Mercurial Circus

flowers

2008-09-11T15:47:00.000-07:00

I threw out four bouquets of flowers today. Two of them were larger than my torso, and they made a huge mess on the floor. Dry petals fluttering all over the piano, and brittle leaves on the ground. The one the John Howard Society sent included a strange plant that resembled the tail of a fluffy animal—it shed fuzzy bits of itself all over my clothes. They filled two garbage bags.

It feels final, somehow, to both acknowledge and dispose of the evidence of tragedy. However, they took up a lot of space in the living room, and I never was a girl who cared for flowers. I didn't like the aesthetic of them decomposing there on the piano, next to a pile of mail and the box that holds my mother's ashes.

Massive flower bouquets may make a lovely gesture, but they're hell to clean up.

I don't think I'm the same person I was three weeks ago.

toxic

2007-05-14T17:08:00.000-07:00

Food poisoning is quite possibly the only thing in life I've found less pleasant than a full blown migraine, though the only reason it ranks so highly is because it goes on... and on... and on...

Point of interest: it might just have been the particular staff on duty, or that I went in at 7am (instead of my traditional evening "oh god kill me" time for migraines) but emergency seemed a lot kinder this time. I wonder if people with "real" problems like serious dehydration and vomiting get more sympathy than those with something as trivial as mere pain?

Nah, it was probably the 7am thing. Emergency was relatively quiet--I guess people with the less critical problems are sleeping, or waiting for a clinic. I ended up so thoroughly stoned on medication that I couldn't really panic about all the needles, but I was still dimly unimpressed with the guy who kept pushing back the curtain to stare at me. (Had I been fully coherent, I'd have verbally murdered him.)

Sorry for the woefully personal entry. I'm still intending to update, but I've just been too busy to keep up on the news.

conservapedia

2007-05-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting article about activists trying to get a chimp legal status as a "person". The really hilarious part? I found the link on the Conservapedia, titled, "Liberals oppose a legal right to life for unborn children, but demand legal rights for chimps."

The Conservapedia bills itself as "The Trustworthy Encyclopedia." Because as we all know, the Wikipedia is a den of liars, abortionists, and bleeding heart liberals. Why does an encyclopedia have to be political?

feisty fawns in your backyard

2007-05-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

Dell computers now come pre-loaded with Ubuntu (Linux). Even if you're not on the bleeding edge of the tech industry, there are indications that Linux is creeping farther into the mainstream. It isn't just weirdos like my brother who run Linux systems these days.

Corey is a strong promoter for Ubuntu, so he's happy about it. In fact, Canonical is sending him to Spain for a conference next week. (Yes, I'm jealous.) But it's interesting to be close to someone so passionate about open source technology. I'm learning things—and finding interests—that I never knew were accessible to non-techs like myself. I'm not going to be playing around with source code any time ~~soon~~ ever, but that doesn't mean it isn't something I can support. I've chipped in on a couple of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletters, editing and smoothing out bumpy grammar. It isn't much, but I find that the sheer passion behind open-source is a hard thing to ignore. People put forth professional-quality work… for free. It boggles my inner cynic, but they do it out of love for the concept.

Think that Linux is nerdy stuff that has absolutely no bearing on your existence? Try using the multiple desktops that come with something like Ubuntu, then go back to using Windows. It feels kind of cramped. Switching to Ubuntu after years of Windows is a bit like putting on a running shoe when you're used to wearing hiking boots; it feels really weird for a few days, but once you're adjusted, you can appreciate its virtues. Running shoes and hiking boots are both comfortable, but they have different strengths. Linux systems aren't much for video games, but they're pretty spiffy for usability.

Linux also opens new subcultures. Before I started dating Corey, I put a passing reference to using Linux systems at work on a dating site profile. The queries came pouring in, titled things like, "linux?" or asking about my workplace. I'd tapped a new vein of nerd-subculture in the mining expedition of my geekiness.

More importantly, Linux opens up work experience and career opportunities. Corey could probably turn his high-level volunteer work into a real job in the industry, if he were willing to live in another country. All I seem to be able to get out of it is a broader dating pool. But maybe, someday, using my editing skills to contribute (albeit in a tiny way) to the Ubuntu community might make a difference in my career.

Alas, no trip to Spain for me. And I worry about being "just a girlfriend" almost as much as I worry about crashing in too much on Corey's hobbies. It seems to be the catch-22 of being the rare female in male-dominated fields; you get so used to people questioning your reasons for being there that you end up questioning yourself just as much.

can't stop the signal

2007-05-02T22:26:00.001-07:00

09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

"On 1 May 2007, technology news site Digg began removing posts containing the number, and in some cases, closing accounts which created those posts. The Digg community responded by creating a high volume of posts containing the key, many using creative ways of semi-directly or indirectly inserting the number, such as in song, in images (either representing the digits pictorially or directly representing bytes from the key as colors), and on merchandise. At one point, Digg.com's "entire homepage was covered with links to the HD-DVD code or anti-Digg references." Eventually the Digg administrators gave up and stopped removing such submissions, stating, "You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.""

The first hacked HD DVD was Serenity. How poetic is that? I am not a hacker, and I am not a programmer. To me, it's just a symbol. A very powerful symbol.

gods of media

2007-04-30T00:42:00.000-07:00

Heard about the God of War Promotion yet? If you belong to PETA, you might want to skip this one.

More than half of me is thinking, "that marketing strategy is brilliant. Risky, inspired, and creative." A mere 40% or so is thinking, "what a crappy reason for an animal to die." Does this mean I've gone to the dark side?

Lately I've been fascinated by marketing, advertising, and PR. In fact, I've been slowly chewing my way through the library's selection of books on the subject, having wandered into them after tackling the subject of business writing.

So far, my thoughts go something like this:

Advertising is not the creature it used to be. While not entirely obsolete, its power is diluted to such a degree that it's more of a reminder of the product than anything else. If what you're advertising isn't already famous, no one cares. They'll remember your punch-line, not your product. Example: Remember OutPost.com? Yeah, no one else does either.

*PR is the new advertising. Rather than going directly after the consumer, PR aims at getting a product covered in third party media, which are automatically more legitimate to jaded consumers than ads. Example: Sony sacrificing a goat to get the attention of the gods of media.

The mystery is how to go about getting PR. By committing an act of barbarism and indulging in such a hedonistic display of irreverence, Sony did something that I can't help but view as artistic: it's meant to piss people off. It could backfire, but man, you have to admire the guts (ha!) that the promoter behind that project must have.

I mean, how do you pitch that? "I'd like to sell this product by parading half-naked women around and slaughtering a goat. Then we'll get testosterone hyped fan-boys to eat warm offal. By combining indecency, the degradation of women, and cruelty to animals, we will create the perfect trinity; women's groups, conservatives, and PETA will do all the PR for us!"

Which is why I think it's brilliant. Further evidence of this brilliance is that now I'd really like to try God of War. None of the advertisements elicited so much as a twinge of curiosity, but a goat died for it, and I want to know what the big deal is.

When really, the only "big deal" is probably that Sony's PS3 got roundly spanked by the explosive sales of Nintendo's Wii, and they're willing to do anything to yank the spotlight back. A few months ago, buying a Wii meant that you were the coolest kid on the block and everyone wanted to try it. I know one guy who bought a PS3. We made fun of him. And that is the opposite of good PR.

pearls before breakfast

2007-04-09T00:37:00.000-07:00

I tripped over this interesting bit of news and was absolutely fascinated. What happens when one of the world's finest musicians takes his $3.5 million Stradivari violin and plays in a subway station for the better part of an hour? He got $32.17. Over a thousand people walked past him, a handful stopped, and one person realized who he was. You can read the entire thing here.

"A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work."

live inside the book

2007-04-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

I like Tanith Lee. She knows that things can be beautiful because of their mystery, and does not patronize her readers with all the answers. She skates along the edge of mystery and darkness; sometimes her work falls over the line and I can't quite follow. But when she hits that balance of mystery and beauty and humanity (Silver Metal Lover, When the Lights Go Out, The Claidi Collection) she gets it.

I think this quote is beautiful. It makes me want to spend more time writing--and not just the grinding-away-for-money kind of writing.

"When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, fee its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one.

Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all those other places than here."

-Tanith Lee

time again

2007-03-26T21:36:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how easy it is to lose sight of perspective and work yourself sick under the right combination of factors. You get so focused on taking the next step, and the next step, and the next step that you don't realize how frayed you're getting. It's possible to work more than forty hours a week and stay sane, but only if you love what you do. I didn't love what I did.

So I quit. It took a lot of encouragement to finally submit that resignation letter. It felt a lot like a break up. As soon as the deed was done, thoughts like, "oh god, what have I done?" started to surface. Was it really that bad? Was I really so unhappy? Was it reasonable of me to be so unhappy? What if it got better? It didn't really mean to make me sad...

This is, of course, sheer madness. If you're going to spend so much of your life in a place, it had better be a place that doesn't make you crazy. At the same time as I backed out of my corporate niche, contract work was reduced, and I'm now on the fine edge of unemployment.

Which is kind of scary, but not was much as it would have been two years ago. I'm older, I have more marketable skills, and there are jobs to be had in Victoria. I can find something that lets me feel competent, useful, and appreciated. I can find something that doesn't involve working the same office as my boyfriend, though he was pretty dang handy when it came to tag-teaming snarly problems into submission.

I intended this post to have a point, but it really doesn't. I've got some time to write again, which is glorious, because it also means that I have time to appreciate fresh air and sunlight. Change is good.

recovery

2006-08-31T16:13:00.000-07:00

What happens at PAX, stays at PAX.

At least that's what someone in the table-top game room said. Unfortunately, I picked up some kind of virulent case of ebola, which is rendering me half senseless at the moment. Obviously some things don't stay at PAX.

I also came home with a huge bag (literally huge--it's bigger than my torso, and made an oversize battering ram to get through the crowds on Saturday) of swag. As if I didn't own enough black t-shirts, now I have ones for Pirates of the Burning Sea, NVidia, and Vangaurd, as well as the PAX 06 shirt I bought.

I packed two novels to read during the downtime, and as testament to how busy things were, I didn't even get half-way through one of them. However, there's some kind of creepy synergy about reading Microserfs while sitting in a Bellevue Starbucks. It really is Bill's town. However, King B-B-B-Bill probably wouldn't be too thrilled with some of the things Alex St. John said in his keynote speech about the pre-history of the X-Box.

Alex gave away a desktop computer that almost made me weep to gaze upon, but of course, I didn't win it. I did get a handful of shiny tokens that his daughters flung into the avid crowd, however. When I'm less apathetic, I'll figure out what those are for. There were a lot of give-aways, but most of them were too crowded or tricky for me to take a serious interest in. Being 5'7" made me a little too short to compete during the "toss free crap into the crowd" distributions. (NVidia, I hate you. The bruises haven't faded yet, though the sweat from the guy who landed on me did wash off in about two hours of scrubbing.)

The rewards of PAX were more subtle, but pretty dang cool nonetheless. The group of guys I hooked up with from #GWP placed first and second in the Guild Wars tournament, which was both unsurprising and satisfying. I later had dinner with people who I only know by internet handles, and it didn't even occur to me to ask their real names. I was called Samyel more often than Audrey, and that suits me just fine. I got to game with complete strangers, try several yet-to-be released games, and enjoy a complete immersion of being surrounded by some 19,000 of "my people."

When the final round of Omegathon turned out to be old-school Tetris, I felt completely at peace to be surrounded by people screaming their approval and joy. We clapped along with digital Russian music, and "oooooohed!" at every misplaced block. Later, I stood alone on the balcony of my hotel room and was so happy that despite exhaustion, I felt light enough to fly.

Dimlight posted some stuff about PAX on his blog, and so did one of the other guys I met at the Guild Wars booth. You can check you his Games. Tech. Musings. blog for more on the tournament.

I'm not even bothering to spell check or edit this, so tough. I'm running a fever and I keep nodding off at the computer, or curled up in front of the TV. Every time I lie down, I start to cough, and my throat feels like I gargled razors.

And y'know what? It was soooo damn worth it.

I'll post more on PAX later. Meanwhile, if you have no idea what PAX is, or what the hell I'm talking about, go check out the Penny Arcade Expo site. If there was any doubt as to whether Tycho and Gabe had ascended to digital godhood or not, I think it's been settled. I hope that e-celebrity treats them well.

hiatus

2006-01-22T00:57:00.000-08:00

I'm putting this blog on hold, maybe forever. I've got other things on the go, and updating it doesn't interest me right now.

If you're remotely interested in online computer gaming, go have a look at Guild Wars at TenTonHammer. I'm managing the site and writing content under the name "Samyel," which helps keep the "omg, ur a rl grrl? cn I c ur pix?" crap to a minimum.

"no friends, all enemies."

2005-11-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

More on the William Freund thing, focusing on his Aspergers autism, and some of his internet activity. SA, thankfully, hasn't been mentioned. Nor have the other less-than-mainstream communities he visited prior to the murders, except for an autism site. Apparently, he asked them for help. When he came to SA, all he asked for was information about ammunition.

It's been a few days since the incident now, and although internet communities are still talking about it, mainstream media seems to have let it go. Hallelujah.

Or course, it never occurs to anyone that the reason things like this and Columbine happen is because of the marginalization and torment of kids who are different. School is hell if you're ugly/disabled/socially awkward/poor. By the time some of these kids finish, the only world they see is a hostile one where even the teachers dislike them.

It's hard to move into the world with anything other than rage and hopelessness if you never found a niche in school. As an adult, you know that the bad things eventually blow over. As a kid, if your whole world has been a bad thing, you don't have any sense that it will end with anything other than death.

Maybe I'm reading way too much into the issue--I'll admit, it bothers me. A lot. Columbine bothered me a lot too. Maybe it's partly because I read Frankenstein recently. Regardless, it seems terribly unfair that flaws in society create these monsters, and instead of trying to help those that can be still helped, we heap them with hatred and mistrust. The result is an ever more hostile world for misfits, a few of whom may break and decide that going out in violence may be the closest thing to respect they'll ever recieve.

something truly awful

2005-11-03T21:01:00.000-08:00

I really, really want this to be a hoax.

For those of you not familiar with Something Awful, be aware that following either of these links goes to a place that is irreverant, profane, and often extremely funny. It's safe-for-work in the sense that you won't accidentally hit nudity, but it's not exactly safe-for-you if you're easily offended. Or really, if you're offended by anything at all.

As for the issue, assuming that this isn't a tasteless troll, it's ugly. People died, and that's horrible. But our sub-culture is probably going to get blamed, and that's a whole different type of ugly. Just like Columbine, where newscasts highlighted the fact that the murderers were gamers, and just like Jack Thompson, who blames everything violent since the crucifixion on us.

The people at SA who are involved, however peripherally, pretty much all feel terrible about it. Hell, I'm not even a forum goon, and I feel terrible about it. However, if SA can be considered responsible, they are less so than whoever sold that boy his gun and ammunition; a merchant who almost certainly will be attributed no blame by the media.

And though they may have done nothing to result in their son showing sociopathic/suicidal tendancies, I have to ask--where the HELL where his parents?

As a last thought, depending on the media spin of the ignorant, this may end up being blamed on his autistic characteristics. If so, the mentally disabled are going to get pissed on the same as the internet community.

Peachy fucking keen.

katrina: the politically incorrect

2005-09-17T02:23:00.000-07:00

Although I'm probably going to hell because this made me laugh, you have to give it credit for being very savvy of the issues.

Katrina: The Gathering.

Non-gamers may have a hard time understanding the format, but it'll probably be funny anyway. If you've never heard of Magic: The Gathering, check out this wiki article for an overview. It's highly spoofable.

harry and the potters

2005-09-14T23:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm slow to update and deserve to be gnawed to death by parakeets. Vampire parakeets.

And just to prove that the Harry Potter fandom can get weirder, go check out Harry and the Potters. They're very... enthusiastic.

"Are you scared to walk through the hallways?
Are you worried that the spiders run away?
Are you petrified
Of being petrified?
Are we going to have to save the school again?

We've got to save Ginny Weasley from the basilisk
We've got to save the school from that unseen horror
We've got to save Ginny Weasley from the basilisk
We've got save the school again
We've got to save the school again..."
- Harry and the Potters (Save Ginny Weasley)

new orleans

2005-08-31T23:27:00.000-07:00

The mess in New Orleans makes me sad. I wish I'd visited it before Katrina did... it'll probably never quite be the same.

I keep getting drawn into news reports, like I'm watching a car wreck in slow motion. The parallels between the tsunami and this are striking, but somehow it seems a lot closer when it's happening to places you've always wanted to go, and people who speak the same language as you.

Or maybe because America's (okay, to be fair, North America's) sense of immortality has been shaken again.

Here's an interesting article from 2001 which describes pretty much what just happened.

"During a strong hurricane, the city could be inundated with water blocking all streets in and out for days, leaving people stranded without electricity and access to clean drinking water. Many also could die because the city has few buildings that could withstand the sustained 96- to 100-mph winds and 6- to 8-ft. storm surges of a Category 2 hurricane."

Yup, pretty much what's happening right now, although it seems like not very many died in the storm itself. The scary thing now is disease, and death from prior illnesses such as diabetes. Every time they show shots of people wading through murky, oil-slicked water in the muggy heat, I think about overflowing sewage systems and imagine diptheria.

photos

2005-08-30T16:48:00.000-07:00

Hey look, photos! Unfortunately, they're in reverse order, and I'm too lazy too fix it.

things I learned...

2005-08-29T00:21:00.000-07:00

Things I Learned at Pennsic

• I am not allowed to scream “yeti attack!” when someone staggers past my tent at 2am.
• It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity and the heat.
• Belly bunnies may be cute, but they harbour disease and filth. Plus they’re about as period as a golf cart.
• Tying a scrap of leather around your waste is not garb. Nor is a bra with jingly things sewn to it. However, it's hard not to be jealous when you're in a very appropriate two-layer Saxon tunic with long sleeves in the blazing sun.
• Bored seven-year-olds, far from television and gameboys, are actually useful in the kitchen.
• Never listen to the guy who says, “this dance is really easy, you just take three steps like this. I’ll show you the rest when we’re up there.” It will end poorly.
• The Blue Feathers have the best garb.
• You probably shouldn’t admit that you’re from an “A” kingdom.
• That guy really isn’t wearing anything under his loin-cloth. Don’t look.
• Chthulhu on a Stick isn’t medieval, but it’s really, really funny.
• When you don’t know SCA etiquette, being polite to everyone works very well, except when a good solid slap is necessary.
• Unless you know it’s supposed to be a toy leech, it really does look like poo with eyes.
• Rayon is not a period fabric. Nor is the shower-curtain cloak a good idea.
• The flush toilets are probably more disgusting than the port-a-johns.
• “Narwhale” virus is not the Pennsic Plague.
• If you’re shampooing your hair and you hear the fighters returning from battle, skip the conditioner and rinse quickly.
• Not everyone knows who the kings are, but absolutely everyone knows about the Tuchux.
• By Friday, you will wish disease and death upon the untalented masses of doumbek players. (It’s a kind of drum. Unless you play one, you hate them. Doumbek switch ad.)
• The Diamond Ninja is watching over Midrealm. Midrealm is unamused.
• Being dropped while riding a scutum isn’t scary. Watching a pair of burly Australians run straight into the guys carrying you is.
• It’s often assumed that if you have blue hair, you might be a Blue Feather.
• Wearing a blue feather is not a good way to discourage this notion, but blue feathers are pretty, goddamn it.
• If you wear “mundane” clothes at Pennisc, people look at you funny.
• If you wear garb to the nearest Wal-Mart, no one bats an eyelash.
• Wode is for when you’re feeling blue.
• Lavender sharbots are love.

ontario

2005-08-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

On this trip thus far, I have stood on the glass floor at the CN Tower, set foot in two provinces (the Canadian Museum of Civilization is in Quebec, while the War Museum just across the bridge is in Ontario) and fondled a variety of howitzers, tanks, cannons, and anti-aircraft guns. I also coerced a 17-year-old into eating sushi ("but it's so gross!") and took the train first-class to visit friends I hadn't seen in eleven years.

Oh, and we drove through the middle of a lightning storm, with strikes going on all around us. Yes, it scared the hell out me. More terrifying, however, is my tan. It's barely there, more like an infestation of freckles, but the sun touched me. Ick.

For the next week, however, I'll be running around in saxon tunics, which don't generally involve bare shoulders and arms. We leave for Pennsic (an eight hour drive from Ottawa) at five in the morning. Dan's uncle was vehement about the traditional four a.m. departure, but with threats of cloroform, was talked back to five.

Which means I have to wake up in less than eight hours. And then, a whole lot of road.

call for submissions (again)

2005-08-02T00:34:00.000-07:00

Once again, I'm trolling for submissions. Stories should be written in the first-person, be between 500 and 4000 words (I'll consider one story over 4k per issue) and share your opinion or perspective.

The theme of issue three is relationships. This doesn't have to mean romantic ones. It can be about the people (or pets?) who matter most to you, one way or the other. Write about the people who've hurt you or helped you. Write about your best friend, or the ultimate betrayal, or the love of your life. It can be about how you changed someone else, or how they changed you. It can be how you watched someone change while you stayed the same.

Be creative, be honest, be expressive.

The coma-line (not quite dead) is August 25th. I will be out of town until the 23rd, but if your submission is ready to be read before then, or you want feedback during the drafting process, send it along. It might take me a day or two to respond, but I will reply as soon as I can.

Ferric_feline@lycos.com is the best way to contact me. Please pass this request for submissions on to everyone you know.

If you haven't looked already, go read Peripheral Axis for previous stories.

quote

2005-08-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

Another excerpt, this time from another otherwise ordinary mystery novel called Exposed, by Laura Van Wormer. It's so damn true.

“When you hang out a lot with somebody who’s not well, after a while you start thinking like them, particularly if you think you’re in love with them. You want to understand them. Gain their trust, their innermost thoughts. So later, when you come up for air and relate to the real world, you feel like you’re not well in the head, either, and you’re not, because you’ve been trained to think like the person who’s not well, the one you might be in love with.” I smile. “Fortunately, it doesn’t take years of cognitive therapy to reverse it. You just feel like hell for a while.”

travelling

2005-08-01T02:44:00.000-07:00

I grew up in Toronto, and I’ll admit, it made me a bit of a snob. If a city or town wasn’t internationally renown, I wasn’t interested in it. I had no curiousity about anywhere rural unless my family was boarding horses there.

Even after living in BC for ten years, my experience consisted of Kamloops, Victoria, and the places that connect them. I was missing out.

While wandering this summer, I have crossed a swaying bridge to get within a few feet of a roaring waterfall, gotten a lecture on my poor German grammar from a shopkeeper who sold me beeswax candles, and fed a swarming pool of salmon in a forest park full of creepy fairy statues. There are roads that epitomize the words “verdant valley” and towns that drip so much charm it’s hard to remember why consider myself a city girl.

Vernon in particular has surprised me. There’s a heavenly Bed and Breakfast up there, and we've stayed there three times now. If I ever get serious about the novel I haven’t been writing, I’ll go there for a few days to work on it. There’s something about the press of green trees and the soft black sky that pulls tension out of me. Or maybe that’s just the perfect breakfast and steaming hot tub.

We found another haven near Revelstoke. Three Valley Gap is a sprawling, epic resort in the middle of nowhere. It boarders on a crystal clear and ice-cold lake, has a ghost town next door, and contains a tiny swimming pool with a tribute to the Titanic on the wall. During the day, they offer helicopter tours and boat rides. In the deep silence of night, I slipped from my room and sat on the dock. The stars looked too vivid to be real.

I’ve been neglecting this blog, I know. And that’s not likely to change until the end of August at soonest. Dan and I are traveling again, this time a wee bit farther from home.

On Thursday afternoon, we’re flying to Ontario. I can’t describe how panic-stricken I am at the idea of setting foot on an airplane again, but this ought to be worth the suffering. We’ll have a little over a week to spend in Ottawa and Toronto and then we’re going to Pennsic.

Those who know me are aware I’ve had a flirtation going on with the Society for Creative Anachronism for years. I love history—I was about three credits away from a minor in Medieval History when I finished my European History degree at UVic. I also enjoy the eccentricities, intelligence and kindness of most SCAers I’ve met.

I’ve hesitated, however, out of an inherent dislike of hierarchical structures and politics. I also suspect I’d feel desperately silly donning a medieval gown and being called “m’lady.” I’m enticed by the martial aspects, but as I’ve learned from paintball, I’m not the most gracious when it comes to getting hit.

But now I’m jumping into an SCA event with both feet, mostly because Dan wants to go, and I’m not going to let such a perfectly wrapped adventure pass me by. As such, for a week, we will be guests of the noble House de Taahe. I was impressed when I found out that my friends in Victoria knew of Dan’s relatives in House de Taahe by reputation; I was even more impressed when I found out that they build a campsite at Pennsic that includes a private, hot-and-cold running shower.

Pennsic is a yearly event in Pennsylvania that draws a crowd of over 12,000 people. More than 1,000 of them participate in the war (each one in approved armour and certified as a fighter who knows the SCA rules.) There’s dancing, carousing, shopping, and god knows else the rest of the time. I’m not quite sure what happens when you put that many history dorks in one place, but I’m kind of excited to find out, being a dork myself.

I’m not going to make the most convincing wench. My hair is now half brown and half navy with purple streaks. It’s also going to be hard to give up my jeans and t-shirts for a week. However, I’ll make an effort to document my experience, so that others can share in my inevitable bafflement and culture-shock.

Internet access from August 3rd till the 23rd is going to be sketchy. Weirdly enough, Pennsic has an internet café, but response time may be a bit slow. Also, I’ve had some trouble getting messages from my TRU account—I had nothing for weeks, then a deluge of things that just got stuck somewhere in cyberspace. My ferric_feline@lycos.com account works just fine, however, and is my primary contact address right now.

the truth

2005-07-26T22:24:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, by Melissa Bank.

"No wonder I'm single," she says to the mirror. "Even I don't want to get into bed with these thighs."

I say that getting married isn't like winning the Miss America Pageant; it doesn't all come down to the bathing suit competition.

"What do you think it comes down to?" she says.

I say, "Baton twirling."

harry potter

2005-07-17T16:15:00.000-07:00

Gee, I sure was surprised when Dumbledore turned out to be a robot from Mars. And when Draco died from the heroine overdose... that was just tragic. Who would have thought that a heart-broken Hermione would be left bearing his child? I wept, truly.

In other news, Blogger seems to be randomly eating comments. I have no idea how to prevent this, and it seems to be happening to other accounts as well. Hope they fix it soon.

ouch

2005-07-15T12:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was unfun. I woke up with a skull-crushing migraine, which is the worst way to start a day. Once you’re in the throes of a migraine, pills don’t work. On a scale of 1 to 10, this one was a 9.5 and getting worse. I couldn't do anything, but I couldn't sleep either. Dan took me to emergency in the afternoon.

Apparently, common procedure is now to administer an IV for migraines. I was braced for a shot (narcotics were the favoured method the last time I was hospital bound with a migraine) but the idea of having something lodged in a vein completely derailed me. I was still profoundly unhappy about the idea after the Ativan kicked in, but I was in so much pain at that point that I wanted the IV in and over with.

I managed to not lose consciousness when the nurse stabbed me. She was very kind, professional, and even used a baby-sized needle in deference to my panic attacks. However, as she tapped plastic tubing to my arm, she blithely commented, “You were very good… your vein didn’t collapse or grab onto the needle. That sometimes happens when people freak out.”

That can happen? Cue hysterical screaming inside my head.

The last time I had an IV, it went in the back of my hand hurt like hell. This wasn’t half so bad, though the medication felt icy cold. The nurse explained that the packs of painkillers are all room temperature, which feels odd when it hits your warm body. The first pack didn’t do anything, so they added a second, and then some Gravol when I started to get queasy.

The whole thing took hours. There hadn’t been very many people in the waiting area, but inside the ward, nurses were running around and the doctors were moving from bed to bed as brusquely as possible. Dan returned from a blanket run with the news that some guy had been hit in the head with a chainsaw, so I can’t really complain that I had to wait.

Today I’m still a little shaky, but not in pain, which is a huge relief. There’s also a yucky bruise on my arm where the IV was, and some red marks from the tape. While the whole event was unpleasant, it’ll help me flesh out a fiction story I’m writing that takes place in a hospital.

In totally unrelated news, the second issue of Peripheral Axis is up. Go have a read.

migraine triggers

2005-07-03T14:33:00.000-07:00

It happens over and over again. Dan points out something tasty on the menu, and I sigh.

"That's a migraine trigger."
"Really?"
"Yup."

And then I go ahead and order, regardless of common sense (or let him order it and steal half, as if won't count that way.) However, I'm pretty sure my friends think I'm just randomly selecting food and declaring it a migraine trigger, because the list is so bizarre and encompassing.

Really though, I might as well be making up triggers as I go along, because I spend about half my life with a splitting headache. In spite of this, I've compiled a list of migraine triggers from information provided by my neurologist.

Let it first be said that these don't apply to everyone. Some triggers are more common than others (MSG gets almost all migrainers, but some of the triggers on the list may not affect you at all... or maybe things that aren't on the list hit you like a bullet between the eyes.) Further, most of these things can be tolerated in moderation. The trick is balance. If you're going to have pizza for dinner, don't drink it with iced-tea, coke, or coffee. If it's a rainy day, it might be wise to skip clubbing that night.

Weather Triggers:

• bright sunlight, especially glare
• cold, strong wind
• drizzly or overcast skies
• low barometric pressure
• sudden change in climate

Lifestyle Triggers:

• allergens
• bright, flashing or flickering lights
• change in eating or sleeping
• computer monitors (*sob*)
• fluorescent lights
• high altitudes
• loud sounds (traffic, hair dryers, food processors, telephones)
• over-exertion
• pollution
• poor ventilation
• smoking (includes second-hand smoke)
• strong smells

Food/Drink Triggers:

• caffeine/decaf beverages (coffee, tea, hot chocolate, cola, iced-tea)
• chocolate (dark is worse)
• MSG (soups, seasoning salt, salty snacks, croutons, gravies, processed meats, veggie burgers, etc)
• processed meats (aged, canned, cured, fermented, marinated, smocked, tenderized or preserved; sausage, lunchmeats, bacon, hotdogs, pates, wild game)
• fish (smoked or pickled, caviar and anchovies)
• cheese (except cottage cheese, ricotta and cream cheese)
• yogurt
• milk
• butter
• sour cream
• nuts
• vinegar (in moderation)
• alcohol (red wine, champagne, sherry, brandy, scotch, bourbon and beer: vodka is best tolerated)
• citrus fruits (oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, tangerines, pineapples)
• fruits (bananas, raspberries, red plums, papayas, passion fruit, figs, dates and avocados)
• veggies (onions, sauerkraut, pea pods)
• breads (less than one day old, especially sourdough and homemade)
• aspartame/saccharin
• fatty or fried foods
• pizza
• most seafood

killen case

2005-06-23T02:09:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of a news junkie (pure heresy in a journalism student, I know) but sometimes stuff catches my eye. Despite some hesitation about hitting the "publish post" button, I'm going to throw this opinion piece out there. It may seem as if I'm claiming Killen is innocent, or that I'm on his side; I'm not. However, I do question the system that's calling him to task.

A few days ago, an 80 year old man was convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for killing three men in 1964. In the story Ex-KKK Member Convicted, you can find a bit of the background. You can also find a few things that made me scratch my head.

I understand that covering politically charged issues is difficult for journalists. Conveying a complete picture with tact and honesty—within a word count, no less—is something that stretches the capacity of prose. However, in this case, I have some issues with both the case and the coverage it's being given.

First off, what exactly is an "ex" KKK member? Has he renounced his former beliefs? I googled around, and couldn't find anything declaring Killen's status. Is he no longer KKK because he quit, or because he's now too feeble to pull a bed sheet over his head? While I'll admit that his classification doesn't exactly pertain to the case (the defense admitted he was a member of the KKK, but rightly stated that membership doesn't automatically mean he's guilty,) by stating that Killen is "ex-KKK," the journalist has implied something that may not be true.

Next, how about this image? "Killen, who was in a wheelchair because of a logging accident in which he broke his legs, was surrounded by more than a dozen armed officers as he was wheeled from the courthouse and taken off to jail."

Oooh, scary grumpy old man. Unable to walk. And surrounded by armed police. That makes me question the motivation of the authorities. Are they really afraid that this guy is going to leap out of his wheelchair and attack the nearest black person? Probably not. It was a statement, but I can't quite figure out what kind of statement. Either they were playing up the threat he represents (he may be a frail little old man, but he's an evil, inhuman little old man) or it was an unsubtle move to show the black community how seriously they're taking the matter.

Either way, it’s a scene generated expressly for the media and viewers. Sounds like his guilt in the trial was a foregone conclusion. While I want to see this bastard burn, isn't the way the legal system ought to work.

Was Killen really on trial for what he did, or is he serving as an effigy of every KKK-lynch mob? One man to represent the whole bloody mess of racism, violence, and segregation hardly seems fair. Seems to me that Killen’s trial is a PR-fest to prove how liberal and open-minded Mississippi has become.

The story says, "[Killen] slapped two television microphones and a TV camera on the way out." While this does paint a vivid picture of a vicious old man with a temper, lashing out at the world that's condemning him, it bothers me. Guilty or not (even if his hands aren’t bloody, it’s pretty clear he incited hatred and violence in his role as preacher) he's now presented as a symbol of his time, so that American society can make a show of atonement for past transgressions. Of course he's pissed. Doesn't matter what he says, we're going to crucify him anyway.

And anyway, why the hell was a camera that close to him anyway? Sounds almost like he was being bated—same way you could poke a pitbull with a sharp stick to get a picture of it growling.

Next issue, and possibly the largest—why manslaughter, and not murder? The story states: “With a murder charge, prosecutors had to prove intent to kill. With a manslaughter charge, they had to prove only that a victim died while another crime was being committed.”

I have a hard time believing that you can place a community leader (like Killen was) at lynching and then say the deaths were accidental. Either he is guilty of murder and the charge is stepped down or they can’t prove he’s guilty in this case, but are sure he’s a killer and are slapping him with a lesser charge. Neither sounds too plausible, but as I said, the manslaughter charge smells funny to me.

The rest of the article is full of the predictable rhetoric about heroism, change, and civil rights. Which is good. People need to feel safe, respected, and represented in their own societies. However, the realization that we’re only now addressing these issues, in 2005, makes me sad. It’s something that should have been done decades ago.

Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of solid ground to stand on here. I’m attacking a journalist, a society, and a legal system all in one go. However, I stand by my theory. The Killen case is a kangaroo court trial, legitimatized by political correctness. And the media isn’t going much past the orchestrated veneer.

Yes, Killen needs to be held accountable. Yes, retribution ought to be granted and attitudes altered. However, to say that the conviction is an indication of wonderful change seems more like deliberate rhetoric than a true shift of ideology.

But maybe I’m too pessimistic. Truth told, I have more than a few hesitations about posting this. I don’t want it to be misread. If you’re offended, please understand; just because I’m skeptical about the system attacking Killen doesn’t mean that I’m on Killen’s side.

I’m afraid, however, that we may be letting the media-enhanced “victory” of condemning Killen distract us from the very visible problem of racism and segregation in North American society. The case, which finally addresses the vicious and unnecessary death of three people, shouldn’t be seen as the end of anything. Rather, let it be the first opportunity to call attention to racial segregation and injustice.

The KKK still exists, and even in Canada, racism is something you can find in your own neighbourhood. We’re not done with these issues, and the Killen case does represent something powerfully important. I hope, however, that there is substance behind the show when it comes to atonement, retribution, and justice.

one art

2005-06-18T01:29:00.000-07:00

I found the poem "One Art" on the front page of a book called "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing," by Melissa Banks. I've read so many stories with terribly written women (we tend to get written the way we wish we were, the way men wish we were) that a book with such a profoundly real women stands out in stark relief.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop (1927-1979)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

issue 2 submission info

2005-06-07T20:39:00.000-07:00

If you read the JList, you've already got this information. However, for everyone else (all three of you) here are the submission guidelines for Peripheral Axis.

Peripheral Axis Issue 2 Guidelines:

I only want first-person material (though I'm flexible about informative sidebars) between 500 and 4000 words. I'm willing to let ONE story per issue go longer than 4k, but you'll have to hand me something good. I won't go under 500 words because of stylistic concerns.

At the moment, story topics for Issue 2 seem to follow a theme of self-discovery, travel, and concepts of home. I would love to get my hands on more stories, and I bet some of you would like clips for your journalistic resumes.

Here are a few topic suggestions: risk taking that paid off (or didn't), accounts of big changes in your life, interesting travels, or personal stories about gaining adult perspective. Of course, I'm open to any and all pitches.

For Issue 3, I'll be looking for things about relationships (romantic, familial, and friendships both good and bad) so if you have anything in your brain that fits under that genre, start drafting. I’ll publish people in consecutive issues, as long as they keep sending good stuff.

To submit to Peripheral Axis, send me a note ASAP at ferric_feline@lycos.com. Let me know what you'd like to write about, and what kind of approach you're going to take.

For example, if you want to write about your experiences as a journalism student, give me a couple anecdotes or quotes that highlight the tone of your story. One or two paragraphs is fine. Think of it as a very informal query letter--tell me why you think it's worth writing a full story.

If it's interesting and you can produce something solid, we'll work together to polish it for publication.

I don't like to rush brilliance, but I’d like to finish the issue by the end of June. June 22nd is about the latest I'd like to take in stories for Issue 2.

Thanks for the interest, and please please please pass this call for submissions on to anyone who might be interested.

love song

2005-06-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

It wasn't requested, but when someone asked me "who the heck is Alfred Prufrock?" I decided I had to take action. I love T.S. Eliot as much as I love Firefly, Douglas Adams, and the steak sauce at Japanese Village in Victoria. No faint praise, that.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

oh darwin, where art thou

2005-06-05T02:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I fear for the species. Shamelessly ripped from Jess's Blog, here's one of the first reports on Paris Hilton's engagement.

"I'm very in love – he's the one," Hilton told PEOPLE earlier this month. "I want to have kids in the next two years, because I know that completes your life."

Just like her dog completes her wardrobe. If you listen really closely, you can actually hear the divorce scandal headlines already.

fire and ice

2005-06-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

I'm very tired, but feeling guilty for the lack of updates.

The grinding wheel of Peripheral Axis is starting to turn again, albeit slowly, and I have a small handful of stories to work with at this point. If you're interested in writing something, now's a great time to do topic-talk with me. Insecure about your writing skills? Talk to me anyway.

On the personal blog front, I have a lot of things I'd like to write about, especially my wanderings around some smaller communities in BC. But every time I try to coax my thoughts into formation, they disintegrate and scatter. Even writing this is difficult, which I find profoundly depressing.

At any rate, here's my new fall-back position: I love poetry, but I don't read enough of it anymore. Gone are the days when I could recite all of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" without checking my notes.

Now, when I can't manage my own words, I'll give you someone else's.

(And no angsty-pop song lyrics designed to appeal to the awkward outsider in us all. While they are debatably poetic, most song lyrics are better left inside the song. Jenny seems to find a few good ones, but I prefer lyrics to be sung.)

You get a virtual hug and a digital cookie if you can name who wrote this. Googling it is cheating, and anyway, this ought to be dead easy.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

keel hauled

2005-05-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

While waiting for a greasy cardboard bucket of chicken (spiced with a secret blend of MSG and the despair of menial labourers) I learned something new; KFC employees don't get to call a chicken breast a chicken breast. They call it a "keel." Upon inquiry, it was revealed that it's "the politically correct way." I don't think text can properly convey the accompanying eye-roll, but you can use your imagination.

Oh, and regarding the prior post... there was a story about the PlayStation 3 in today's newspaper. I shudder to think what shiny Final Fantasy based product they're going to tempt me with this time around. My will shall remain strong.

And finally, because everyone else is doing it, here's my obligatory election commentary. Yes, I voted. Everyone at my station looked so dang happy while they were voting. I found it strange, because I'm so disillusioned that I almost wrote "I am a fish" on the ballot. As an observational sidenote, I didn't see any voters there who looked younger than my own slightly greying 25.

next-box

2005-05-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

MTV, a former hobbit and Microsoft have banded together to tell us what's cool. And so the next generation of consoles starts to trickle forth.

Take a computer, strip it of anything that could remotely be used for work, and throw it in sleek, sexy case; you're getting awfully close to a gaming console.

I am not a console gamer. The last system I bought was a PSOne so that I could play Final Fantasy IX. I promptly realized that I didn't like Final Fantasy IX (I was rendered blind by the cute) and I haven't touched it since. At one point, I really wanted a PS2, but I couldn't justify $449.99 + $79.99 to play one game. Sure, things are cheaper now, but that's still about $300 I'd rather spend on my beloved computer.

These days, I'm playing Guild Wars. It's a nifty multiplayer computer game with fast-paced combat, shiny graphics, and a fun story-line. In half an hour of play, you can actually make some progress, which sets it apart from every other massively-multiplayer I've tried.

I'm going to try to update a little more often, but it'll probably end up being once a week.

health care

2005-05-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, if you look really hard, you can see the ghost of the Northern Lights in the sky over Kamloops. We're in that lovely state between seasons when it's neither too hot nor cold, and rain sometimes passes during the afternoon or evening.

Peaceful nights notwithstanding, things are still kind of crazy. I got to spend more time in the hospital this week; first taking Dan to a planned day-surgery, then going to emergency that night when he was in too much pain to sleep.

Surprisingly, my hospital-phobia is mostly in remission, possibly in shock from being so thoroughly assaulted. I'd get a flattening wave of dizziness every time someone badly injured went by, but it subsided quickly. Mostly, I just felt odd. It was strange to be an observer instead of a participant.

The health care system is a terribly dehumanizing thing. The whole process of emergency makes you feel vaguely guilty for needing the help. On both nights I was there, I saw people give up on treatment and go home to suffer, unable/willing to suffer through four+ hours upright in a waiting room while in pain. Is this a system that works?

The nurses were all kind. The doctors weren't, but I guess that's not their job. It isn't the individuals who cause the system to (in my opinion) fail. It's the system itself.

No, I don't have some brilliant scheme to fix what's broken. I can't even point to an exact place and say, "this is where it fails." But when you see a woman glassy-eyed with migraine pain stagger out of the ER with their vomit basin because she'd rather suffer in bed than upright under florescent lights for hours, there's something wrong.

kingdom hospital

2005-05-05T19:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't really been in the mood to update. With one family member in the hospital, the rest of us are feeling a little forlorn. I'm trying to stay busy, but most of that keeps me out of the house and away from the computer.

I spent the last couple weeks chewing my way through Stephen King's whimsical and creepy "Kingdom Hospital" series. Try watching that, then spending six hours in emergency. It's surreal. The waiting room was full of terribly suffering, bored people, all maintaining a perfectly polite veneer of silence and feigned disinterest. The staff looked equally bored and devoid of pity. No one even seemed to notice when a little girl farther in the ward started to scream for all she was worth.

Smirking ghosts would have fit in just fine, especially when we were lead to a different ward through the underground passages. White walls, bare pipes in the ceiling, and defunct medical equipment left to die alongside the path. The nurse cheerfully said it was a lot creepier before they increased security; homeless drug addicts used to sneak in and hide in the corners of those tunnels for warmth. Charming.

At any rate, "Kingdom Hospital" is highly recommended. Real hospitals are not.

colours

2005-04-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

From the lofty vantage of our hotel window, I can see out over the city of Victoria. Almost every inch of these downtown streets is imprinted on the soles of my feet, but on the sixth floor, I'm far above the noise and humanity. It feels different from here--the shining stripe of Broad Street, where the prostitutes walked before it was 'cleaned up,' and the distant spire of the cathedral next to where I used to live. All so pretty, all so remote, all so idealized.

It seems strange, to be enclosed in this generic and spotless space, with a mini coffee-maker, mini soaps, and mini desk. The side-by-side beds would be identical except for the sprawl of books and clothes on each, one mine and one Dan's. We're at the end of a hallway where every door leads to another carbon-copy room. Utterly benign, but interesting because it's so different from my disorganized life of computers, books and cats.

As with every other hotel, I take the bed next to the window. Everything here is clean and has a faint non-gendered scent. We drink the provided bottles of purified water, and when we leave this polished bubble of climate-controlled comfort, a valet fetches the car from the same ether in which it was earlier hidden.

It's a far cry from the warm, friendly, chaos of Christmas in Jaime and Kathy's home, but charming in its own way. In a few weeks, when the last of the rainy chill slinks into remission, hotel prices will double and triple. The young man at the check-in desk (looking smugly comfortable behind the fake-marble counter while he typed with two fingers) admitted that they raise price further when things are crowded. I wonder if his cheerful complacency wll be polished into a tenser kind of servitude when the season really begins. Customer service jobs in the tourism sector tend to leave you with a diamond-hard mask of benevolence. At least, that's what it did to me.

If I'd been able to find a job like his (better than grinding data entry or the endless cycle-counts of retail) I might not have left the city to study Journalism. Or I might have taken the program offered at UVic. It wouldn't be better or worse. It would just be different. Josh says the problem with Victoria is that everyone gets too content. Like the fire goes out, and people just soak up routine, because it's comfortable. Me, I think content is a worthy state. But then, I don't find my creative edge is blunted by contentedness.

I've thrown myself back into the city, with Dan affably allowing my determined lead. He lets me drag him along the paths I used to know, probably aware that I'm mostly chosing them out of nostagia. The restaurants we've eaten at (John's Place, Japanese Village and Baan Thai thus far) are all comfort-food staples from my years living here.

In Vancouver and Victoria, my blue hair is practically passe. Easily half the kids slouching on the curbs of Douglas Street have bright green, purple, blue, or red streaks in their hair. Even in fashionable places, the pretty long-haired retail clerks sometimes have vivid streaks of burgandy or crimson in their dark manes. Like Kamloops, the community is predominantly caucasian, but here, people paint themselves in brighter colours. They want to shine, as if wearing their souls on the surface.

The young people (when did I turn into an adult, anyway?) are decked out like birds, crows and magpies and jays. Flaring skirts, heavy heeled shoes, rainbow hair and curving tattoos. Even the goths wear slashes of colour on their skin or cropped hair, and glittering jewelry. They walk like they own the street.

Was it always like this, or is it a slow shift that's happened since last summer? Am I only noticing now because I'm so desperate to see it, or because Kamloops has taught me to see in a certain way? There were always kids who dripped colour like gypsies, but now they seem to be everywhere.

I wonder if I should take another leap of faith and move back here, chancing the viscious job-market and the unknown of what alchemy eight months of distance has wrought on friendships. It also brings up a tangle of issues and promises, responsabilities and desires. Freedom is such a burden.

For now, I have several more days in Victoria to enjoy the warmth, sun, and company.

on the road again

2005-04-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

Peripheral Axis went online Saturday, April 16th. I don't even want to think how many hours I poured into it over the last three weeks. I'd like to say that I expertly navigated Dreamweaver to add features or designed glorious graphics in Photoshop. But no. I was just trying to make the cell heights consistant and catch a few of the thousand-odd textual issues you never think about until you're presented with it.

Do you capitalize Lakehead Highway? When you're talking about your own parent, is it 'dad" or "Dad"? How much can you fiddle with someone else's words before they cease to be their words, and become your own? And where the hell did I put my CP Style Guide, the book I only breifly paid heed to in an editing class, to my own detriment? For that matter, why didn't I pay more attention in editing class?

I haven't tallied it up yet, but even with only nine articles, Peripheral Axis represents a HUGE amount of text. Josh's epic story was over 9000 words, and most of the others fall between 1 and 2 thousand. I could have done justice to those words, perhaps, if I were wiser. Wise enough to have gathered submissions earlier in the semester, instead of attacking the challenging but less social task of designing page templates. Wise enough to pick my battles on substantive issues, and wise enough to walk the thorny path between being an editor and being a friend without ruffling feathers.

I did the best I could. After all, I love words. Although so much of Peripheral Axis was mind-numbing, dragging, repetative work, but I wanted to do it. Axis meant a lot more to me than writing another news feature or any of the term papers I worked on in under-grad. It may display only rudimentary webdesign skills, contain copy-editing errors of the highest order, and lack a sense of unity, but all those weaknesses are mine to strengthen.

Besides, it lets me play with technology. I adore technology. And Peripheral Axis is, for me, pushing the edge of my experience and forcing me to learn new skills.

Oooh, look. No spell checker on the laptop. But we're finally in a hotel with internet access. No promises when updates will follow.

hiatus?

2005-04-11T23:56:00.000-07:00

If Tatsuya Ishida of Sinfest can take some time off, so can I.

I've got lots of things to say, but I'm too tired and scattered to organize them. School is wrapping up this week, and I'm feeling overwhelmed. Getting my History degree involved climbing a mountain of research to finish that one fifteen page paper per class. Getting a Journalism diploma is a little more like having the mountain fall on me, one stinging pebble at a time. Yeah, the assignments are tiny compared to an academic term paper, but there are zillions of the goddamn things.

As soon as I get done here, I'm skipping town for a walkabout with Dan. No promises of updates in that two-week span of meandering--I'll take the laptop, but I've had trouble getting the network card to, well, network. The wifi seems to work fine, however, so I might be able to squeek in an update or two.

This trip might be an adventure. Or not. Dan and I are both geeks, and our idea of fun involves plotting fantastical trips to Europe and visiting historical war sites. Since we don't have time for Europe, we're going to do some hiking, exploring, and geek-out in every gaming store we can find.

In the meantime, why don't you go squick your mind out and visit Sycophant Hex, a website entirely devoted to Harry Potter fanfiction, most of which is smutty as hell. Yeeeek.

I resemble that comment...

2005-04-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

Gemini: (May 21—June 21)
You've always thought that your tendency to ask a lot of questions about the local culture was appreciated, but judging by the flames licking at your body and the tightness of the ropes, it seems you might have been mistaken.

Still looking for Peripheral Axis submissions. They're coming in, but I've always got room for more. And no, I don't have pink-eye, my eyes are just bloodshot from the 12+ hours a day on the computer.

busy busy

2005-03-27T14:44:00.000-08:00

Too busy to do a real update, so here's a lazy link. I get a lot of good recipe ideas from Cooking for Engineers, despite being a lit-geek/history dork. Enjoy.

gyahh!

2005-03-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

I've never gone swimming in the ocean. My teenage distaste of lake swimming at summer-camp ("but fish fuck in it..." I'd mutter while reluctantly toeing the icy embrace of an Ontarian lake) evolved into a terror of being at the mercy of an environment with that many slimy, poisonous, bitey, and disgusting things living in it.

The only ocean I've closely regarded is the part that surrounds Vancouver Island, which might make my disgust a little more understandable. I think anyone who has actually seen what washes up the beach can empathize with my position. The ocean is beautiful, but so are avalanches. It's a powerful, frightening, and lovely thing in which I have no desire to be submerged. I'm a great swimmer, but I'd probably start shrieking like a five-year-old with a skinned knee if a fish touched my foot.

Sometimes I look at pictures of tropical, turquoise waters, clear and inviting. It's hard to reconcile that image of the water with the dark, oily and impenetrable depths that lap up against the sides of the Spirit of British Columbia, and imbue the rocky beaches with the faint tang of rotting seaweed.

However, after reading today's news, I'll take the waters of Southern BC over those of warmer climes any day. Should you chose to swim in the murky waters off Vancouver's coast, the most unpleasant things likely to happen include hypothermia, being seriously grossed out by seaweed sticking to your leg, and being run over by a rowing team.

Australia, despite possessing some of the most beautiful seascapes on earth, has 20-foot long fucking SHARKS.

Let's put that in perspective. A handball court is 20 feet long. Two stories of a house is about 20 feet tall. More than three times the height of an average grown man equals 20 feet. That's bigger than the U-Haul truck I moved in. 20 feet is 6 metres.

And apparently, this 6 metre monstrosity, gliding through water like birds fly, surfaced and snapped a man in half on a whim.

Excuse me, I think I need to go pull a blanket over my head, curl up in a corner, and whimper quietly for a bit.

peripheral axis

2005-03-15T00:45:00.000-08:00

As I may have passingly mentioned awhile back, I'm creating a web publication out of thin air. It's a directed study project for me in the Journalism program here at UCC/TRU.

And now, my beloved readers, I'm running out of time. The basic web design is done, but now I need text! Lots and lots of text! I know some of you are talented writers, and all of you have interesting things to say when cornered or plied with enough alcohol.

Acceptable subject matter runs a HUGE spectrum. I just want articles about culture and life. Write about your hobbies, your family, your work, your childhood, your health, your life. Just write it so that someone who has never stood there can read it and say, "oh hey, that's interesting."

If you think you have a great story idea, but are insecure about your writing ability, give me a poke. If a story has promise, I'm happy to help polish it till it says what you really want it to say.

Have a look at the submission guidelines at Peripheral Axis and please PLEASE pass this information on to anyone you know who might write.

life of riley

2005-03-09T00:00:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to say that Life of Riley is back.

Life of Riley was one of the top-notch webcomics out there. I started following it a couple years ago because it focused on a group of 20-something gamers, both male and female, who all seem to be based on real people. They were into paintball, anime, computer games, goth-rock, and kilts. Not unlike finding a Floridian parallel to various geek-cliques I've drifted through.

The storyline, which went from silly to somber, came to a screeching halt about six months ago. On a cliff hanger. Mid-epic battle, with the good guys mauled but defiant in the face of ultimate evil... then *screeeech* First the comic wasn't updated, and then the site itself poofed into nothing.

A month or two ago, Clan Bob (the group who do Life of Riley) came back online with a series of humourous World of Warcraft videos. Just recently, they posted the first new comic.

Current high quality webcomics, at least in my books, include Penny Arcade, Something Positive, and Megatokyo.

As far as popularity goes, all three of these have serious awards of merit; Penny Arcade is organizing their 2nd annual expo, where thousands of PA fans and gamers revel for three solid days. Something Positive creator Randy Milholland challenged his readers to provide him with a year’s salary (a response to complaints that he wasn't updating often enough) so that he could quit his job and write the comic full time. To everyone's astonishment, it worked. Megatokyo is also flying on its own wings, supported by fans, site advertisements, and some very successful merchandizing.

Life of Riley could probably keep pace with those illustrious names in webcomics, if Clan Bob can crank it up again. I hope they do, but mostly because I really really want to know what happens next. Damn cliff-hangers!

advice on vices

2005-03-03T18:38:00.000-08:00

For magazine class, we're putting together an online publication focusing on Vice and Excess... some of the story proposals sounded really interesting. Mine, not so much, but I'll try to keep up. However, I'm also working on one of campy features... adVice. If anyone out there would like to help us out, please submit a sincere question for our advice column.

Looking for advice on vices? XS Magazine (Jour 454) will run an adVice column to offer tongue-in-cheek assistance for navigating that fine line between indulgence and destructiveness. Please submit your anonymous anxieties or questions about sin.

The seven “deadly” sins are, of course, Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth. At XS Magazine, we believe that a little sin can do you good. But sometimes, you might need a little help figuring out where that line is. Don’t hold back, give us the best of your worst.

Please make your questions real, but we encourage anonymity. Feel free to e-mail your questions to me (ferric_feline@lycos.com), but if you’d prefer to really put some distance between your name and your question, you can go to this forum and leave a message.

XS Magazine – coming to a computer monitor near you in April 2005.

hey geeks...

2005-03-02T00:28:00.000-08:00

For the gamers amongst my devout readers (all five of you): have a look at these ebay auctions and see if there's anything appealing. The seller is a friend, and if you don't believe his 350 positive ratings, I'll vouch for him.

I'm not much into miniatures (too many of the dang things cluttering up my space already, and I weep when I think of all the unpainted lead I have in the garage) but I figured I'd post this on the off-hand chance one of you is.

For everyone else, gamer or non, check out the USB memory duckie. Along with the USB sushi and a grand piano, it ranks among things I appreciate but will never actually spend money on. However, I have one of these, so there's no accounting for my taste.

vancouver

2005-02-25T22:02:00.000-08:00

Back in the ‘loops, after about as smooth a trip as it could have been. I’d have updated from Vancouver for the novelty of it, but none of my tech-fu managed to coax the hotel’s highspeed internet service to cooperate with my laptop. Even so, it was a great trip.

I miss cities. Kamloops is a fairly large community, but I always feel a little isolated here. When I’m in Victoria, Toronto, or Vancouver, I feel connected. It’s as if I don’t even have to try, I’m just there. In Kamloops, it takes an effort to focus on the moment. I can be delighted by the way downtown sparkles when you look down on it from Sa-Hali, but mostly the sheer blandness of this place gets to me.

(Yes, the local mountains are lovely, but you only ever get to look at them from a distance. When you’re actually on the mountain, it isn’t as pretty. Which is probably a great metaphor for something about relationships, but I’ll let that slide.)

Vancouver made a wonderful break from this unending winter. It’s sunny here, but it still hovers around the freezing mark, and Dan and I were feeling slightly nomadic. It’s nice to have a travelling companion again. I wanted to go to Victoria, but it would have been too painful to have only one full day there. Vancouver was enough, and we spoiled ourselves terribly.

I got to eat caribou for the first time. We went to restaurant called Locus, which is designed to look like a dark corner of a tropical forest… if the forest were indoors, marked with aboriginal art, and served things like buffalo stroganoff and elk burgers. Caribou isn’t very much different than beef. Dan had the quail, which was pretty much like a dense kind of chicken. Still, the novelty was delightful, and the food was extremely well prepared.

We also visited a few gaming stores, browsed books in a place prowled by grumpy cats, and walked to Granville Island. My haul for the trip includes a plushy d20, a handful of dice, some clothes, two charms for my bracelet, and a Call of Cthulhu supplemental book.

However, I am still sick. I didn’t get to walk around as much as I’d have liked, and despite best intentions, I spent most of yesterday afternoon asleep in the hotel. The rest of the weekend is going to be for catching up on school work, if I can stop coughing long enough to study.

Dang, this is a pathetically personal entry. I should promise a good rant or something in the near future to make up for all this traditional whiney stuff. However, I won’t promise, because that would almost guarantee failure. Instead, lets just say I hope I get a little of my effusively vitriolic spirit back.

*hackhackhachWHEEEEZEdies*

blah

2005-02-20T22:32:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so that update shedule... er, uhm. Hey, look over there, it's a walking robot!

I've been exceptionally busy, and yet exceptionally unproductive at the same time. Peripheral Axis is driving me nuts, because I'll play with the layout for an hour then realize it looked better before I messed with it. I'm stalled out with my ideas for stories I was enthusiastic about in January. And I'm sick, again.

This is the fourth distinct, consequetive illness since the semester started. If it interferes with the trip to Vancouver that Dan and I are planning, I'm going to be petulant. I've long since accepted that my con is abysmal, but I don't have to be happy about it.

And yes, I am a D&D geek. Even if you don't game, why don't you take a quiz to find out your alignment, or maybe what your race and class would be? Okay, so both quizzes kind of suck.

A better but completely unrelated link is J.K. Rowling's official site. It's one of the best webpages out there, and has won awards for its design. There are all kinds of things hidden in the virtual clutter, and the reward for discovering the secrets are little treasures. Over Christmas, I uncovered a page of concept sketches including the Sorting Hat, a scan of the first Philosopher Stone manucript (copy editing scribbles and all) as well as a rough doodle of the Gryffindor heroes.

Well worth the time, both as a game, and as an example of some profoundly cool web design.

This has been a lousy update, I know, but I'll try to do something a little more meaningful and coherent when I'm feeling better.

forum is up

2005-02-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Untarnished and virginal forum here for general use. Feel free to register and make comments there. It'll be paired with my Peripheral Axis project, but for now it's fair game for insanities and inanities.

foamy, my lord and master

2005-02-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

It's come to my attention that a lot of people don't know who Foamy the Squirrel is yet. That's gonna have to get fixed. Get over to the Ill Will Press archives and start catching up.

In warning, there are far too many Foamy cartoons for their server to handle. Consequently, they can't host all of them at once. Every time a new episode is added, something has to be moved to make room. Enjoy them while you can, because they're not going to be there forever.

Of the current selection, I'm especially fond of "Amityville Toaster" and "Small, Medium, Large," though they're all worth checking out.

"Oh I see what they’re doing! They call “small” “tall” because it makes the customer feel good when they pay $3 for a urine sample sized cup of coffee swill! This way it seems like they are getting more because the word “tall” is stuck into their psyche. I see their psychological marketing trickery! You tricky bastards that’s what you all are! Fucking tricky!" - Foamy

comments

2005-02-07T22:46:00.000-08:00

Although I may regret this, I fixed the settings so that you don't have to be registered with Blogger to leave a comment. I hadn't realized that feature was even active, but now it's off.

If you post unregistered, please leave me at least some clue as to who you are. Er... not that I'd use any comments for blackmail, mockery or other illicit use. Honest.

nyquil, nyquil, nyquil

2005-02-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to intimately understand the expression "death warmed over," and it's only the second day. I feel like I died, was buried, then dug up and put in a microwave on high for two minutes.

Because I'm too lethargic to move much, I've been spending a lot of time either asleep or mindlessly surfing the internet. I'm finding weird stuff on the internet, but weirder stuff when I sleep. The NyQuil is almost as good for #$%^ed up dreams as demerol. I think I'm going to switch cough syrups because I'm afraid of the flesh-eating fairies.

Anyway, I can't show you my whacked out dreams, but I can show you some of the whacked out things I've found online. Like USB Sushi and a comic called Edible Dirt. Enjoy. I'm going to mainline some NeoCitran and play Bejeweled until I fall into a drugged stupor again.

oh baby, you're so cruel

2005-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

Normal people catch a cold. Not me. That would imply far too casual a thing. I don’t catch colds. Colds catch me.

When it comes to an immune system, genetics let me down. It has a lot to do with my other health problems, but it always seems a little unfair. I’d been trying new medication meant to keep the migraines at bay; the result was a full week of spin-y head feelings and nausea, plus a migraine with a real sense of irony. Once I stopped taking the meds, the side-effects grudgingly gave up and slunk off to pester someone else, but I guess I weakened myself enough to get the cold approximately half the campus has.

So once again, I’m running a low grade fever, extremely woozy, and just healthy enough to be absolutely desolate that I can’t go play with my friends. My throat feels like there’s sandpaper stuck behind my tonsils, and I feel woefully contagious.

I took out my homework, poked it with a stick a few times, and then went back to bed. I’ll probably skive off class tomorrow, though I’m sure Jenny will make a point of kicking me in the shins for it. It’s about as high as she can reach. Short people are funny.

The template for Axis is only partly done, and I’m slightly panicked about trying to get submissions for it. My sketchy sense of self-esteem is suggesting that maybe I ought to have just done a fifth class instead. (What if I can’t get enough material to publish? Eeek!) XS Magazine is also weighing on my mind, but only because the kind of writing I want to do for that is completely beyond my capacity when my brain is this numb. Same problem for my Freelance story idea. I just can’t hit the right tone of academic wryness while I’m this messed up. It’s extremely frustrating.

Ah well. Every year, I seem to get sick a little less often and have slightly fewer issues, which ultimately makes me cheerful enough to tolerate a little discomfort. I’m trying not to use medical deferals as a means of survival this time around, but having the option keeps my anxiety down.

Oh, and on a side note, U2 tickets for Vancouver went on sale yesterday.

You say you want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
You say you want
Your story to remain untold
But all the promises we make
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you…

All I wanted were three goddamn tickets, but no… Ticketmaster is evil. Eeeeevil. The exact second that the tickets became available, their website slammed to a screeching halt, phone lines jammed, and four of us fought for over an hour to try and get a series of tickets at least near each other.

Thanks to Auren, who was the only one of us with any success, it looks like we’ll have some tickets for the April 28th show. Unfortunately, they’re scattered, which could cause problems later.

Despite that, I am overjoyed at the idea of finally getting to see the band I’ve loved for more than half my life. I’m still expecting things to go wrong, but if things do go pear-shaped, I will still go to Vancouver that weekend and have fun. Sure, we may burn Ticketmaster in effigy outside GM Place while Bono sings a few hundred feet away, but damn it, it will be fun.

Yeesh, it took me over an hour just to write this. I’m going to do some NyQuil shooters (bonus points to whoever can quote the whole Dennis Leary ‘Q’ song) and go to bed.

too much cute

2005-01-29T14:18:00.000-08:00

If you weren't rattled by the idea of a Hello Kitty MMORPG (massively multiplayer online game) why not give Mystic Journey Fairyland a shot?

The literature states:

Mystic Journey is a huge world and includes many different realms. From the world of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, The Matchstick Girl, Mermaid, Alice in Wonderland, Emperor’s Robe, Peter Pan, The Arabian Nights and many more, each environment offers different stories and exciting adventures. Mystic Journey provides you with a myriad of surprises!

I suspect the end player base is mostly going to consist of pedophiles pretending to be kids in order to proposition other pedophiles pretending to be kids.

os-tan

2005-01-27T01:17:00.000-08:00

After a random encounter with what was described as the female embodiment of Win2K Pro (an operating system) I did a little digging. Apparently, there's a whole package of female characters created to represent different operating systems.

Wikipedia has this to say:

OS-tan (OS for Operating System, and the Japanese "-tan" which is an overly cute mispronounciation of, specifically a child's slurring of "-chan," a diminutive honorific for a person) or simply OS Girls are the personification of several OSes, most famously Windows, by various amateur Japanese artists. A pure fan creation, the appearance of each character is generally consistent across artists. OSes are almost always portrayed as women, the Windows girls usually as sisters, despite sometimes seeming the same age.

I find the whole thing to be slightly disturbing and yet fascinating. It's either a very human way of giving anthropomorphic qualities to a computer, or a very #&%^ed up way of amusing guys who can't get dates. However, it's kind of a neat idea, if you don't stop to analyse it.

Really, it only gets creepy when you skim down to the part about breast-size relating to how much memory each OS uses.

the eiffel tower is a portal to HELL!

2005-01-23T01:53:00.000-08:00

The pain, oh sweet jeezus, the pain.

The Eiffel Tower is a portal to hell.

"Parisians have known about the portal for years. Why do you think you don't see Frenchmen up there? We'd just as soon leave the tourists to the demons, especially the Americans."

Yeah, thanks, Weekly World News. I needed that laugh. I'm not sure what bothers me more -- that their logic makes a twisty kind of sense, or that the story is filed under the politics section.

If you still have braincells left after that journalistic monstrosity, how about learning 10 simple ways to tell if your prostitute is an extraterrestrial. Damn those evil aliens, using innocent and unsuspecting johns for lurid sexual purposes! Those poor men!

Incidentally, they actually use the phrase "fallen woman," which amuses me greatly. However, it's not entirely clear why an alien would want to peddle their ass on street corners. Science? Or is it all part of an elaborate plan to cull the secrets of the human race?

Dan offered to go find me a few hookers so that we could evaluate their potential status as celestial immigrants. However, I decided that if aliens want to get their kicks that way, let them enjoy it. I wonder if extraterrestrials get frostbite...

on the periphery...

2005-01-22T02:42:00.000-08:00

I've set up a domain and hosting for my web-project, Peripheral Axis. The only thing there right now is the initial report I submitted to my supervisor, but it's wonderful to see my own space take form.

I'll be working on it in portions over the next few months, mostly on campus, as my web-builder of choice is on the J-School computers. The call for submissions will go out as soon as I'm organized enough to accept and work with them. I just pray I get enough interest to get this off the ground.

As for other internet publications, work on the Jour 454 project is just getting underway. Everyone seems pleased with my idea of vice as a theme, which frankly, surprises the hell out of me. It also makes me happy, because I think this is something other people are actually going to read. And by that, I mean people who aren't related to, dating, or working with the production staff.

Names are still being thrown around for that... Tru Vice (which makes me cringe a little, but is undeniably clever) and XS are two of them. Personally, I strongly prefer the simple austerity of Vice, or another unadorned, non-cutsey title, but it isn't my baby. I scored my victory with the theme, and anyway, I have a whole other project that suffers no creative meddlers but me. It also occured to me that the cumulative vision of some 20 students might actually turn out better than my narrow view of things would permit.

Meanwhile, except for a few complaints, things are going so well for me that the hairs on my neck are prickling with the anticipation of a metaphorical piano landing on my head.

If you hear a crash, it's probably just karma catching up to me.

update plans

2005-01-20T00:29:00.000-08:00

I'm setting this down, partly for your information, and partly as a measure to keep myself from crapping out. Too many blogs go to seed that way, and this is for my own benefit, if only as a textual dumping ground to keep ideas flowing.

There is no update shedule, as such. However, I plan on updating this thing every five days. Three days is ideal, and seven days acceptable with extenuating circumstances. I'd like my blog to turn out as interesting as Marv and Arjun's, which means regular additions of new material.

Some of those updates will be 1000+ word rants, like the White Wolf thing, while others will be piddly little "hey check this out" comments with a URL. I'm a full-time post-bach student, with an active (but geeky) life, which means my available time will wax and wane depending on assignments, exams, and production shedules.

I think a lot of my creative energies are going to be transfered over to the yet-dormant Peripheral Axis, but for now, this is what I've got.

doujinshi

2005-01-17T22:45:00.000-08:00

One of the fascinating phenomena I've discovered in recent years is doujinshi. (For those in the dark, doujinshi is plural, doujin is singular.)

Fanfic is old-hat, though still ragingly popular in some circles. Check out how many Sailor Moon (or Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Final Fantasy...) stories are on FanFiction.Net. Doujinshi takes it to the next step -- amateur artists continuing retired comics, or drawing stories that never took place in the professional work. Most often, doujinshi are used for the same purpose as fanfiction; giving shippers a non-canon romance, or a least some smut.

Consequently, most of it isn't really interesting. Besides, North America is so fearful of copyright laws that our artists generally won't even think about playing with someone else's intellectual property. Japan, on the other hand, practically encourages it.

Doujinshi circles fund small print-runs out of their own pockets, and market them privately. Comic shops sometimes sell them, and fans can often find copies in library-like cafes where you pay for the time spent reading. Some of it trickles across the ocean to us, but no where near approaching the demand.

I'm not a promising candidate for the JET programme or anything, but I find Japanese pop culture to be utterly riviting sometimes.

The PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi is an astonishingly good doujin based on American cartoons. I think the artist is located in the Philippines, but it's published in English. PGD is further removed from the standards of the genre by being G-rated and about as cute as Saturday morning cartoons.

There are several reasons I appreciate PGD. A few of them are the brilliant art, the believable character representation, and a sense of humour. It's easily the highest quality doujin I've seen, bar none.

Cross-overs are a classic storytelling tactic in amateur fanfiction and doujinshi, and PGD weilds this tool with a vengence. Although the PowerPuff Girls are the main characters in his story, aspects of other cartoon network faves are woven in with a gleefully chaotic touch. And amazingly enough, it works. Bleedman, the artist, has taken a genre and made it into a universe unto itself.

PowerPuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Space Invader Zim, and Dexter's Laboratory are the cartoons I recognize, rendered in Bleedman's absolutely adorable and vivid world. There are probably others (anyone know if some of those monsters are Digimon?) but I'll have to plead ignorance; I've spent the last 15 years worth of Saturday mornings sleeping in.

I don't know anything about copyight laws, but I think it's possible that PGD may get yanked sooner or later. I've seen similar things vanish when they gets too popular or when the network lawyers get wind of it. Bearing that in mind, go check it out now, because the art alone is worth a look.

While I strongly advocate original creative writing and art, I think fan productions -- be they fic or doujinshi -- mean getting involved in the fantasies that are marketed to us, and making them partly our own. Aside from that fact that any creative endeavour is good in my books, I think that ceasing to be a passenger in your own dreams is an admirable project.

I cautiously hope that PGD represents a step towards more quality North American doujinshi. With the internet remaining a relatively lawless space, I don't think my hopes are entirely unfounded.

vampires and self-mockery

2005-01-12T21:44:00.000-08:00

(Non-gamers probably aren't going to understand most of this. I'm woefully bad at explaining the nature of RPGs, but if you have any questions, I'd be happy to take a stab at them.)

Watching scary movies while eating cookie dough was a ritual my best-friend and I carried on though middle-school. She was cool, and I wasn't, but we had enough in common to appreciate a little after-school silliness. We both studied piano, we both liked stupid boys, and we both yearned for a more exciting life than the suburbs of Toronto allowed us.

Renting trashy horror flicks was, I think, a way of rebelling against the polished exterior of our good-girl world. The well-educated, dignified young women our successful parents wanted us to be wouldn't have taken such enjoyment from fictional murder.

Villains are always the cool ones in horror movies. Early 90s heroes were boring... bad guys were cool. We rented Lost Boys, and I fell in love with Kiefer Sutherland, even if he was a sadistic vampire. Possibly because of it.

As twelve-year-olds, we departed from our usual good behaviour and snuck into a theatre to see Dracula. I remember liking the movie, but the joyful fear of breaking the rules is what sticks with me most; in retrospect, it's easy to see that as the pivotal moment between childhood and my anxious teenage years.

Vampires became a symbol of freedom to me. Sensuous, wise, and unfeeling, they're the legacy left behind by a hundred horror flicks. Even when they get to be the protagonist, they remain villainous. No one makes a vampire practice the piano, or study the history of the Canadian railroads.

Enter temptation.

Vampire: The Masquerade is a table top role-playing game, somewhat akin to Dungeons and Dragons. I discovered it around the tender age of 15, when I felt that being a bloodsucking, soulless demon would be preferable to being a teenager.

What made V:tM so damn cool, apart from the vampires, was the concept of clans. Each blood line, or clan, had definitive characteristics. To the perpetually excluded, storytelling in a fantasy world where the characters have a solid sense of belonging is compelling. Even the names sounded mysterious and musical: Ventrue, Malkavian, Toreador, Tremere...

From a perspective ten years removed, I'm pretty damn sure that White Wolf's design team deliberately created the game to appeal to miserable geeks like myself. While Dungeons and Dragons was meant for the previous generation of Tolkien-loving gamers, V:tM was something seemingly tailored for my generation of viciously amused
teenage losers.

In fact, White Wolf was responsible for a whole slew of interconnected fantasy worlds for gamers to taste. V:tM was the most widely played, but if vampires weren't your thing, there were also the ghosts of Wraith: The Oblivion. For those looking for something more human, the wizards found in Mage: The Ascension might appeal. These, along with other games (including mummies, werewolves, and angelic monster-hunters) coexisted in White Wolf's masterful creation, the World of Darkness.

Am I giving the impression that White Wolf is a disgustingly successful company? I hope so, because they are. As a group, we gamers seem to heap more derision and disgust upon White Wolf than any other company. However, someone is obviously still buying their stuff. Not even counting the books, one would need a very large space to store a complete collection of World of Darkness merchandise. Jewelry, ornamental weapons, posters, clothes, GM screens, mugs, and dice are just some of the things you can buy.

I've shut the door on the World of Darkness, and haven't returned to it in a very long time. The books are in the garage, the seethingly green collector's mug broken years past, and my sentimental Ventrue pin lost to time. The only reminder I keep is a cheap but pretty clan necklace and handful of 10-sided dice, which occasionally come in handy for playing games like Call of Cthulhu and D&D.

I think the reason so many of us reject White Wolf and it's creations is because it signifies a portion of our lives to which we don't wish to return. The feeling of affinity I felt when I first read the core V:tM rulebook from cover to cover is gone.

Oh well. A long time ago I liked the New Kids on the Block, strawberry bubble gum, and GI Joe action figures with karate action. I just grew out of it. (Okay, so I still like GI Joe action figures. But I'm still mature, damn it.)

The last good World of Darkness story I participated in was during the play testing phase of Hunter: The Reckoning. Instead of vampires, we played hunters. Our fragile and flawed characters hunted down the monsters, and instead of becoming them, we defeated them. They mauled the hell out of our squishy human characters, but we still won. The symbolism of this, and the irony, was lost on me at the time.

Amusingly enough, the spark for this particular rant was news of White Wolf's newest venture. Apparently, they too have ceased to take the dark realm of fantasy so seriously, and are indulging in a delightfully crude type of self-mockery.

Pimp: The Backhanding.

I was certain this was a joke, at first. In a state of sleep-deprivation, I gazed at the monitor, deafened by cross signals from my outraged inner-feminist and innate bullshit-detector. What gamer hasn't made the offhand crack about "Human: The Bludgeoning" joining the excessively somber ranks of the White Wolf library?

However, it looks to be real. Randy Milholland, patron saint of comedic social commentary, had this to say:

The gloomiest game company around, White Wolf has a new card game coming out titled, Pimp: the Backhanding. A few weeks ago, this generated some VERY unhappy responses in their forum (which, I'm ashamed to admit, made me happy because I'm glad to see someone else get bitched out for once) who felt it was degrading to women and promoted violence. Then they all went into their basements and pretended to be -534 Generation Assamite vampires and pretended the bottle of ketchup they were sucking on was the neck of every girl who blew them off in high school. Later, there was masturbating and crying in the dark.

Consequently, I've decided that my inner-feminist still has a sense of humour, and that taking anything in gaming seriously is something that ought to be beneath me. Most likely, this game will tank, regardless of the implicated gender warfare -- the joke is a one-trick pony, and it lacks the charm to stick. However, in a way, it's redeemed White Wolf in my eyes. It dared to make fun of itself.

hello kitty

2005-01-09T02:37:00.000-08:00

Because I am perverse and irreverent, I give you the Hello Kitty online game. I'm so going to play this.

(And yes, I am the one who's been setting hello kitty backgrounds on random computers in the Journalism lab since October. Shh. Don't tell.)

yikes

2005-01-06T03:38:00.000-08:00

How many nightmares is this guy going to have? After being carried away by the tsunami he managed to survive for eight days at sea. Eight days living off floating coconuts. Although the tree he took refuge on was apparently large enough to stand on, he was surrounded by corpses and kept himself alive by drinking rain water.

Both impressive, and lucky. And probably a bit of a morale boost for his home town of Aceh, which is one of the most ravaged areas.

so damn cool

2005-01-05T05:11:00.000-08:00

I yoinked the following link from InstaMarv's blog. I'm not the biggest current events junkie, but tech stuff makes my geek heart tremble with delight. And c'mon, teleportation. The days when I won't have to climb out of washroom windows to escape lousy dates will soon be over. Okay, I kid... but it's still pretty neat.

The Year in Science: Top 100 Stories

This list amused me for at least one hour of my latest war with insomnia. Thanks Marv.

(Amusingly enough, I posted this before I realized Marv had sited me as his source for the World Changing link, which I'd gotten from Arjun. This is what I love about blogging... the information flow makes me giddy sometimes.)

quote

2005-01-04T17:00:00.000-08:00

"It is no secret that the best place to write, in my opinion, is a cafe; you don't have to make your own coffee, you don't feel that you are in solitary confinement while you work and when inspiration fails, you can take a walk to the next cafe while your batteries recharge. In my opinion, the best writing cafe is just crowded enough so that you blend in, but now so crowded that you end up sharing a table with somebody who tries to read chapter twenty upside down, has staff who don't glower at you if you sit there too long (though these days I can afford to keep ordering coffees even if I don't drink them, so that's less of a problem) and doesn't play very loud music, which is the only noise that disturbs me when I'm writing."

-J.K. Rowling

I am in full agreement with Ms. Rowling. The cafe comfort-zone is one of the reasons I miss Victoria so much, actually. While living downtown, I had my pick of cafes to walk to and study or write. My hand to god, there were four Starbucks within two blocks of my apartment.

Kamloops just doesn't do cafes right. Sure, there's a 24-hour Starbucks, but the seating arrangements aren't inviting in the slightest and it's always crowded. Ditto for Zack's. An old friend dragged me into a cowboy-themed cafe once, but we were driven out by the excessively loud croonings of a poet-musician by night/road-side produce salesman by day. I've retreated to the familiar confines of Denny's on occasion, but I keep meeting people I went to highschool with there. Ick.

Closest I came to a happy cafe writing place was while studying for the Media Law exam. Chapters is a place I like; sure, it's a big evil corporation... but they have a lot of books. Books make coffee taste better. And honestly, Starbucks coffee needs the help. I spent a couple hours happily entrenched by the fire place, paper and books in a state of organized chaos around me; with mismatched socks, blue hair in braids tucked under my santa-hat, wearing a hugely oversize sweatshirt that reads "WTF," I like to think that I'm not kind of girl to whom jesus-freaks are generally drawn.

Imagine my wary astonishment when the grey-haired man across from me tore a page from his notepad, smiled, and handed it to me. He put away his pens and paper and walked off without a word, leaving me perplexed. Frowning at the scribble, entitled "Received by inspiration, for your encouragement," I read the following.

I am calling you unto myself. You are a chosen vessel which I have picked out of the many that are to become Mine. I have the many details of your future before Me. I am calling you to place your trust in Me and Me only...

The letter went on from there, increasingly creepy. I waited till I was fairly certain the man was gone, then packed up my notes and abandoned my overpriced latte and place by the fire. So much for that refuge. Even if I go back, I'm going to feel like I have to watch for the guy who thinks he's the Voice of God, or that he is God, or whatever. Once again, ick.

At any rate, I'm walking into another semester without a place to escape and think. Sometimes this entire city feels like a comical adventure in futility. Oh well. There's a good chance that Kamloops will suddenly look like a thriving metropolis if I fail to get a good internship and end up in someplace like Whiskey Creek.

Victoria has spoiled me utterly rotten.

unfathomable

2004-12-30T19:08:00.000-08:00

I'm hearing all kinds of horrible things about the recent tsunami disaster. The rumours are running wild. I heard someone say the initial earthquake actually shifted the Earth's axis by a small degree, and another person said that entire islands were moved hundreds of feet by the force of the tsunami. Everyone is talking about how much money it will cost to help.

Even if those things aren't true, the death toll is spiralling into numbers I can't comprehend. 117,000 from a recent count. It's hot there, and there aren't enough people to bury the bodies. In a few more days, disease will get a foot hold; once again, the death toll will climb.

Most of me is madly grateful that I'm safely here. Another part of me feels guilty, and wishes I could somehow go there and help. Of course, I know I'd be more of a liability than aid... which perhaps leaves me free to safely wish. It also leaves me free to be angry at my health for altruistic reasons, instead of the selfish ones I endeavour to ignore.

At any rate, it's a big ugly mess, and even if it vanishes from the global eye in a month or two, that kind of damage is going to take generations to heal. What about all the adults who lost everything? What about the children who have no one to care for them? How long is it going to take for the economy to heal, much less the people?

In my war history classes, we talked about things like that. Except then we talked about the result of war, not of a perfectly natural geological event. Further, those were catastrophic wars from before my time. I guess some of the blind idealism of my generation has crept into my unconscious thinking; "horrible things have happened, but they don't happen like that anymore." Except that this is horrible, and it's happening right now.

Isn't it frightening? We were all fussing about the war in Iraq, democracy, and human rights.... then the earth itself just shrugged and did about as much damage as a war could.

Finding news that isn't just a parrot-recitation of the death toll along with some grim footage is a little tricky. I guess the networks figure that replaying scenes of piles of rotting corpses is the same thing as reporting. I watched a woman tell a reporter that he had lost her home, husband and children in the chaos. She said she tried to save her baby, but it was torn from her arms by the water. She wasn't even crying. Her tone of voice was the same as someone complaining about rising gas prices. I wonder what happened to her when the shock wore off. Her eyes were black and unfathomably cold.

Stuff like that makes me feel very, very, small.

For less sensationalism, and more activism, the blogging community is the best place to look. I'm shamelessly borrowing links I found on Arjun Singh's blog. The weblog of Kiruba Shankar is a very human look at what's going on and how people are reacting to it. I can't recommend it enough. World Changing is another blog with news and information about the relief effort that most television reports aren't covering.

More links: The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog posts about news resources, aid, donations, and volunteer efforts. Tsunami Victims is a central point for collecting details about relief activities in specific areas.

Here are also a few blogs of ordinary people who are in the affected areas. Ellie is in Phuket, Thailand. Meilathena is in Medan, Indonesia. CCMBrown is in Bankok and Coolprasad is in Madras, India.

The list goes on and on. These are just Livejournal accounts. The disturbing part is, these kids have the same kind of blogs we all do-- right up until the disaster. To me, that brings home the fact that this is our community that's hurting. I wonder how many blogs are never going to be updated again because the writer didn't survive. It seems silly to relate to something so tragic that way, but sometimes the sharpest moments are the trivial ones.

purrr...

2004-12-15T22:23:00.000-08:00

Happy here.

poof

2004-12-14T21:36:00.000-08:00

I'm hopping a Greyhound tonight and heading back to the rainy embrace of the coast. Some friends are being wonderful enough to put me up in a cozy guest-room while I'm there, so I get to enjoy the tranquility of Oak Bay.

I chickened out of my mother's offer to get me a plane ticket. Yes, I am a slave to my phobias. So ten hours of buses. I am armed with a discman, GBA, laptop computer (okay, so I'd have to be mad to use it on a bus, but still... I installed Pirates. ARRR!) and enough medication to keep me docile till Vancouver. I'm a spoiled little neurotic. But in my defence, the discman is falling apart, and everything but the drugs and Pirates software is borrowed. :)

Honestly, the worst part is that long, dragging, muscle cramping trip to Vancouver. I think I've managed to sleep it away once in seven years of seasonal migration. Mostly I sit there, twitching, and wish ebola on whichever dredge of humanity is encroaching on my space. When you're young and female, everyone and their grandma wants to sit next to you. If you're lucky, they'll offer to share the ubiquitous oh-so-subtle vodka concoction they made out of cheap booze and orange soda. (Just say no, kids.)

When you look harmlessly vague like I tend to, getting a solo seat involves shameless lying. Not the obvious kind... just try holding some crumpled kleenex, sniffling randomly, and affecting a slight cough. The smell of Halls helps. No one wants to spend five hours up close and personal with another person's phlegm problem. However, it's not always enough, and when the bus is full the game becomes encouraging the least offensive boarder to chose your seat. Otherwise you can end up with someone who isn't faking sick, or wants to show you pictures of their cats.

As compensation for my suffering, I love the ferry ride. Being in the open, when the wind is trying to strangle me with my own hair and the ocean is a vision of solitude-- that makes me happy. Plus those little cakes they serve in the buffet are killer.

I'll be gone for a week. Any last requests for Rogers chocolates, Murchies tea/coffee, or touchable bubble blowing necklaces can be made through my ferric_feline@lycos.com account.

dude!

2004-12-12T18:34:00.000-08:00

Deconstructing and deciphering the word... Dude!

"Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity — an effortless kinship that’s not too intimate.

Cool solidarity is especially important to young men who are under social pressure to be close with other young men, but not enough to be suspected as gay."

Words are so damn cool.

dull roar

2004-12-11T15:22:00.000-08:00

My computer went splat again. Luckily, my brother is a clever bugger when it comes to this sort of thing, and by hooking up a spare slave HD, he gave me the opportunity to pillage the wreck for my mp3 collection and word documents. Mike's theory is that my computer's memory is presenting a problem, so he underclocked it. Right now, things are working, but error messages keep popping up.

Oh well. At least this happened while I only had exams to worry about, and not writing.

Next week I'm heading back to Victoria. Really looking forward to it; Marv sent me some pictures of the city -- mostly near where I used to live -- and I got all sentimental and squishy about it. Kamloops is okay, but I don't feel that sense of home that I had every time I climbed the steps of the Montrose. Plus I miss... well, everyone. There are great people here, but the level of angst and melodrama never gets below a dull roar.

spice world

2004-12-02T01:54:00.000-08:00

I was going to rant about Christmas, but since that entire diatribe can be summarized with the words “bah humbug,” I’m going to skip it for now. Instead, something a little closer to home.

I dyed my hair bright blue. Not all it, just half of it. From the ears down, and only the under layer. The rest is still a mostly natural brown. Doing this wasn’t exactly a whim. I wanted to do it for awhile, so I finally jumped off that fence.

I’m actually pretty predictable that way, or would be, if I stayed anywhere long enough for people to notice. I very carefully avoid doing anything noteworthy most of the time. Keeping to the innocuous paths is convenient.

But I get restless. That’s usually when I realize that I’m not who I want to be, or that I’m following the unspoken laws of “supposed to.” Since I’m not presently looking for work, I assumed there wouldn’t be repercussions. I thought blue hair would be really pretty. I didn’t do it to make a statement. I did it because it feels right. This is what I am right now.

That and I’d rather be dead than ordinary. I love contrast. Chaos is even better. To be one thing, then contradict it entirely… that’s what makes people interesting. Besides, last year Bill dyed half of his hair green and half of it red, and then put it in corn row braids. He thrives on the derision of “normals.” There will always be a piece of Bill inside me, telling me to go ahead and totally fuck with someone’s head for the hell of it.

I’m not going to pretend that I know what people are thinking. There are assumptions, however, that go with certain things. I complain about all the stupid boxes we put each other in, but then I catch myself doing it to others. Blue hair means “punk,” right? Old ladies visibly frown with disapproval as their eyes settle on me, and my father curled his lip and snarled.

I really doubt it’s the aesthetic of blue hair which makes them sneer. It’s the prepackaged associations. Blue hair means I’m a rebellious party-girl slut, right? Except that all of those associations are directly counter to my obvious nature. I think that’s why it bothers me. They aren’t silently berating me for a displeasing fashion choice; they’re pissed off at the person they think they I am.

We tell ourselves we’re living in a free, liberal society. You can be anything you want now, no more rigid gender roles. Women come in more flavours than just “house-wife” now. But how much choice do we really have? Maybe we’re just living in a Spice Girls version of the world. You can be whatever you want… as long as you’re one of the established archetypes. You can be Posh, Baby, Sporty… that’s allowed.

Girl power about as varied as a package of Lifesavers. If you match the criteria (which is laid out so clearly in kids shows) you are healthy and acceptable. If you’re outside of those archetypes, clearly you’re angry, hurting, or broken.

I bet that in ten years this sort of thing becomes totally passé. But right now, it’s against the standards. When I was a teenager, the standard for girls was red-dyed hair, Kurt Cobain worship and grunge. Now it’s all about tight jeans and fitted tops, contact lenses and slightly lewd exuberance. There are a lot of extremely pretty girls in Journalism. Most of them pull off that look with an easy grace I can’t imagine feeling in a shirt that small. It’s actually a very flattering look.

But it isn’t me. Not that I don’t enjoy their company, it’s just that no one is ever going to mistake me for one of the group. Maybe dyeing my hair is a subconscious way of making it perfectly clear that I’m not trying to be a part of "cool" anymore.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m getting more compliments than anything else. Blue hair hasn’t utterly altered my place in the world. The change is almost imperceptible. And I very much like it. The shade is perfect, and some part of me just loves that it pisses a few people off.

quote

2004-12-01T01:43:00.000-08:00

"You know we have more prescription drugs now. Every commercial that comes on TV is a prescription drug ad. I can't watch TV for four minutes without thinking I have five serious diseases. Like: "Do you ever wake up tired in the morning?" Oh my god I have this, write this down. Whatever it is, I have it. Half the time I don't even know what the commercial is; there’s people running in fields or flying kites or swimming in the ocean. I'm like that is the greatest disease ever. How do you get that? That disease comes with a hot chick and a puppy."

- Lazyboy (Underwear Goes Inside the Pants)

grrr...

2004-11-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

I am not a happy kitty tonight. Rant time, kids.

It’s been a real struggle lately to get everything done. It feels like I’m trying to live about three different lives and be at least that many people. While there are definitely benefits to that, it means that nothing gets done quite as well as I’d like it to.

Tonight was my last chance to get shots of the SCA fight practice for my photography assignment. One roll from last week got trashed, which leaves me only one to work from. Not enough. Despite the weather being utter shit (two days of fog gave way to five minutes of pouring slush) I went to pick up Joe.

I made it about two blocks down Summit.

It’s level where I live, but slants steeply downhill after that. The steepest place is by the 7-11, but I wasn’t even that far when I completely lost control and slid, gaining speed on the slope. I stared directly into the headlights of an oncoming pick-up truck, which was also out of control. I helplessly pounded the breaks and calmly wondered, “Is this going to hurt?”

The woman driving the pick-up threw it into reverse and managed to get half onto the sidewalk. I thudded into the snowy curb, unscathed but rattled, literally an inch from the right side of her truck. Both of us thought we’d impacted, though her first words were, “Oh, it’s okay honey. Don’t worry about it.”

I stood there shaking, and she lit up a cigarette. We watched another car hit the same patch of ice she had, sliding to within two inches of the truck. Anyone coming up or down the hill probably figured it was a three-way collision, which made it almost funny that we hadn’t so much as touched bumpers.

I wasn’t entirely sure my legs were going to hold me, but didn’t want to let that on. So I dug out the family cell phone. I’d half expected to get stuck at the bottom of the hill on my way back. Hadn’t even occurred to me I wouldn’t make it down.

While I phoned my father, which I regretted about five minutes later, I watched a car reach the point I’d lost control. The car spun, shuddered, and then did a complete 180. Backwards, it skated gracefully into the sidewalk below us. The next guy made it past by driving on the far sidewalk, but the one after twisted and got stuck in the snow.

I’m not sure how many people were stuck. Ten or so cars with flashing lights visible just on the visible curve of Summit. The occasional person was still sneaking through, but those of us on the sidewalk and road had to keep dodging skidding cars. At some point, a city bus put its flashers on and gave up. I called emergency city services, who said a sand truck couldn’t get through… because there were too many cars stuck in the way. Hello, irony.

I got out my camera and loaded it with the film I’d packed for the SCA. Not easy to do with frozen fingers. Then I shamelessly wandered through the snow, taking pictures. I really doubt anything looks like more than a bunch of blurs. Nothing I could use to replace the shots I’m not getting tonight, at any rate.

Instead of calling a damn tow-truck like I asked (as if one would have made it) my father walked down. The man has the survival instincts of a fucking lemming. But he thinks he’s immortal, or at least so damn good that he won’t get hurt. Never mind the permanent limp. When he casually crossed the ice slicked road in front of an oncoming car, which wasn’t in control, another woman covered her eyes and said “oh, Jesus…”

He decided, despite the protests of everyone around… including the owners of the truck and car I was tangled with, that he’d drive up on the curb and around the car. The truck had been pushed back enough to allow people to walk between them. Not much more than that.

I tried to talk him out of it, but got yelled at. Everyone kind of shut up at that point. Not going to argue with the pissed off old German guy who isn’t hearing shit, I suppose. He managed not to hit anyone, which was a bloody miracle, and made him disgustingly smug. I didn’t want to get in the car, but it’s not like I had a choice in the matter. He pulled into the bumper-car ice rink that Summit had become – ignoring my plea of “but there’s a car coming!”

I really hate him sometimes. And not just because he was a complete asshole to me when I was a kid. I hate him because he’s still a complete asshole.

Then had just had to make the comment; “See? You need more experience to drive in winter.” Like I’m sixteen or something. I kind of lost my temper at that point. His driving scares the hell out of me on a good day, and he wrapped that same car around a streetlight last year. But of course, if I do the same thing, it’s because I was careless or driving too fast.

So now I’m stuck at home, feeling more trapped than ever, and sulky about the missed photo opportunity. I don’t know what I’m going to do for photography class. I have maybe three useable shots from last week.

*growl*

Sorry Joe. I know you wanted to go play swishy-poke with the rapier fighters. If Eileen gives me an extension, we can go next week. Meanwhile, I’m going to listen to really loud goth-metal and pretend that I’m not indulging in teenage angst.

snow

2004-11-23T23:46:00.000-08:00

Now I remember why I fled to Victoria when I was 18.

(I looked at the list of pros and cons for each post-secondary I was accepted at, saw the one that said "no snow" and said "y'know what, I'm going there." Seriously. I hadn't even seen the ocean in my life at that point, but the coast was looking really good while I shivered in Kamloopsian winter.)

It's been a really mild winter so far. It's not even all that cold... which is kind of the problem. When it started snowing, the flakes hit the road and dissolved. Then it started stacking. At least, that's what it did here. I live about half way up the hill... it probably was raining downtown and icing over in Aberdeen. The roads were slippery when I drove my brother to the autism meeting tonight. By the time we left, the roads were practically undrivable.

It took at least half an hour to get home, stuck in a car with my brother, with whom I am not close. I had to put the blinkers on and creep up the hill, skidding as much to the side as forward, fighting for every foot of the way up Summit. People with 4 wheel drive got to barrel up the middle of the road, while the rest of us crept upwards, hoping to god no one would stop and cost us all forward momentum.

In a word, sucky.

But snow is pretty. And it feels nice, crunching under foot and gathering in my hair. I'd planned to go to Ruckers, but since I wasn't willing to drive again, I took my parents' dog and went for a walk.

Or tried to. I think we need a new dog. This one is broken. He bounced along, in that way standard poodles do, until we got out of sight of the house. Then he sat down in the snow and absolutely refused to budge.

Totally freaking useless. I tried to coax him forward, yanked on the leash, pushed him, cajoled him, and even tried to bribe him. He just sat and looked up at me with mortally sad eyes. While he's probably better behaved than either of his poodle-predecessors, he's a sad disappointment as a snow dog. Casey was always up for a snow fight, and Marcus used to steal my mittens and roll in the snow. Lucas... Lucas just sat down and waited for me to take him home.

At any rate, I now have had my fill of snow. Less than three weeks till I can visit Victoria and get away to a place that has the decency to rain.

geek culture

2004-11-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

I feel like I lost a day... Monday isn't supposed to be tomorrow.

Of course, the way the migraines are going, I pretty much did lose a day. I'm on stuff that's supposed to help prevent the migraines (pills incidentally make me mildly allergic to sunlight) but in the last week or so, I've had two hospital-worthy headaches.

If you know any good folky stuff for treating headaches, send me an e-mail. Chances are I know it already, but I'm willing to try just about anything at this point.

Despite a very rough night yesterday, I did manage to put in more hours than I'll ever own up to on my webpage this weekend. I'm cautiously proud of the result. I like webdesign... it's mathematical art. I wrote a lot of fluff for it, but didn't have a lot of pictures, and I think my layout compensates nicely. I'd like to do more on it, but maybe there'll be time for that later.

While I was mucking around trying to find a good quote about being geeking to fill a blank spot on my page, I found a blog story about the commodification of geek culture called Geek Culture, Geek Girls: Crippling Homogeneity. Interesting thoughts... and the part about girl geeks is true in a cringe-worthy kind of way. We tend to get shoved into the sidekick/mommy/trophy role. However, slagging Think Geek, even indirectly, gets a resounding "booooo" from me.

gomen nasai!

2004-11-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I know I don't update often enough. I keep meaning to do a substantial kind of post, but then I'm always so brain dead it falls to the side. My friend Joe, however, has been doing some interesting stuff over at his blog End of Times. If he ever moved away from the hard sciences and concentrated on writing, I fear I would be seriously outmatched.

Current projects include a webpage, a story on autistic kids in school, and a bunch of editting. I'm also starting to get anxious about getting an internship. I'd really like to use that as a way to get back to Victoria, but I know first-hand inhospitable the job market is there. Plus UVic has it's own J-School, which means all of those students will have an edge. That means I have to think about moving again or trying to stay here.

Anyway, enough whiny stuff. I'm going to be spending most of the weekend in the school lab, trying to finish off my absurd webpage and the autism story. I'm too much of a perfectionist about it, I know, but I'm assured this sort of thing builds character.

an update

2004-11-11T15:19:00.000-08:00

My computer is working again, though it’s a little depressing feeling as though I’m using someone else’s system. Without all my bookmarks and settings, it’s kind of like having a favourite pair of shoes replaced by ones that don’t fit as well.

Fortunately, most of my important files were saved, though I lost a fair chunk of mp3s along the way. I also have to download and reinstall a lot of software. It’s so easy to take things like Quicktime and Winamp for granted till you don’t have them. I’d also have to go through lengthy install times to put City of Heroes, Dark Age, ATiTD, or FFXI back on the hard drive. However, I don’t think I’ll bother. I haven’t had time to play games since before midterms, much as I miss my gamer friends in Victoria.

Digital Times is the publication we put together in Online Journalism. I did the weak little shrine (er… digest) about anime and the blogging thing. Oh well. It’s better than the unspeakable thing I built at Geocities during the off hours at Core Games. Definitely not as good as Squibbles site back when he was updating it. You can still find some of my craptastic reviews from years ago. You can blame me for the zen rating system.

For the next issue of Digital Times, I’m doing more anime and probably something on local autistic kids. I’ve also got a story on the SCA underway. They’ve been wonderfully cooperative and friendly towards me, even threw some armour on me and handed me a sword. Wenching sounds like fun, though I think I’d rather hit people with sticks.

computer problems

2004-11-03T22:34:00.000-08:00

My computer randomly stopped working today while I was out. I'd been out swimming, and when I came back, and the monitor was blank. After some fruitless poking, I got my brother (the autist savant type) to look. He proclaimed the registry to be corrupt.

Now, I'm not much on computer tech stuff. But I know enough to understand that's really, really bad. All my creative writing efforts, plus most of my journalistic endeavours are on that harddrive, along with several years worth of collected art and "teh funney."

I'm in a state of surly mourning at the moment. Since we can't find the recovery disk, I'll be getting professional help tomorrow. Needless to say, this couldn't come at a WORSE time... I have so many assignments on the go right now that extensions won't help, because they'd extend into time I need for other assignments.

I hate the world today. Growl.

blogging

2004-11-02T01:02:00.000-08:00

Here ya go. One story on blogging. When I get time (this week is extremely stressful for me) I'll fill in all the hyperlinks that got lost in the cut-and-paste.

Blogging: Pop Culture Communication

For Arjun Singh, it started as a way to record a trip to India so that friends and family could share his experiences. A year later, his personal blog, Chunky Ji’s Journal, is still his “online playground” and has readers from all over the Kamloops area.

Singh’s blog now touches on local politics, international affairs, and personal reflections. Unlike a professional news site, Singh doesn’t just report the facts. He discusses them, offers his view, and encourages response from his readers. He also provides hyperlinks to the sources that help him form his viewpoints. Most importantly, to Singh, the comment feature allows conversations to develop about the subject.

It’s the personal touch of blogging that appeals to Singh. “[Blogs] are essentially
very human. A good blog does not sound at all fake or contrived… Traditional media is becoming perhaps too formulaic and stiff. A good blog is like a good column. There is some colour to it and lots of personality.”

To express his interest with technology, Singh also created Friendly Technology, a blog focused solely on technological innovation. The uncluttered way Singh discusses technology makes it accessible to all types of people, and has lead to an international readership. Further, it has resulted in some interesting offers. “[I’ve been] approached a couple of times to write for larger technology blog projects. And that has been a little humbling.”

Marvin Beatty, a former UCC student, also blogs regularly. He describes his blog as a way of expressing his creativity. InstaMarv, features golfing news, commentary on the local environment, and personal insights. He uses both text and pictures to convey his view of the world.

Beatty says, “I didn’t appreciate [Kamloops] as much when I grew up here but now I do. In a sociological sense, I do post info about day-to-day activities like my recent job search, fishing trips, etc…so a bit of a Kamloops ‘feel’ must rub off on the site.”

Beatty’s goal isn’t to attract crowds of viewers, though he enjoys having an audience. The creation of the blog itself is satisfying. “It is simply an outlet for creativity. I enjoy playing with the layout of it and seeing what other bloggers do.”

Using a site like Blogs Canada, or a generalized search engine like Google, it’s a simple matter to find thousands of blogs on a vast range of topics. Some are online diaries, while others focus on a concept. The most popular blogs are a combination. Personal comments make it easy to see the writer as a real person, even a friend, unlike the impersonal figures who report for the newspaper or television.

Further, while a magazine or book is unresponsive, most blogs allow comments and e-mail access to the writer. It’s such humanity that makes blogs popular, and it’s the ease of making one that’s allowing their numbers to rapidly increase.

While many people use blogs as a form of creative expression, celebrities can also use blogs as a way of reaching out to their fans. Michael Moore started a blog to document his thoughts and experiences on his “Slacker Uprising” tour. He includes some personal notes, as well as the expected political rantings, and pictures taken along the tour. Actor Wil Weaton has been maintaining a blog since 2001, and author Neil Gaiman uses his to keep in touch with his fans. Blogs allow them to step outside of offical media channels and communicate on their own schedule.

From the Christian blog site Bene Diction to the cooking blog Kitchen Geek, blogs use the internet to spread information, ideas, and foster communities across distance. Politicians use them for propaganda, celebrities use them as a casual way of interacting with fans, and writers of all types use them to express their interests. Some blogs even feature music or photography as the major draw, instead of relying on text.

Blogs can be a way of connecting with friends, or communicating with like-minded strangers. Blogs often relay the kinds of personal perspectives that are left out of offical news reports. You can find news blogs, political blogs, personal blogs, even blogs with a distinct Kamloops flavour.

Starting a blog is easy, with free sites like Blogger and LiveJournal to hand you both space on the web and a template to display your words or pictures. Web design skills can help you personalize the appearance, but aren’t a prerequisite. Once you’ve got your blog template in front of you, pristine as a blank page in a notebook, only one question remains; what are you going to fill all that space with?

editorial assignment

2004-10-25T23:36:00.000-07:00

This is the first thing I've gotten a good mark on all semester. Frustrating, but true. At any rate, my mother worked with the John Howard Society for years, and she's a criminologist, which means I pretty much grew up steeped in discussion about social problems. So as an opinion piece, I latched onto the travesty that happened around the Howard house in Vernon. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that I've only succeeded in the one project in which I'm allowed to get mouthy.

Howard House: An Editorial

On June 21st of last summer, parolee Eric Fish left Howard House, a facility in Vernon serving as both a halfway house and shelter. There were no bars or electrified fences. No one is really certain where he went during that time, but we do know that he brutally murdered 75 year old Bill Abramenko on August 4th. Three days later he was apprehended.

If there is a single factor you can blame for the tragedy, it’s whatever lives inside Eric Fish’s cocaine addicted, psychopathic brain. However, it was known that his original offence was murder. It was also known that he was doing hard drugs despite the conditions of his parole. One of the three members of the parole board responsible for his release believed he was a serious risk as a re-offender. In fact, Fish hadn’t even been very cooperative with prison rehabilitation programs, apart from his ongoing affair with cocaine. Yet he was able to disappear into society.

What went wrong? To start, why did it seem like a good idea to release someone with such a violent history into the custody of Howard House? Approximately 1/4th of parolees in 2003-2004 were sent to halfway houses for the final third of their sentence. Being sent to a halfway house (more formally called a “Community Residential Centre.”) is the most restrictive form of parole available. This fate is generally for those who are resistant to the reintegration programs.

However, there’s nothing forcing the parole board to give a prisoner that release. Had one extra person on the board reviewing Fish’s file decided he was a threat, he’d have stayed behind bars. All it took were two people shrugging and figuring he probably wouldn’t break into an innocent person’s home and brutally stab or beat them to death… again. One member of that panel identified Fish as a risk, but he still was released to the custody of Howard House.

It’s not the fault of Howard House that Eric Fish walked away. Though a halfway house is permitted to reject an application on an individual basis, they can’t refuse to accept all murderers, or all arsonists. Case by case, they determine who to take in. It seems they were, however, aware that he was doing cocaine. At this point, Fish’s parole ought to have been revoked, sending him straight back to prison. It’s not clear why he wasn’t tossed in a squad car and banished. Somewhere, a crucial point in the legal system was overlooked, and so Fish stayed.

Until he walked off. Halfway houses aren’t miniature prisons. There is supervision, but no prison guards. There are people keeping track of your whereabouts over the course of the day, but no one dogging your steps. Fish didn’t break out. He just decided to walk away and not return.

Which brings up the next issue: what was the RCMP going to do? A convicted murderer, violating parole and hooked on cocaine was free, whereabouts unknown. While Fish made the acquaintance of Bill Abramenko, the community was oblivious of any reason to be wary. Fish pretended to be interested in buying the house the elderly Vernon man had for sale. On August 4th, he tied up both Abramenko and his elderly wife. Then he beat Bill Abramenko to death and fled.

Two days later, the public was alerted to the danger Fish presented, and on August 7th he was arrested. It was too late for his victim, and too late for the traumatized society who lashed out at Howard House for having brought a killer in their midst.

The RCMP passed the buck when it came to admitting they ought to have alerted the Okanagan communities. There was a Canada-wide warrant for Fish, and there were pictures they could have released to the public. However, in an interview with the CBC, RCMP Corp. Catherine Galliford said “he hadn't been flagged to us as an individual who was a high risk to re-offend."

Sounds weak, considering his prior record and drug habits were known. Still, why wasn’t Fish deemed a real threat? First he slipped through the parole board into Howard House, and then slipped onto the streets of Vernon. It wasn’t till after he killed again that cries of “it wasn’t our fault!” go out, instead of a perhaps more appropriate “oops.”

The system failed us. It failed Eric Fish by releasing him to the freedom he wasn’t responsible enough to make good with. It failed the family of his first victim and it utterly failed Bill Abramenko’s wife.

It also failed Howard House. It was so very easy to blame the John Howard Society run project for what happened in Vernon. It’s also easy to look at other halfway houses and wonder what they might be harbouring. However, in blaming them, we do ourselves an injustice. Without halfway houses, there is nothing between prison and the open world. There would be no checks at all to encourage and facilitate positive habits, no middle ground between a highly institution life in prison and the bewilderingly free life in society.

More checks need to be put in place. More points along the road of rehabilitation and release to catch train wrecks like Fish, and more supervision keep parolees from sliding into the drug or alcohol habits that aggravate violent tendencies. Halfway houses aren’t a mistake; they are an insufficient measure. Strengthen them, supplement them. Blaming Howard House for what happened with Fish is like expecting a computer to safely run a missile program without all its components.

Either we keep our criminals locked up in cells for good, or we really start to mean it when we talk about rehabilitation. It’s the wishy-washy middle ground, combined with carelessness, that cost the lives of both Bill Abramenko and the Howard House.

some links

2004-10-24T01:39:00.000-07:00

I'm a total web junkie. Certifiable addict, as most of my friends know. My computer is my television, stereo, telephone, school, work and my entertainment. Some of the sites I keep bookmarked are...

Digitally Imported streams music without pause or advertising. The majority of its channels are types of trance, which I use as background when I'm writing fiction or just messing around on my computer. They also stream a few other genres, including classical, which I use for serious work.

Launch is another place for music. You have to register, but if you use the rating system, it will tailor the music rotation to your tastes. Also has a huge library of music videos.

DDR Freak is where I go to get step charts for my favourite game. Y'know those people you see in the arcade flailing to 90s techno while arrows flash on a big screen? I'm one of those.

Something Positive is one of the most irreverent, funny, and intelligent webcomics out there.

Popcap games are a great way to evaporate stress when you've worked so hard you can almost feel your brain trickling out of your ears. I like Zuma, Bejeweled, and Alchemy best.

ME2.DLL

2004-10-20T20:45:00.000-07:00

Right. So I wrote out an update the other night, but lost it when Explorer told me (as it has countless times since the last major security update) that it had a problem with the file ME2.DLL.

It frequently has a problem with this mystical ME2.DLL. But not regularly. Sometimes it waits until I’m seven or eight pages deep on a research dive before freezing up. Other times, I’ll only take one step into the void of web space when Explorer grinds to a halt.

Then, with a particularly wounding move of corporate condescension, a pop-up tells me that Microsoft is sorry for the inconvenience and politely encourages me to send an error report. They could wallpaper Bill Gate’s office with the error reports I’ve sent in.

Theoretically, I tell myself, I should be able to fix this problem on my own. It’s probably as simple as tracking down an uncorrupted file, or deleting some unwholesome virus. After all, I took a “PC Maintenance and Repair,” course last year. This should be right up my alley. However, when pressed, I have to admit that I never learned more than fixing loose components, common user errors, and…

Well damn, that’s about it.

If I gave the school name, I’d probably be dancing on libel when I say they took my money and left me stupid, but that’s how I feel. I got 98% on the practical exam (dinged for not putting all eight screws in during a drive install) then went home and utterly failed to upgrade my mother board. I’m pretty sure getting wtfpwned by my own computer isn’t anywhere in the tenants of Girl Power.

Still, self-sufficiency doesn’t factor into my version of feminism. So I drag up my ICQ list and scan for available targets. Ah-hah, Squibbles can help me. Five minutes later, he tells me to uninstall MediaLoads.

“Why? What’s MediaLoads?” I ask. He says it’s spyware, and getting rid of it will probably fix my freeze-up problem. It’s easy enough to find on the add/remove software list, and looks entirely innocent. Still, I trust Squibbles, so its gone in a matter of seconds. Tentatively, I navigate through some links, and nothing freezes up or crashes.

When I ask Squibbles how he managed to conjure up an answer, he sends me to a site called 2-Spyware.com, which describes my infiltrator as a relatively benign parasite. In fact, it quotes the MediaLoads publisher’s description: 'It's MediaLoads Direct -- the internet application that brings rich media content to you, directly to your hard drive. Now you can get all the best movies, games and programs downloaded directly to your computer ... while you sleep!”

To someone who loves their computer the way most people love their children, that’s like being told that there are Nazis congregating in your living room at night. While you sleep.

My computer is once again functioning properly, though I’m not entirely certain my brain is. Squibbles found the answer to my problem in five minutes using Google, something I should have thought to do myself.

Understanding computers isn’t easy, but there’s always some kind of underlying logic. Assuming you can find said logic, there’s a solution. If you get stuck like I did, don’t put up with it. Stay on top of Windows Critical Updates, periodically skim all the spyware off your computer with something like Adaware, and when in doubt, Google for answers or pester your tech-inclined friends. The only reason I caught MediaLoads was probably because something in the last security update broke it.

Computers are supposed to work for you, but sometimes, you have to do a little work for them first.

proud to be Canadian

2004-10-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

"We're proud to be Canadian
We're awfully nice to strangers, our manners be our curse
It's cool in many ways to be Canadian
We won't say that we're better, it's just that we're less worse."

- Arrogant Worms

I watched a bit of the presidential debates this evening. Just long enough to see some snippery about fetal stem-cell research sliding into a debate about abortion. Coyotes, both of them, biting at each other in the most irrelevant ways rather than state a real opinion that might lose voters. But that’s the only game going when it comes to politics.

Personally, I hope to hell Kerry gets in, because I want to see what he can do. We know what Bush can do, and I’m not even talking about that piece of propagandist brilliance Michael Moore unleashed. I’d be happiest if they could find a president who can separate church and state, but I’m assured that’s just not the American way.

Not like Canada is the land of milk and honey. Oh well. Probably the last time you’ll ever hear me spout off about politics, which is not a subject I’m comfortable discussing given my own tendency to glaze over mentally at the discussion of morality and law.

But just because I’m a total bastard, I’ll stick you with a little John/John action. And for you Bush supporters, how about some quality time with Chirac?

quote #3

2004-10-04T01:50:00.000-07:00

"Don't mind me. I'm just aligning my mental crosshairs."

- Something Positive

quote #2

2004-10-03T02:01:00.000-07:00

"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt."

- Shakespeare

finally...

2004-10-03T01:40:00.000-07:00

Finished the article about blogging I've been working on for Online Journalism. Once it's polished a bit, I'll post it. Though my story is fairly upbeat about them, it should be mentioned that blogs are unhealthy, infectious and only written by ego stroking writer wannabes.

Writing for class is probably going to put me into therapy. I'm used to writing this kinda crap for my own benefit and no one else's... now I'm getting graded. I also feel like I'm running blind, as I'm the only one in 410 who hasn't done the 320 prereq. Which apparently is okay, because my background in European History will compensate. Right. Inverted pyramid style, whazzat?

quote #1

2004-09-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

"It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles)

the past

2004-09-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

Just once in my life I’d like to be able to weather a little difficulty without getting sick. Its just plain undignified.

I’ve been living here for about a month now. The prodigal daughter returned after seven years. And really, I wish I could have stayed gone. I can almost imagine the surly 17 year old version of myself regarding me with utter disgust that I’m back. Hell, I’m still surly and disgusted by it sometimes. 95% of the time, I know being here is a good thing. Other times, I stare at the ceiling and wonder what possessed me to believe this was the best of all opportunities.

Oh well. I’ve broken a lot of self-made prophecies by coming here. Which means I ought to stop dwelling on the sacrifices and concentrate on what they’ve bought me.

Initializing...

2004-09-30T22:25:00.000-07:00

First experiment with this blogging format. More to come. Maybe.

Mercurial Circus

flowers

toxic

conservapedia

feisty fawns in your backyard

can't stop the signal

gods of media

pearls before breakfast

live inside the book

time again

recovery

hiatus

"no friends, all enemies."

something truly awful

katrina: the politically incorrect

harry and the potters

new orleans

photos

things I learned...

ontario

call for submissions (again)

quote

travelling

the truth

harry potter

ouch

migraine triggers

killen case

one art

issue 2 submission info

love song

oh darwin, where art thou

fire and ice

keel hauled

next-box

health care

kingdom hospital

colours

on the road again

hiatus?

I resemble that comment...

busy busy

gyahh!

peripheral axis

life of riley

advice on vices

hey geeks...

vancouver

blah

forum is up

foamy, my lord and master

comments

nyquil, nyquil, nyquil

oh baby, you're so cruel

too much cute

os-tan

the eiffel tower is a portal to HELL!

on the periphery...

update plans

doujinshi

vampires and self-mockery

hello kitty

yikes

so damn cool

quote

unfathomable

purrr...

*poof*

dude!

dull roar

spice world

quote

grrr...

snow

geek culture

gomen nasai!

an update

computer problems

blogging

editorial assignment

poof