Jae's Blog

For the first time in a really long while, I have good news to report from the frozen wasteland also called Finland.

As of today, November 24th 2025, the Finnish Red Cross Blood Donation Service will give the same questionnaire, regardless of the gender of the person wanting to donate blood.
The question about gender will also be removed altogether. Doing that is a pretty good step in including everybody, and a welcome change in today’s environment.

You can read more about this on their official website. Also donate blood if you can, you’ll literally save lives.

To give a more complete timeline, the restriction of blood donation for gay couples was removed back in December 2023, which the blood donation service requested in 2022.

With summer just around the corner, it still surprises me that we still have snow here.

Not sure what they are doing over there, but Yle reported 30 cm of snow around the northeast of the country.

Quite honestly, I wish we still had snow here, in the south (and I know people around here will hate me for saying this). Summer is probably my most hated season.

Back a few years ago, my personal ID number changed. Just to sum up for people who don’t know, in Finland, the personal ID number is used for everything. It basically identifies you to government and banking services.

Given the data debacle I talked about previously, I decided it would probably be good to request my own Posti data, as GDPR allows me to do so.

You can imagine my surprise when clicking the request link and hurting a wall saying I don’t exist:

After talking to some people, it turns out the way of fixing this is quite easy. You just need to log into the Moving Notification site of Posti (muuttoilmoitus.fi) with your bank details.

After doing so, I can finally access the data request page, as simple as that!

Here in Finland, it’s the Good Friday, meaning we get this Friday and next Monday off work.

That’s plenty of time for me to re-play some of my favourite games, and on the menu this time: Yakuza Kiwami 2.

I’ve finished this one months ago, but remains the one with the best music in my opinion.

If you’re interested, you can grab it DRM-free on GOG, or just grab the (almost) whole series DRM-free.

I wish the more recent games such as Gaiden, Ishin, Infinite Wealth and Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii would be released on there, but hopefully this will happen soon enough.

If I manage to do what I wanted, I’ll go ahead and re-play Yakuza 6 as well, but we’ll see.

I’ll write a larger review of the series at some point in the future. In fact, it’s been in the works for a while, but I haven’t finished it due to the sheer amount of content in those games.

If you live in Finland, you have without a doubt interacted with Posti. Recently, they announced large changes in their user data processing policies, taking into effect on May 20th 2025.

Bottom of the line is:

• New targeted advertising (directly sending your data to Facebook, Google, Adform and many others)
• Profiling of your data

To avoid getting caught in this, visit the account settings page (on my.account.posti.fi), then on the left, select “settings”.

In there you will need to uncheck two options:

• “Use of customer data for targeted advertising (effective from 20 May)”
• “Profiling (effective from 20 May)”

Also feel free to clean up any options you might have forgotten to disable before.

As a friendly reminder: do not forget to press “save changes” on the bottom of the page when done with the unchecking part.

With this, you should be pretty safe to proceed, tho just in case, I’d still watch this page just in case Posti has a magical bug that would re-enable everything for everyone.

Personally, I find this whole thing kinda scummy given Posti is an essential public service. Forcing that kind of analytics on people can only go badly on the long term.