What a beautiful day! I had taken a vacation day from work today.

After I woke up to help my GF in the morning by preparing food and coffee for her, I crawled back to bed and slept in.

Took my sweet time, dreamt crazy dreams. Later, I started a new audio book from libby (more on that maybe another time) and started cleaning and stowing away our camping supplies.

In the evening we went out to that bar that is so close to us — they had an open terrace for us to sit on, drink beers and eat. Lazy discussions about our summer plans and how we would approach tomorrow’s day hike.

Finally, a little stroll along the two lakes that are less than two hundred meters from our home.

Mosquito bitten and sore from carrying the heavy backpacks while walking through difficult terrain, but happy nonetheless, we emerged yesterday night from the national park.

We walked from Ristikallio to the Visitor’s Center of Oulanka and stayed over night in the camping area of Taivalköngäs.

The distance wasn’t that long: Maybe 18 km - still, our untrained bodies were and are pretty exhausted nonetheless.

Initially, we had the idea of continuing our hike down south to Juuma which would have added another 35 km tomorrow and on Tuesday, but we wisely decided against it. In our current state of fitness, we can do around 10 km a day, maybe a little more, but this number is really dependent on the terrain. And even a full day of rest in our home here in Kuusamo, we felt, would have not been enough to recuperate. You have to leave something for next time. And we’re looking forward to hike it.

Regardless of that, we had a great time. This part of the national park is just breath taking. Lush forests, amazing rapids and all around amazing things to see, big and small.

We were lucky with the weather, too. It only rained once, in the morning, while we were laying comfortably in our tent, listening to the water dropping on the nylon tarp, mixed with the sounds of nature and the faint rushing of the rapids some two hundred meters down the hill.

For our trip we had prepared a southern German speciality: Spätzle. Spätzle’s are normally a kind of fresh pasta that taste amazing with a heavy helping of Emmentaler cheese, some fresh parsley and roasted onions on top. Since the German supermarket chain Lidl is also present in Finland, we sometimes can get a dried version of this dish, which we did. We pre-boiled the German-style pasta at home, so we would just need to warm them up while out in the field (instead of boiling them for 13 minutes out there). And although they were somewhat heavy in my backpack, they tasted amazing after a long afternoon and evening of hiking.

These kinds of trips make you appreciate your home, when you come back as well. Our comfy couch, the soft bed, a warm shower to soften the muscles. We celebrated by getting pizza on the way back home. What a great Midsummer weekend.

Photos: M.H. & e.virsu

Just read @manton’s old post on the deliberate lack of Hashtags on here. I think the concept of emojiitags is a great idea not least because it’s kind of a more controlled way to tag a post with a certain topic.

This means users have the freedom to tag, but the platform has control over what a tag ca be. Bad actors may not invent new tags or reinvent slightly different tags that denote essentially the same topic only with a slight change of emphasis and all the other tricks of attention generation that free-form tagging lends itself to on social media.

Hashtags and Twitter trends go together.

Emojitags won’t solve this problem, I’m afraid. A limited and controlled topic dictionary doesn’t change that. If trends are not to be made invisible, then there is an incentive to appear in the discovery timeline for the trending tag.

And even if trends are not going to be made to stand out more: Trends are somewhat inevitable. E.g. the hockey tag :ice_hockey: shows what you would expect at the moment: A few posts on the Stanley Cup.

Another problem is that certain forms of content happen to be more successful. Just think of instagram, which is full of cute puppy videos (amongst other things) or tik tok, which has a crazy amount of dancing videos. What I’m trying to say: A platform has a ratcheting effect on content once one (or more) repeatable format(s) is (or are) found and found to be successful.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. I think this is a somewhat predictable quality of social media platforms, when they grow big enough to sustain the complexities on which those emergent properties are dependent.

So what can platform owners do to mitigate the bad effects of growth?

The answer is probably that growth needs to be slow. And content needs to be actually policed. And discoverability needs to be somewhat limited. And content shouldn’t be sorted by likes or similar.

It seems that micro.blog already does most of these things.

Starting fresh on my work computer because of changed policies around private use and a new monitoring tool that must be installed. Anxious moments. Will everything work? Did I backup everything? Ugh. Wish me luck!

If you want to make me monologue without end, give me a question where framing is important, like: “Are you happy?”

I found myself laughing out loud today. To myself. While nobody was at home. It’s probably hinting at something. I just don’t know yet what.

Uff. The drama around the roof reconstruction continues. They decided to work on Sunday, too. Drilling big hooks into the outer wall to secure the scaffolding. We were never warned about that our weekends would be ruined, too.

So thankful to my partner for calling the guy in charge and negotiating a stop - however she managed to do that. This is the least communicated reconstruction project I had to endure ever.

Hiking was indeed nice. Now a late dinner cooking session to feed us hungry and exhausted nature admirers.

(The era of the Pre-Post-Pandemic means that having guests over becomes possible again. It’s a challenge that I want to use as a chance to improve my hosting abilities.)

If things don‘t come naturally, I immediately want to devise a system to solve the problem. Replace talent with technology.

If you are forgetful, you should write it down, create a reminder maybe put it on your calendar. In the same way, I feel I could counter my shortcomings when hosting somebody, too:

If you are not a natural host maybe devising a guest room (we don’t have the space, but in theory…) and putting aside some resources just for the guests just as a bnb would do would lessen the stress.

I’ll try to observe closely what things make staying over here and being a host enjoyable. Let’s see what of the things we improvised this time, we could account for next time beforehand.

Having a guest (Friend of GF) over. My GF and me both are not natural hosts. We stress cleaned like crazy yesterday. First night of two went well tough. If the weather holds we might visit a short local trail later today.

Also: Just got my first vaccination. Thank goodness we are still allowed to go to Sauna!

Would’ve been good to inform the tenants more than 2 days in advance that the roof will be replaced and that it will take basically the whole summer.

We started watching 911 Lonestar (3 eps in) and we like it. I especially like it for making diversity the norm (within the circles of this fire dept.). Sometimes conflicts are resolved kinda quickly but then again there are only 10 eps in the season.

Speaking of @merlinmann: Got inspired to try something new, after seeing him enthusiastically rebooting Most Days.

Love the thought technology of doing stuff not because it’s gonna make me rich or whatever, but because it’s fun. This is fun. At least for now.

So. Hi! I’m matti.

I’m a German living in north-eastern Finland. I work as a developer remotely for a German company. I have an academic background in history of science and technology.

Love a good chunk of the @merlinmann MPU, Maximumfun and some Incomparable Shows. Hi!

So.