Our larp, Odysseus, ended almost two weeks ago. Last week we spent tearing it down and packing everything worth saving ready for storage. It's eight weeks since we started building our spaceship.

Today we hauled all the props to our storage. The final mission after we can say everything is done (except some paperwork). Now only thing left is throwing a party to our amazing crew. To celebrate our accomplishment and move forward.

It's been a long time since I have written code as my dayjob. Haven't even written much of any code for any reason lately. I used to be good at it. I wouldn't say I ever was a rockstar level coder, but still I would say I wss pretty good at it.

While I might bot be up to date with all the latest language versions, libraries and frameworks and it might take a while to get up to speed writing proper code again (even with the help of all the new A.I. coding assistant tools) I can still easily read and understand code.

Past few days the weather has been cloudy. The sun has hardly shown itself. But the weather has been extremely hot still. The humid air only males it worse.

At least when it's sunny and hot you can stay away from the direct sunlight and seek some coolness in the shade. It might not be any cooler there as what ot has been recently, but at least it feels that way when you compare it to the heat of the direct sunlight.

The lunch time is one of the highlights going to the office. Getting a chance to spend some off-duty time with my colleagues is nice, even though often the topics tend to steer towards work related matters. It's also a chance to get good food served to you without the effort of preparing it myself.

Yesterday, my first day at work after vacation I didn't go to the office. I would have wanted to - wanted to meet my colleagues. But as it's the prime vacation time there wouldn't have been anybody there.

We already got a lot of recognition in all the Finnish major news media as well as many smaller ones, but during the weekend at Ropecon we hit the jackpot: we won the "Deed of the year" award. The award is given yearly by the committee to a person, group or organization that has done remarkable work within the genre.

Today was my last day of vacation. I still had a lot of things undone from my list I made before my vacation started. Maybe I was a bit too ambitious, or maybe there just were too many ad hoc things to be done that took my precious time. I was still trying to tick off a few things from my list today, but it was hopeless to tey to clean it completely.

When I bought my current car it felt really big. It was the only reason I hesitated a little before making the decision to buy it. Until then I had only owned smaller cars, C-class mostly. I like how they are quite agile while still having enough space to not feel cramped inside and fit plenty of stuff inside.

It took quite a bit to get used to not having as nimble car. Parking in a tight spot requires a bit more work for example and not every slot is big enough to fit it in comfortably.

This weekend the yearly tabletop- and roleplaying convention Ropecon is happening again. It has been a yearly tradition for me to attend there. It's the yearly occasion when I have chance to meet many of my old playing buddies and see what's new on the scene.

This year however I'm going to skip it. This summer has been quite busy times for me and I think I need this last vacation weekend just for myself. It's time to relax before returning back to work next week.

The beginning of this summer was exceptionally hot. Fortunately the temperatures later got down to more bearable levels. But it's still been a lot warmer than average. Usually there are not that many warm days around here and even fewer of those extremely hot ones.

Music is a great medium to get a message through. There are many songs I listen (almost) purely for the lyrics. There are a lot of artists that use music to raise awareness to various things. It's a shame those songs rarely get any air time. Hit lists are filled with meaningless songs that don't make you think. Sure, some those artists contribute their profits to good causes in different ways. But a billion songs about love don't change the world.

One could say that best way to enjoy every bit of your vacation is having long days filled with things to do. Of course it depends on what those things are.

Today I woke up just a bit after 5 am. That's not too unusual for me. I actually woke up before the alarm I had to set (first time during my vacation) because I had ro drop my car ro the service early in the morning. The not-so-geat part is I was only at home around 1 am last night. I stayed late at our spaceship to get as much teardown done as possible.

Today we start tearing down our glorious spaceship. It took us two and a half weeks to build, two years of planning and preparations and now we need to take it all down in less than four days.

Last time we were confidently saying "never again" and threw most of our props away. A small portion of those were stored and donated away (which we thankfully got to borrow back). This time we won't be that careless. We have a large storage rented out where we can store big part of our props. Who knows, maybe never becomes sooner this time.

My last vacation week starts tomorrow. In a way the last three and a half weeks Have gone really fast. At the same time, looking back it feels like my last workday was ages ago.

It's the paradox of perceiving time again. When you have nothing to do time seems to crawl and while you are busy time just flies by. But afterwards it's the opposite. The busy times feel like a long time while the lazy times was just a blink of an eye.

The final run of our game is now over. Tomorrow there will be only debriefs for the last batch of players and on Monday we hand over our spaceship to another larp association which will borrow it for a day to run a children's larp there.

Today I finally had some free time. First time suring my vacation. It's been. While since I have been looking for new music, so decided to spend some time going through the discover weekly and release radar playlists in Spotify to check if there is anything new to listen.

After going through both list and finding nothing I was disappointed for a moment, until I remembered I can male my own music. Another thing I haven't had time to do lately.

Today the third and final run of our game will start. It has been hectic time building, running, resetting and repairing the "ship" over the past few weeks. If everything goes as planned and there are no issues during the final run today was my last day visiting the site before we start to tear down everything next week.

During our open doors tours oir visitors got to experience a "real" visit to a spaceship. We tried to create an immersive experience from the moment they stepped in. The ship we staged in itself with all the light and sound effects and props would have been immersive enough, but in addition to that we had people from our staff playing various roles of the crew around the ship.

Today we opened the doors to our spaceship to general public. We didn't promote the event that much (besides to our friends, families and colleagues, who mostly came already yesterday). We only had the event posted on a local events listing page. Of course we also had all the media coverage we have gotten from all the major news outlets.

While we have built a lot of props and software ourselves for our game we tried to use as much ready made stuff as possible. There has been enough work to just modify such things to our need and we barely made it all in time that doing everything from scratch would have resulted in much less feature rich systems.

One of the software component we use was partially used due to it's origin and real world usage over other similar options: the OpenMCT mission control framework. It's developed by NASA and used in many of their real space exploration missions!

Our godson and his brother have been staying at my place over this weekend. For the past several years it has been a tradition for them to visit us every year. Like us, they too like to play boardgames and these visits are often filled with long boardgame sessions. Over the weekend we have been playing at least 5 different boardgames. Many of them several times.