Not cool Michaëlle Jean

This has been an especially distressing week for me. Commentary from all over the country has been unified on a single topic: the coalition government. Debates are fierce and well they should be but an overwhelming amount of the opinions I've heard being shared by people all across Canada is that the coalition doesn't have the right to claim leadership of government. Earlier this week I had no doubt that this contest was a healthy exercise in democracy but all that has been thrown sharply into question with the governor general's decision to prorogue parliament.

The prorogue in itself is not the problem. Both the Coalition and the Conservatives have the right to request these things from the governor general. The context of it, however, leads me to a more depressing conclusion: Canada does not function as a parliamentary democracy should. The ruling party, no matter how many seats they own, are expected to govern as if we were a two party system.

Obviously my statements require a defense. The way I see it, other parliamentary democracies around the world accept coalition governments as a normal way to compose a parliament. Switzerland, Germany, India, Ireland ... all of these generally elect governments composed of a four party coalition. Canada has not had joint rule since World War I and even then it was under dire circumstances. Canada, despite it's claim to a parliamentary democracy, has rarely ever had a need for the minor parties to utilize their right to challenge the sitting government with a coalition.

This hesitation on the behalf of minor parties is often understandable. Canadian leaders do not tend to rock the boat on any issue and both parties fall at more or less the same stance on important issues within a shade or two of liberalism or conservatism. Rarely does it come to such a boiling point that minor parties even want to remove power especially when it means compromising on issues for the satisfaction of all members of the coalition.

Regardless of all this, the right to form a coalition is inherent in our system. This aspect of parliamentary democracy (indeed, perhaps the entirety of how Canada functions politically) seems lost on, or at least ignored by, many people. I've heard many commentators go on about how the coalition has no right to contest the government, how the country has elected Stephen Harper as prime minister and that the coalition is usurping democracy. Before now I would have said that all these were untrue but with the governor general evidently putting a roadblock in the way of the coalition one can only wonder how much of this was dictated by public opinion. Certainly the choice was her own but with a position as transitory and vestigial as Governor General I remain unconvinced that Jean has the capacity to make a completely unbiased opinion.

Which leads me back to my original point. If the rights of the parties to use their democratic tools to influence government are being unevenly influenced by those who do not know how a parliamentary democracy works, how can we be one? The country has already used its power of the vote to remove complete power from Harper. More then half the seats in the house belong to a party other then the Conservatives. The very purpose of the Coalition is to use this fact to demand a change of leadership for Canada. What the Governor General has said with this decision to approve the prorogue is that the will of the single party with MOST of the seats is more important then the will of all the other seats unified but without a single party. How can we truly think of ourselves as possessing anything other then a system where the plurality rules supreme.

As I've said, the actions of our political players have greatly distressed me. Canadian democracy has been melting away from all but the parliament for a long time now, removing checks and balances and rendering whole branches of government useless. If we truly are shearing another level of accountability off of government I can't help but worry for us all.

Wal-Mart worker dies in Black Friday stampede -- Newsday.com

Wal-Mart worker dies in Black Friday stampede -- Newsday.com

Worker, 2 Black Friday Shoppers Killed

This is hideous.

Canadians don't really have a Black Friday. I cannot think of a single day in the Canadian calendar that exemplifies quite the level of consumer excess that Black Friday represents to US retailers. The day after Thanksgiving is usually one of the biggest shopping days of the year and is frequently associated with doorcrasher sales and prices well below normal. Every year you can see videos where surging mobs of people press up against the doors of Wal-marts and Toys-R-Us', pounding on doors and, once inside, fighting like dogs over small towers of electronics and appliances.

Hence the headlines. A seasonal Wal-Mart employee trampled to death by a mob of people who broke down the door to get inside so they could be the first to the piles. Pregnant women injured. Men shooting each other. Is this really how far we value our status symbols. Is that 42 inch TV worth a mans life or a loss of your own humanity to the will of the mob?

I'm not sure which is more distressing to me: The lack of any effort on the side of the retailers to acknowledge and account for the mania these deals inspire in the consumer population or the mass of people pounding at the front doors of these places every year who have devolved to little more then a lizard brain at the prospect of a camcorder for half off.

Peering into the micro world - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Peering into the micro world - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Obama is everywhere.

I'm as ecstatic about the U.S.A.'s president elect as anyone else but his permanence from multinational issues to nanotubes is a little bit disconcerting.

A little while ago I let myself fully appreciate the magnitude of Mr. Obama's victory. At least I tried to. I was forced to stop when the entire world seemed to be morphing around me into a shape impossible to define. I hope that it's because my disenfranchisement with North American authority is so far gone that I can't recognize a good turn when I see it. As cynical as this sounds I do hold a certain reservation that Mr. Obama will fail to live up to the generation defining amount of hype and speculation surrounding his accomplishment.

I just want to believe.

I don't want to live on the moon.

Finally, I have claimed a small amount of time for myself and taken several days off in order to relax, reflect and catch up on my life. Even after this one afternoon I am truly feeling myself appreciating the intricacies of the world around me and how much is missed out when one does not put oneself out in the open to let the randomness of daily life pass around you; how sub-communities form and crystalize when you put yourself out into a place for long enough. Right now I am sitting in my favourite cafe listening to Dave Matthews Band and drinking the dregs of a tall Americano. If feels nice to come back after so much time away and appreciate everything anew.

I am reminded sharply, however, of how far I have fallen in terms of keeping up social ties. I reached out to several of my friends I have not seen in some time and found them all to have fallen into their own separate paths. Both now pouring their time into their current job and positioning for their future. I find now that they are both making far more headway then I consider myself to be. How insignificant my own steps seem in contrast to theirs. I may have a steady job, be making enough to support myself and have disposable income besides but it is down a path that I do not plan to take to the end.

Looking out at those around me in this coffee shop I see how much time one must put into a place to become a fixture there. A constant presence and contribution must be maintained to become someone of note. The same effort, I would argue, must be applied in following our dreams and aspirations.

This I must always keep in mind. The path to sloth is a hard one to veer off once undertaken.

Nevermind the fork. Both roads lead to hell

How hard is it to know yourself?

This is the question I've been asking myself for a while now. I consider myself lucky to have a job where I have disposable income, can live by myself and afford all kinds of luxuries. All around me I see people struggling with jobs and school and how fortunate I am to have all the things I do.

That said: I am miserable.

How can this be?

I wake up every morning to go to a job where I am achieving nothing. Learning nothing. Doing nothing. If I can borrow an analogy from the current death spiral of the economic system if my workload were meals I would be eyeing my belt and shoelaces with a ravenous and crazy look in my eye. The organization in the office is shoddy at best. Management techniques are focused more on distracting employees from the serious systemic problems that have grown like weeds from the cracks. I find my faith in the information that we receive sliding at an exponential rate and the promises of continued employment next year feel like lies told out of desperation. How else to explain the timetables that are rigidly enforced then ignored without explanation. How else to explain an office full of people scraping for work yet constantly told of the immense amount of work left to do. How else to explain trained professionals being forced to ignore their training and even the requirements of their position to do menial tasks.

How else... how else....

I have kicked off the job search in earnest a few weeks ago. However, I find myself growing impatient with slow responses and little time to expand the sources I draw upon to lead me to jobs where I don't feel like I'm underpaid, underworked and certainly understimulated. (I realize how rediculious it sounds that I am underpaid and underworked but I am bringing specialized knowledge, however infrequently, to the project).

This entire experience has been troubling on so many levels. I didn't think I would ever feel so wronged by and so infuriated at something that was so beneficial for me. I'm forced to conclude that to do a thing with dignity and to connect with it in a positive way is worth more then money.

Until I can once again pry some time for words away from my chaotic life,
CP

Huuuuur Gamer Rage Huuurrrr

I've spent the past few months nurturing a fascination with competition. I've been playing a lot more board games, have developed an interest in sports and have picked up a few competitive video games I probably would not have normally. It's one of those universal constants that people take part in every day for various reasons, whether it's strategizing ways to get a good parking space or having an argument with someone. In some cases our desire to compete and win provides some tangible benefit. Other times the only purpose is to experience the thrill of victory. It is not impossible for a competition to end without the loser feeling inferior, however. Often the very act of competing or playing the game is enough to satisfy to expectations that the player had going in. Occasionally when I'm in a scenario where I am competing it won't be about determining the winner, simply about experiencing the mechanics of the contest.

This came to my mind after observing how seriously people become frustrated and downright angry when they are struggling through a conflict. Maybe you didn't get that parking space despite getting up earlier or maybe the game you are playing is too demanding. I've witnessed and participated in many different situations where despite my best efforts i was not skilled or prepared enough to cope with it and reacted with anger and occasionally damage to self or property.

I like to think that competition is something more then just multiple interests attempting to secure the same goal. Generally we see relatively minor events like sporting events or personal confrontation as the most obvious sources of competition. We don't, however, tend to apply this term to more serious clashes. The word "competition" inadequately conveys the gravity behind an extremely serious conflict such as a war or a murder. Competition is something that people can enjoy either by participating or observing. The higher the stakes, however, the more likely it is that the rush of winning and the pain of losing are amplified that much more. Competition for the attention of a potential mate or the recognition of a figure of power have much higher stakes but also trend towards less regulated "rules of the game" insofar as unfair advantages are permitted. The perception of a loss in a system where the stakes are so high is further exacerbated when the player cannot counter that advantage in some way.

This is where I believe the "gamer rage" comes from. Many of us have experienced the sheer blood-boiling rage when your reflexes were just a nanosecond too slow or you weren't thinking the right way and you fall into the hole or catch a rocket in the face. Just a few months ago I was playing Halo 3 for the first time and came across a point in the campaign the game decided that it wasn't good enough for you to just brute force your way through. (Just as a side note. Not a Halo fan. This was my first one.) Maybe the other Halos taught you to use cover more but even on Heroic you get along just fine before that point hopping around and finding creative ways to hide so enemies practically mow themselves down coming around corners for you. At the point where I started raging out and finding alternate ways of getting my aggression out I was being killed over and over by a tank that was lobbing volley after volley of one hit kill plasma blasts at me who was completely boxed in. After some experimenting I discovered that it was impossible for me to destroy this thing by just shooting at it. You had to creep around the debris on the battlefield until you could run out behind it and perform a quick-time event to toss a grenade in and blow it up (I believe I found this out by running out of ammo and rushing it with a mind to pistol whip it to death). The reason this made me so frustrated was that up to that point even if it was hard you would probably get through any battle event by shooting and hiding. Once you figure out the puzzle the whole battle becomes something you can manage and strategize around but until you figure out that puzzle you are doomed to die repeatedly.

My skills as a game and how well Halo 3 was designed aside, the perception of that battle puzzle being practically impossible infuriated me. The more I lost the more I hated the game until I finally solved the puzzle. After that the blissful rush of endorphins was easily satisfying enough to make up for the frustration built up during the battle. Even if I didn't enter the battle feeling especially competitive I was quickly thrown into a state where it was extremely important that I beat this game and prove to it and myself that I would not be stopped by it's inability to show me important, non-obvious, techniques. I hope this illustrates just how competitive anyone can be by nature. Not so say that I'm not a competitive person. I am. Very much so. But the quality of the competitive experience is crucial to how invested I am in the outcome. I don't generally react to trivia contests, for example, in nearly as strong a manner. They're both far less immersive and most are designed in such a way that even when a question is hard it's rarely something so difficult a real buff on the subject wouldn't know. Both of these, I feel, are valid forms of competing and both provoke very different results depending on what kind of a competitive experience you are looking for. Likewise rooting for a favorite sports team can range from a connection so close that you share their excitement or disappointment or a much more muted experience.

The breadth of the experiences that we receive from going up against obstacles whether from our peers, ourselves or our environment is wide and the basis for much of what we consider fun. Crafting that rush of victory or exercising our mind or body is such an important part of our lives that it is often impossible to fully understand just what each one of us pursues as entertainment. I don't feel like I fully discovered or answered many of questions I hoped to in the writing of this but I can tell you that the experience has certainly helped me to come to a much more solid appreciation of how hard it is to craft a thoughtful piece of writing in an extremely short time frame.

I've been driving myself a lot lately to do some form of writing of substantial length as often as possible. I'm aiming for one piece a day but I'm not quite there yet in terms of hours per day I can dedicate and ability to select topics.

I'm desperate for some inspiration. While trying to write last night I crawled every news site and blog of any interest to me and came up with a big nada. The only thing that's really been on my mind lately is the exodus of Jeff Green and Shawn Elliott from 1Up and since I only found GFW Radio last month I don't have much to go on.

So instead I watched my girlfriend play Viva Pinata while jotting down ideas. Eventually I got a copy of Ubuntu Linux and attempted to revive my struggling iBook. Not as good as OS X right now but I've literally done nothing but install and update. I also realized why I threw Linux to the dogs after my Debian experience years ago. Nothing ever works as nice as you'd like it to. I got the PowerPC build and for whatever reason wireless and the touchpad are completely useless. Not to mention that The site I got my build from was from several years ago and hasn't updated since so now I need to find the new version and upgrade again. Ug. Open Source is such a pain.

Large Colliders Make for Large Discussions

From the moment we all enter this life kicking and screaming and covered in slime we are constantly learning and discovering new things. Usually the first thing we pick up on is “Hey, it's OK to breath” or “So THIS is where I've been all this time”. It's a bit touch and go from then on but sooner or later we'll have someone explain to us the basics of our three most respected branches of science: physics, biology and chemistry. Most of this basic understanding of what we're made of is passively assimilated and we continue our lives accepting these as little more then trivia. Not nearly enough of us really appreciate the enormity of this knowledge. When we're first told that if you go close enough we all look like bundles of differently charged balls of matter we might struggle with it for a while but eventually come to accept it as a fact and move on with our life. After all, who really cares about what our corn flakes are made out of. We're just going to eat the damn things and go buy a new pair of pants at the mall. You can go pretty far in life not knowing the difference between a proton and a neutron.

It's amazing, then, when a real evolution in the science occurs. Sure we all know what protons and neutrons are, but they're NOT the smallest division of matter we've discovered. Both of those can be broken down AGAIN into even smaller particles called quarks and gluons. We stand now at the precipice of another watershed moment in the development of science. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online today marking the next step in solving the mysteries of the universe from the Big Bang to String Theory. First of all, the LHC is a HUGE step forward in human ability and ambition. The complex is designed to accelerate particles to ridiculously high speeds (99.999999% of the speed of light) and then to drive them into each other. Like any collision, once particles collide they explode into their component parts. Analyzing these collisions at these speeds is really hard. I don't want to think about how smart you have to be to figure out how to even interpret the data but people are optimistic that the data will be able to shed light on physics problems such as dark matter, string theory, the big bang and the Grand Unification Theory of Physics.

At this point is becomes clear exactly just how far science has evolved beyond the comprehension of the average person. I know few enough people who have even heard of String Theory or the Grand Unification Theory, let alone understand them to a degree where they're meaningful. For a long time I've held the belief that it's important to at least be aware of the most recent developments in the core issues of the sciences but we've hit a point where these issues are so far beyond the understanding and utility of the average person that to fully appreciate the strides that are being taken you need several years of education. Take Brane Theory, for example. I can't even begin to describe it in a way that will make sense to anyone, including myself but it's kind of a mash-up alternate universes and big-bang theory and flat out wackyness (our universe was created by the big-bang which was the result of two alternate dimensions colliding with each-other). The LHC has the potential to further remove science from the understanding of the layman. Quarks and Gluons don't seem to turn up as anything but trivia for nerds; like telling people that the NES was really a North American adaption of a much more versatile system known as the Family Computer (Famicom) in Japan. Sure it's true and mildly informative but in the end you'll never experience it for yourself so will you really care?

Enough about this physics shit then. I've got some requests and recommendations. First of all I'm going to push a podcast. GFW Radio (on the 1-Up network. Available on iTunes) is pretty much the best podcast I've got going right now. It's smart, it's funny and spends suprisingly little time actually talking about games. That brings me to my next point. A few weeks ago they were talking comics and I heard of a fascination comic artist/writer called Joe Sacco. He's a professional journalist but instead of publishing his stories on the news wire he draws comics. He has two books out now called Palestine and Safe Area Goražde which are based on his experience covering these areas. They sound like something I would fall in love with. I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience with these novels.

Until next time,
keep your head in the clouds.

Ever so slowly reading through The Proud Highway. Volume 1 of Hunter Thompson's Gonzo Letters. It's fascinating so far, though I doubt that I would be so into it if I wasn't trying to study the origins of my favourite authors voice. I'm picking up so many new names to look up and techniques for improving my own style. It's important to stay loose and write frequently if I'm going to improve at all.

I find a great deal of potential in writing letters and blog entries. They are immediate and have specific goals to convey information. To tell a story of the events of your life. To reflect and draw purpose from experiences.

Ah. If only I was as passionate at a young age.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to pen my recent experiences.

I just returned from a weekend at Kristin's cabin. The whole experiences was full of drinking, relaxing and more then a little drama. I returned to town on Sunday feeling a little hungover and more then a little concerned about how quickly I get tired these days. This is no way to live while still this young. I am grinding away harder then ever at work but with no potential to further my passions I'm more then a little depressed about the upcoming months. It doesn't help that I have loaned out a significant chunk of money.

Alas, real interaction has found me and I must away.

Got Soul But Not A Soldier

The idea of being a specialist has been on my mind a lot lately. Everyone knows what a specialist is but how often do you think about what you give up by being one? If you want to be really good at something you've got to dedicate yourself to it. Dedication means a heavy time commitment to what you're doing and usually less for everything else.

I have dreams of being a professional writer. A journalist, reviewer, researcher... so long as I get to hunt down truth and sive it from the mistruth I'll be living a life that I'm happy with. The biggest obstacle I have been finding these days is sharing my time between what I want to do and what I have to do. A lot of things that need to get done these days have a way of bringing me down. They've been doing so for quite some time. I've had my joy in my job eroded for quite some time now from excitement to boredom to frustration to white, burning rage. Writing is something I love. These days I can't do it. My writing boils down to dissatisfaction with my job which is just too specific to draw any decent content from.

Which brings me back around to the point. Unless writing is what I'm doing for my job my skills are going to degrade. If I can't write I can't improve and I can't get a job writing. It's time I gritted up and got serious about finding a style and a speciality that's my own and that I can perfect. I've got ideas but I need time and that's a scarce resource these days.

Future Echoes

"The world's present would end. Its future, immeasurably vaster, would also vanish. Even our past would be cancelled. Our struggle from the primal ooze, every childbirth, every personal sacrifice rendered meaningless, leading only to dust, tossed on the void-winds.

Save for Richard Nixon, whose name adorns a plaque upon the moon, no human vestige would remain"



I've been rereading Watchmen again since the trailer hit last week and it still stirs up all kinds of crazy thoughts and emotions. As powerful as that book was back in the 80s its significance has doubled since 9/11. I'll write more on this later once I have more time to sift through Moore's monumental achievement. Suffice to say: Nixon's name really is on the moon. How is that for mankind's footprint on the galaxy?

Work is a four letter word.

I've been working in the same job for a year now. Not that long when you look at the calendar but it feels like an eternity in retrospect. These last few months certainly haven't made it seem any more reasonable. Everything has slowed to a crawl from the moment I sit down at my desk till I boot it out the door.

Maybe it's the summer but everything seems like it's falling apart in the office this summer. There are constant rumours about the mental competence of my boss not the least of which is that he is probably going to have a nervous breakdown one of these days. Certainly a likely scenario. He's not really socially competent and despite being nice about what he wants done, fails to give much information about what he needs done. What's been happening the last few weeks is that I've been given insignificant jobs that need to be done right away, then nothing for days and days leaving myself to do my own work that might be lost completely due to the total lack of any efficient tracking of the files that are going around the office.

Despite all this he still needs me to do all this nonsense that no one else can do and in between making stale compliments of my skills he'll pick on something I'm doing because there is absolutely nothing else to do.

I'm just not cut out for this bullshit. Living for the weekend is as good a game plan as any.

Asylum Salutes Cringe-Worthy Porn Spoofs - Asylum | For All Mankind

Asylum Salutes Cringe-Worthy Porn Spoofs - Asylum | For All Mankind

There's a local adult video store that has a billboard out front. It's located on a pretty high traffic road and every few weeks they update what new stock they have on the billboard.

This is a list of 40 porn movies that spoof blockbusters. I'm one of those people who like puns and i'm not afraid to admit that i laughed at "Jurassic Pork" and "The DaVinci Load".

Somewhat work safe. There's no T&A on display but someone is probably going to be weirded out if they see the cover of Edward Penishands.

Firefox 3 is here

I seem to have fluked into being one of the first people to install the final release of Firefox 3.0.

It still feels like Firefox. There are new tweeks to the frontend and the backend has got a pretty significant overhaul leading to faster loading of web aps and better memory handling.

Of course the real appeal of Firefox is the plugins so it feels a little limiting but there's no doubt my mouse gestures and google browser sync will be back online soon.

Update: Bye bye browser sync
Link

No Smoking

I have always had a bizarre realationship with books. I love literature and writing. I feel a powerful compulsion to write things that can grip and hold the reader with vicelike fortitude. My problem lies in the dissapointment i feel when I cannot. I know the mood that takes me where I can write the words I want. But despite all this nonsense I do not read that much these days. Even when I was young I devoured novel after novel, all fantasy and childrens fiction but still... the past few years I have not taken in many books.

I don't know how I convinced myself that it would be a good idea to be a journalist with such a half-hearted relationship with literature but my newfound fascination with Hunter S. Thompson has kickstarted a fierce return to the world of classic books that I fell apart from for so many years. I'm running short on HST books but it's left me with a great bridge into Hemmingway, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe. You shouldn't write if you don't read and I have been too stubborn to learn from the greats for too long.

After all,

No Music
+
Bad TV
=
Bad Mood
+
No Pages

Morning Quickie

I've got to be at work in half an hour but I've spent the past 20 minutes messing around with the Flock browser. Seems really cool so far. It integrates a lot of the things I've had to find ad-hoc solutions for like creating bookmark groups for rapid access to news and actually gives me more info in the same amount of time from sites like Facebook that I usually only scan. I've also got my infrequently used YouTube and Flickr accounts linked up and streaming popular media at me. I frequently end up checking and rechecking the same sites when I'm bored so I've got some hope that this will make that whole process a lot more enjoyable.

Of course It doesn't quite make up for the miserable deluge of rain that I've got to slop through now in a minute but to be honest that would be a lot to ask of a webbrowser. Maybe in Web 3.0

Operation Overlord

There's something about a good game of trivia that brings together all kinds of people and makes them act like they're 13 years old again. I used to be one of those poor socially deprived misfits who loved trivia but had such pathetic social skills as to make all that knowledge not only trivial but sad and pointless. Well, no longer! I managed to squeeze my way into a trivia team for the weekly trivia event held down at a local scum coated tavern, the Rose and Thistle (purveyors of scum and questionable business practices for a generation or more).

We unfortunately lost by half a point to Two Man Army but i'll never get to know if we managed to beat Robinson Screws-Hoes. The valiant members of "Labatts Blue is Terrible" will return at some point with a more juvenile team name and finally lay claim to that holy grail of prizes... a bar tab to celebrate your addiction to things that are completely irrelevant.

Bike

I've finally joined the legion of sweaty self-rightous eco-commuters and bought a bike to get me to work and back. Yes, I spent nearly 600 because walking just doesn't cut it anymore and I really need something with wheels. I'm really quite stoked about it all manner of sarcasm aside. It's the first vehicle I've bought with my own cash and will probably become a huge money sink as I start getting all kinds of gear so I can keep it in good condition and not die while riding on it. I bought a lock right off but I still need a helmet which I'll probably go grab later this week.

Here it is!

Massively Effective

HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL YEAH!!!!

Despite only being an hour instead of the promised 90 minutes Bring Down the Sky was pretty fun. It wasn't really as full as one of the main missions but it had so much more to do then every other side mission in the game. A lot of the hour was unfortunately taken up with bouncing the Mako around another square map but even that was a lot better then usual. It seems like the landscape was designed well enough to facilitate any way you might choose to approach it which prevented any of that damn choking the Mako up cliffs for half an hour and some really inventive use of the props to make the battles that took place inside seem a lot less typical. Not only that but it adds a whole new map for the finale. After so many tedious hours running into the same mine and two complexes a whole new arena to fight in really excited me more then I want to admit.

And after another run through to pick the paragon choices I believe that I'm ready to finally put Mass Effect up on the shelf and get back to spending my evenings with real people who probably thing that I'm a dousche for spending so much time busting space criminals and teaching alien women how to love in ways that 14 year old kids can legally see at the movies.

Mass Effect is turning me into a zombie

The XBox 360 is a strange platform. On the one hand it has probably the best lineup of current games out there on the other hand it makes me hate the games that I'm playing.

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Mass Effect from a friend of mine hopeing it would find some way of not being as monotonous and shitty as most RPGs seem to be. There was enough hype around the game to convince anyone who has half of an ear to the gaming world that it was the next best thing to deep fried Jesus on top of a pile of gold and chocolate. Not to mention the gratuitious sex-fest orgy that was your reward for playing whatever cookie cutter bad/good characters they had probably whipped up. After the somewhat dissapointing illusion of choice that Bio Shock had brought to the table I was about ready to throw the whole 'consequence gameplay' out on its ear for being another exagerated marketing fantasy. If I'd gotten a dozen or so hours of gameplay and some wierd alien skin I would have gone away happy.

Well Mass Effect did not dissapoint and even took it a step farther and made me downright love it. That's not to say that I was wrong about it pretending to give you choice but they do manage to make you care about the decisions that you do make. Bio Shock didn't really make me feel bad for being a savage douschebag baby killer. It let me close my eyes and hum away while all the nasty bits were happening and just did some quick baby murdering math at the end of the game to see whether you get to be Lincoln or Hitler. Mass Effect does manage to completely overwhelm you with so much dialog that whenever a big choice comes up you feel like you've gone through so much crap to get to it that you should really make the right choice. For a while at least. Then once you realize that you can treat everyone like a snot covered tissue and still have them do whatever you want it becomes a little less engrossing. Not that the game doesn't try to colour your good/bad deeds in glowing light when you're doing them but you still get parts where you come up to people, tell them that you're going to kill them in cold blood, then have them care about as much as if you'd just drank the last of the milk and didn't buy a new one. Mash that up with a parade of people who have I AM EVIL and I AM GOOD stamped on their forehead and you get the notion that the game really, really, really wants you to play it a certain way.

ALl that said i've still plugged what must be closing in on 80-90 hours on the game in the past few weeks. At first I was having a great time choosing at my leasure whether to start waxing my Snidley Whiplash moustache or start looking for the nearest cancer charity to deliver some of the 100,000,000 credits I had before I was finished with the game. Then I started in on the achievements. I say this now and I'm sure I'm not the first but there are some games where the achievements really suck the fun out of the entire process. Mass Effect has a few different types of them, most of them involving grinding the fuck out of your abilities or just beating the game 18 times. There are 6 achievements for beating most of the game with a certain person, then there are ones for beating it multiple times, on multiple difficulties and for starting new characters. I think if you were really careful about it you could get everything in 3 complete (or as near as makes no difference) playthroughs and two partial playthroughs with new characters. I'm probably on my 6th or 7th. By the time I was on my third run I was mashing on the 'dialog skip' option at a rate of approximately 100 times per conversation. The ally achievements are especially annoying because not only do you have to beat the game with them you have to grind all of the sidequests so you have to do almost everything in the game at least 3 times in order to get them all. The game seems like it's trying to compensate by giving you tonnes of points just for beating major plot worlds and literally landing on any of the dozens of other plantets but once I got all those I was still pretty sucked in so I kept going.

So now the game has become a monotonous chore that I'm doing out of sheer momentum of having done so much crap for it in the first place. It's like a date who wears the sexiest little dress you've ever seen but is mormon so you end up with a savage case of the blue balls and you still have to pay for dinner.

And if that's not enough I really felt like I owed it to myself to go out on a positive note so I bought the Bring Down the Sky expansion which I am going to save until I get my last 2 achievements finished and finally get this thing out of my life so i can get down to some serious GTA IV which I apparently bought today on somewhat of a whim.

Now there's a game that's going to drive me sideways with all the stuff there is to do.

Tree man 'who grew roots' hopes to marry after 4lb of warts removed - Telegraph

Tree man 'who grew roots' hopes to marry after 4lb of warts removed - Telegraph

This is too amazing to even try to make fun of. This guy was a walking talking tree and now due to the tireless efforts of scientists he can now rejoin society and play unhealthy amounts of sudoku like the rest of us.

The 10th Annual Independent Games Festival

The 10th Annual Independent Games Festival

Where am i?

I can see all this music.

Holy shit did you just see that ball of light give birth to the psysical embodyment of synergy?

This shit is off the hook.

I was playing tower of goo yesterday, and as one is eventually going to do when playing that game, cursing the ancesters of goo balls everywhere for being the most annoying building material since rock and roll (at least they built a city out of that). Feeling the need to keep gaming but not really wanting to hear a 13 year old kid on a $2 headset blast Arnie clips over voicechat or solve another damn jumping puzzle in prey i hit the indie games scene.

The abridged version of my search is that Fez reminds me of Projective Geometry and kind of gives me vertigo, Polarity is a magnet based platformer that's pretty fun but short and Synaesthete is unpronouncable but likely to take over my life like some glorious plague of audio and visual brilliance.

The game is one part Rez, one part guitar hero and one part... Solstice? Basically you walk around in these rooms fighting enemies that appear by pressing buttons to the rhythm of the song that's playing in the background. Everytime you beat a room you're rewarded with a weird statement about spirituality and machines and entry to the next room where you can fight more enemies. Sometimes bosses come up. You also destroy them with your music. Music kills all.

Solid gold, that song on the radio is nice

I am so psyched about the Buck 65 concert tomorrow at Club One. There are few artists whose sound has stuck with me for so long but ever since a friend of mine so generously introduced me to Blood of a Young Wolf one fantastic summer a few years ago Buck has been synonomous with good times.

Uncounted drives back and forth to swimming holes and cabins belting to lyrics the Wicked and Wierd, Blood of a Young Wolf and 463 spot my memory. Whenever those songs make their way to my ears I can't help but at least mouth the words and feel a little better. And now I finally get to see him and pick up some of the EPs that you just can't get anywhere outside of a mixtape or his concerts.

And if that wasn't good enough (it is) he's showing up with Cadence Weapon, whose latest album, Afterparty Babies is pretty solid. All this does kind of drive home the point that i'm only really excited because we barely ever get artists that I really want to see in town but i'm gonna take that little problem and blow it away with a glorious marathon of Canadian hip-hop before tomorrow night.

Cuff the Duke

So we've got a lot of snow down on the ground here in Newfoundland. It's stopped planes and pretty much everything that you'd want to do. My plans for a party tonight at my place were buried under so much white fluff you could put fluffer nutter out of business. So imagine my suprise when one of my good friends from Halifax tells me that I should head down to the ship the night to see one snowed in band of some national reputation, that is, Cuff the Duke. I'm estatic.

Cuff the Duke is a great band in their own right and i always feel a surge of pride when bands I like come here and play small venues. Arena shows are always so sterile. Moms and their kids who are wide eyed fans. People who got tickets from people in the know... It's a different, and to me far inferior experience to that of a nice 'intimate' bar show. The band is right there, not behind some monolithic barrier of barrel chested security guards. It's even more special when it's at a venue that I've got a great deal of respect for. The Ship has that quality of a local Black Sheep or Zaphod's. It's a place that the up and coming bands play when they're in the area. I know Cuff the Duke has made their own name and are enjoy a huge amount of national success but that makes this all the better. Getting to return to the small venues and the close crowds and operating outside of the ticket giants and promoters and handlers.

I guess the guys are used to the bigger shows now and everything that that brings but for my money i'm glad that I get the toned down version.

I'm sure if you've been following the US primaries you've felt it. Something's missing from the elections. Sure, they've tried to do new things and to reach new voters but if you look a little bit deeper it's the same as it's always been. Vindictive news orgs. picking sides, mud slinging, sucking up to the big guys and putting the muscle on the little guys. Take the Teamsters. They're behind Obama now... but only after he pulled out in front and Clinton started her violent twitching death throes. Even with all the hype about this being the first "internet presidential race" it only really ended up being Facebook and MySpace that cared and after Obama muscled out a MySpacer that was running a fan group for him it became pretty clear that the candidates weren't ready to let the internet do its thing. Besides, who the hell ever used MyBarackObama.com or
TheHillaryIKnow.com?

No, all that slime and shade are still there, so why does it still feel empty....

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2008/02/22/nader_mtp/index.html

THAT'S IT!! Where has Nader been all this time! I can't wait to hear what huge corporate monolith he's going to bitch on this time and look forward to hating him when he costs the democrats the election again. Keep fighting the good fight Ralph!

mass effect "goggles do nothing" - Google Search

So I'm playing through Mass Effect and I just finished some mission involving a stolen nuke or a rogue band of biotics or whatever the other mission you get to do a million times is. I'm roaming around the planet and I find this

Brushing away the carbonization on the door of the contragravity speeder, you see the Nezo brand name. Judging by the charring, the wreckage has been here since the star's last viariable peak The corpose is wearing the remains of an expensive suit, and what appear to be melted antique aviator goggles.

The goggles, they do nothing?

They All Drowned

I love Hunter Thompson and random trivia so I love this.

It is a weird plan, rife with madness and a sort of low-tech desperation that nobody in Utah is proud of ... But it is necessary, they say, and it will not be the first time that white men in the Western Hemisphere have gotten involved in a tragic lake-draining project.

One of the uglist of these is the saga of the draining of the Lago de Amor, a remote inland lagoon in the highlands of Colombia where the legendary Treasure of El Dorado still rests in the foul black mud.

This nightmare is described in a book called The Fruit Palace, by a Britisher named Charles Nicholl, who came on the place while chasing a cocaine dream.

"Eldorado was not originally a place," Nicholl says, " but a person -- el dorado, the gilded man." He was the main figure in a coronation ceremony held for a new territorial chieftan (cacique) in the Chibcha empire.

"At the shores of the lagoon he was stripped naked, anointed with sticky resin, and sprayed with gold dust. A raft of reeds was prepared, with braziers of moque incense and piles of gold and jewels on it."

He and four other caciques floated to the middle of the lake, where he then dove into the lake, washing off the gold. The ceremony concluded with all the gold and jewels being thrown into the lake.

When the Spanish learned of the ceremony, they began many attempts to drain the lake, starting with Hernan Perez de Quesada in 1545.

"Using a bucket chain of Indian labourers with gourd jars, he succeeded in lowering the level of the water by some ten feet, enough to recover about 3,000 pesos of gold." They managed about three feet a month but rain refilled the lagoon almost as quickly. Antonia de Sepulveda and a crew of 8,000 Indians lowered the level by 60 feet about 40 years later. He recovered some gold and gems "including an emerald the size of a hen's egg." He failed to get financing for subsequent efforts and died "poor and tired."

A French scientist estimated in 1825 the value of the unrecovered treasure at 1,120,000 pounds.

The lake was completely drained after a British joint-stock company, Contractors, Ltd., bought the rights "to exploit the lagoon" in 1899.

"They drilled a tunnel right under the lake and up into the centre, and the water was sluiced away down this giant plughole, with mercury screens to trap any precious objects."

The lakebed, however, proved intractable, impossible to walk on because of layers of mud and slime, which became concrete with the sun's heat. Not even drilling equipment could free the mud-clogged sluices and tunnel, and eventually the lake refilled.

--HST May 19, 1986

Oh technology has marched on and I, the poor student, was left behind.

That is until recently. And i have to admit, updating this godforsaken pillar in my daily life has been about as easy as gouging your own eyes out with a curly straw. Short of fire shooting out of the case and burning my house down, every problem has been ostensibly met with a more annoying problem.

I bought the motherboard and processor from NCIX during their boxing day sales. It was a good deal at the time but whatever I saved in money I spent in more money and a boiling sense of rage against technology. The boards came and it was good. When I finally got around to installing them in my current system I came across a problem. The RAM wouldn't fit. At this point I began to see the traces of deeply dug trench war between me and the computer. As all nemesis need names you can hate I started to see this as my own personal Cerebus. Keeping me in misery and bondage.

However, spirits were high and I still had some money saved so I swapped my whole system back out, went once again to NCIX, grabbed some new RAM and waited.

It's at this point that I think I should mention how much time it takes to actually get anything from these guys. Don't bother getting the fast shipping. When they come they'll swoop in in mid-afternoon when no one could possibly be around to sign for anything and leave you a mocking tab of paper saying 'Sorry we missed you'!

You will take no comfort in this empty condolence.

To actually receive said package you have to wait for work to end, then find some way of getting out to an area where no busses run and which is deadlocked traffic from 4:30 to 6 before 5:45. You wait in traffic and get cut off by everyone who lives out in CBS who have been hardened into black little husks by years of making this same shitty trip, kind of like March of the Penguins only if it were made by old jerks and bitches in cars that on first glance look way too big until you notice that the cars have to fit around the heart attack at the wheel. You have to do this whenever you make a voyage to Puralator and when you finally get your package you feel little joy for having had to deaden yourself to the world just to get it.

Anyway...

RAM came in and it fit nicely in my board with a satisfying click that you get from solving a puzzle or take a great picture. Good feelings filled me and I went about the annoying task of once again removing my old motherboard and putting this new one in. Eventually it was done. I started to get excited again, it had been about two weeks now but I was going to have my spoils soon.

Or not.

See, the thing that I realized having not made any major computer purchases in the past year or two is that there were a lot of parts that came out that had managed to make a whole new set of cables and ports the standard. My old board had an IDE ribbon, took DDR RAM and had an AGP socket for the graphics card and had a 20 pin ATX power supply and . New boards, like the one I have have a new drive connection (SATA), new RAM slots (DDR2 - EXTRA PINS SO YOU GOTTA BUY ME!) new graphics card slot (PCI-E) and needs more power (ATX 24 pin). I had none of this so off I went to buy a new Power supply.

It was a surprisingly easy process that. I went to a local store (Boom IT), grabbed a new PSU and plugged it in. If you think that that was the end of it, .... no. To cut this short I spent all evening last night finding BIOS revisions, troubleshooting a potential RAM issue and fucking around with my internal drives until now...NOW... I'm finally able to do a reinstall of windows. It looks promising so far but I know Cerebus and he is a vengeful bastard. It appears to have stalled already, which is a problem that I'm really going to have to figure out sometime, but as long as I can get a desktop tonight i'll be happy...ish.

If I can't then I think it'll be time for me to get a big funny hat and to churn butter for the rest of my life.