First Post

Allright. First post. Let's see where we stand.

My name is Isak and I am a Digital Media student at Hyper Island in Karlskrona, Sweden. I come from a family of four (including me), with the Default Household setting of a father, mother, me and my sister. I lived with all of them until only a few months ago, when I moved 643.9 km to live in my own one-room apartment in Karlskrona. If you ask me if it's scary or super exciting to live on my own for the first time, I'll probably answer "no, not really". At the moment I have no real preferences. I accept the moving-out as one of our modern rites of passage, and hopefully I can also leave the Frozen Wastes (aka: Scandinavia) and live abroad some day.

For those few who might wonder (or haven't heard me rant about this before): When speaking English, I pronounce my name as "Isaac", and when speaking Swedish I use the Swedish pronounciation. My family name is Ström. "Strom" is acceptable, but "o" is not "ö", no matter how hard you might believe it.

I don't care for the word "blog". I'm beginning to accept it, but that doesn't mean I like it. From now on (until I cave in) I will call this a Weblog. Everybody else's weblogs will also be referred to as weblogs. Neither do I enjoy the term "podcast". It's a sound file on the internet and suddenly it's a "podcast"? No. It doesn't work that way.

Anyways, this weblog is supposed to be about my time at Hyper Island, so perhaps I should talk about that?

I've been here at "Hyper" for exactly one month, so I suppose this post could be called "30 days into it" or something equally descriptive, but no. It won't be called that. The first few weeks were quite relaxed, we had a few introduction days where we got some useful information and presented ourselves to our classmates; then we had the UGL-course, which was a quite intense week of full 12h+ days of talking, doing and analyzing group dynamics and our own function in a group. I'm sure I learned something, and I think it was healthy to have the course so early. To follow up on the UGL we also had two days of Team Building with the whole class. Lots of fun to be had, and even more analyzing of our results.

In contrast, the last two weeks have been intense. We were introduced to the first project module - Information Society - with a lecture from one of the school's founders, Jonathan Briggs. The project aims for us to establish knowledge and understanding of the Digital Media industry, as well as give us an opportunity to begin gathering connections.

At first it felt as if we had a decent amount of time to complete our project in, but then we realized that one whole week would be dedicated to a separate group exercise (Motion Week) and that the deadline for the Information Society is on this Tuesday, meaning that we only had about 7 school days dedicated to working on the project itself. On top of it all I've got a cold and a fever (it's gone down now, so this is not entirely delirious mumblings... yet), and several out-of-school things tugging at my attention...

Ah, well. I'm sure it'll work out, and if it doesn't... at least I'll learn something from it.

10000 days in the fire is long enough.