I usually don't know what to say and what to not as there is always in a way or another a limited time and different people want to hear different things in different order and different contexts. I may seem like a real bastard on first impressions, but once you get to know me and get past my rough, Finnish reservedness and learn to understand the way my mind works, I'm really an ok guy, if not downright lovely.
But what makes me interesting from amonst the rest of the nearby internet? I have a somewhat rare eye condition, called achormatopsia. It shapes my life in a certain way, bars me from a number of things but also opens other things for much easier access to me.
I am Finnish, I love life and living, I love my language. I love food, I love sleeping, I love staying up and I love having a great time. I love winter, I love summer, I love spring, I love autumn. Most of all I love music, both making it and listening to it.
Most people know me by my real name, which is Tommi. Some also know me as and in real life call me Ishmael (and pun inteded there, now drop it already). I am also known as Zlorth or Matti_Rapula around the internet, since my main nickname has been in many places taken and the alternate depends on the time the account is from. The first is older, from several years back, where as the latter is newer, been in use from just a cuople of years ago.
I am a perfectionist, pagan, dreamer, optimist and realist. I am both adorable and horrible. I am narsistic and self-hating. I am simple and straightforward but I am full of contradictions. I am paradoxal. I find it very hard, if not impossible to purely hate anything, even myself. I have a feet on the ground and my head in the clouds. I believe in nothing and in everything, I believe in myself, and in all things. I do not believe in an almighty god, as one has yet to prove to me they exist. I believe things proven but I question everything at one time or another. I follow my heart and my intuition, I make irrational choices and bad decisions, but I do not dwell in them for too long. Instead I move on, live in the moment, live for today and worry not about the future. It will come as it will nontheless. I just try to make sure it does come.
I am a great fan of music, both live and on record. I generally listen to almost any sort of music that sounds good to my ears, albeit usually if I get to choose what's playing it'll be something heavier. If you are interested in a deeper look into my active listening habits you can have a loo at my last.FM profile. For a general idea I'll throw in a few of my long time favourite bands. My first ever true love in music, so to speak, was Sonata Arctica. Got me into metal music years and years ago and still to this day retains the place of the band I am most excited about when it comes to releases or possibilities to see them live. Sometime over the years from there to here I discovered Kiuas, Diablo, Amorphis, Iron Maiden, Samael and Ayreon to be very much likeable. Not long after discovering Sonata a desire to perform and create music was born in me aswell, and I started studying guitar, mostly on my own. I haven't really had opportunities for much, some here and there one or two show ensembles or random jamming, but now I intend to finally get something started properly and on display here and elsewhere.
I hate conforming to norms just because they exist, just because everyone does. I hate conventional, boring things. I do not try to be anything, not part of the mass nor completely unique from it. I am just myself. I model my style in everything after what I find pleasing -- be it in clothing, in expressing myself, in spending my free time or doing my job.
I like physical contact and my personal space is small and rarely enforced. There is no subject too taboo for me to talk about and I am not too careful with what I say, which brings out my grim and dirty sense of humour. I am a practical person, I prefer doing and trial and error to reading and listening, although I am good at listening too as long as the subject anyhow interests me. In my case actions speak slightly louder than words, as I tend to say things not quite thought through, whereas to me communication and saying things out loud and as they are is highly valued.
One more thing I greatly like is provoking people just because I can. It is not to put down one, but to show and poke at the weak points of the whole system. I openly claim I am a Satanist. But what does that mean? No, I do not worship Satan. I do not worship anything. I do not believe in God and Satan as described in fairytales. I encourage you, if you do not know what it means for real, look it up. Satanism (Satanism has nothing to do with Satan apart from the great provocative value use of the name provides) is a term coined by Anton LaVey in the 60's to represent an ideology and a religion that neither have anything to do with Christianity -- except to maybe poke fun at it, and I follow the general guidelines of the ideology to some extent.
Didn't get too sick of this rambling and want to get to the interesting stuff already? Well let's talk about something commonly deemed interesting.
Aye, the thing people are most fascinated about in me at first. I'm visually impaired, medically almost blind, but in normal life it's really hard to tell by the way I go. I do need to read things a bit closer than other people, but I'm surely not the only one with bad eyesight out there. But that's not all. Achromatopsia is a genetic eye condition that is rather challenging to fully explain as it exhibits such a variety of symptoms at varying levels... There is for example a Wikipedia article on achromatopsia to read in case you are further interested in the medical aspect of it.
My complete, apparently genetically inherited achromatopsia means mostly reduced visual accuracy, great photosensitivity and complete monochromacy. The last bit is what generally interest people the most, tho I every now and then have to try to explain the first one too. Simplest put my vision isn't blurry but the details fade the further things get. Like resizing a good quality photograph down quite a bit. The colour thing -- or lack of -- I really can't explain any further than that apparently I see everything in monochrome. I've fiddled a lot of coloured blocks and bits and pieces abou the subject and I'd say it's about right, for me the shades of grey I see rank in a different order from darkest to lightes than for people seeing the actualy colours of the blocks.
Being visually impaired has closed me out of some things in life -- driver's lisence being the easiest example -- but also brought me to a lot of fun stuff. I've been involved in the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired's youth work for years, first as a mere participant on the camps and events, and for the last two years as a member of board type deal consisting of visually impaired youth who decide the events to arrange and are so to speak the youth's voice within the federation. I never saw myself as an organisation activist person before, but putting myself up on the member vote for the youth work group, getting elected and having been a part of it for two years has shown me it's actually rather fun to be doing this sort of stuff. Even if the stuff is just sitting in a meeting as it has been most of the time until now, I still find it fun to do.
What is this, but which this? This here, this site, is my little corner of the internet where I can do whatever I like and can be arsed to. I intend to showcase my musical work atleast, and possibly at some point add back the few small games I have made.
Over the years I've tried a lot of creative stuff. Of whatever I've gone through drawing, making games (with a nice utility called Adventure Game Studio), photography and making music have stuck on. There's really nothing to write home about on the photography nor drawing fronts apart from the very few things I have uploaded at deviantArt. I used to have the few old-school 2D adventure games up on this site but most of them are nothing special and I am still waiting to get someone to draw graphics for my bigger games I have on the drawing board. The old games page might make a comeback here at some point. But for now the only thing really showcased here is my musical output.
Verilöylykauha then is a different matter... It is a compound play on words in Finnish. The basics on how it works in grammatical sense would take five hours to explain, so I'll stick with giving you a very loose translation, which would be "blood bath tub". The literal translation is slightly more complicated, as where the English example comes from "blood bath" and "bath tub", the Finnish comes from the Finnish words for "blood bath" and the name for a sort of big spoon or laddle used to throw water to the kiuas in a sauna -- that is, to heittää löylyä (lit. throw löyly). Want to read up more on Sauna? The internet is full of info but if you're feeling too lazy to look, there is a nice article about sauna on finland.fi.