Everyone on /r/gaming is doing this

October 8, 2013 - 5:48pm - by admin

so here's the story of my first "wow" moment in gaming.

Which isn't really true because it's my mum's
but it's the first one that I remember
so here it goes:

when I was a youth we had a SNES and because we didn't have a ton of money
we rented The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
from the video store down the street
(for like, a year, but whatever)

and my mum was super into it.

Like, really into it.

So one day after school we're hanging out
Mum's playing away while dinner cooks
doing some stuff in the Lost Woods
and she says

"Wow this is so realistic! I don't think anything could get more realistic!"

So I don't know how thrilled she was several years later when I showed her this:



Sorry Mum.

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We're helping Adrian move tomorrow afternoon

October 5, 2013 - 3:11am - by admin

which Tyrone says he isn't excited about but I think he's lying because it's brilliant when someone gets to move into their own place and you get to share that with them.

Carrying be damned.

I moved out for the first time when I was 19 because I was sick of living in the suburbs and was fighting with my mom a lot. I don't remember what we fought about but it was awful and we were both awful and some friends were moving out together and I just kinda went

'Can I get in on this action?'

and they said yes and like two weeks later I was living in a house which was too big for the three of us and way too expensive for me but I didn't care. I walked to and from my minumum-wage job at the video game store in the mall and existed on a single small bag of salt n vinegar chips and an orange juice on the days that I worked and a few perogies on the days that I wasn't. Sometimes I had sour cream if I was lucky.

I lost a ton of weight and slept and drank way too much but it didn't matter.

Though a few months in I wound up moving to Ontario which was an even bigger shock.

Except there I was miserable and ate n drank all the time and put on all the weight I'd lost and then some.

Eventually I moved home.

I moved back in with my parents and my mum and I got along but once you've had that taste of independence it's hard to let it go, I think, so within a year I moved out on my own again and have been ever since.

I had my tiny character suite in an old building in Osborne Village and now I have my big-ass character suite in an old building in West Broadway which I love to pieces, which is also why I encouraged Adrian to move in here, too.

And by 'encouraged' I mean 'harassed him and the caretaker nonstop about it until it happened' which it has and everyone wins.

Adrian gets a super-cool bachelor pad right near campus.

My caretaker knows he has a decent tenant that he doesn't have to worry about.

And I get a new neighbour one floor down who loves beer, good food and has a super-cute accent.

Did I mention he's also single?

My life is about to become a sitcom.

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Okay maybe I'll buy Jim Carrey's book

September 25, 2013 - 1:30am - by admin

but only if he reads it to me.

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Am I angry because of the Internet?

September 17, 2013 - 12:25am - by admin

Brian Fung at the Washington Post published an article stating that the Internet isn't making us dumb, it's making us angry.

Which doesn't make me angry per se, but it definitely makes me think of the stuff I say and do online, and how it makes me feel afterward.

From the article:

In a study of 70 million posts on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, Rui Fan and a team of others at Beihan University tracked the spread of joy, sadness, anger and disgust across the social network. According to the MIT Technology Review, they found that angry tweets were far more likely to be retweeted by others — or be the subject of angry responses — up to three degrees away from the original user.

Maybe things are different in China but if you tweet a bunch of negative shit you're getting an unfollow from me.



I don't think that it's the internet is making us angrier, it's that it gives generally negative people a soapbox to broadcast their negativity to everyone else, specifically when it comes to sites like 4chan, Reddit and etc where you have a fairly large degree of anonymity and because of that are able to to disregard regular social conventions and straight-up be a jerk to people.

That kind of behaviour and the negative tweets Fung refers to in his article aren't the products of the Internet, these people would be just as negative, destructive, horrible, disgusting, and whatnot regardless of whether or not the Internet existed. Their bad qualities would simply manifest themselves in a different way.

The one thing that the article neglects to mention is the fact that, before now, we didn't have a global public forum to express ourselves and there was no global public record of it before now.

We can't go back in time and see a timeline of what millions of peasants in the Dark Ages had to say. Though I'm sure it would sound something like this:

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Johnny Cash died ten years ago today

September 13, 2013 - 4:05am - by admin

so let's take a second and listen to some real, quality music.

Sometimes in the wake of Miley Cyruses and Rebecca Blacks and whatever nonsense is being marketed to us because of it's shock value or horribleness or whatever

which ultimately distracts from anything important or relevant at all and are just tricks to make us feel superior to someone else

(because why else would we care, really, about something like this?)



it's nice to listen to music that gets you right down in your core

and makes you really feel something

right deep down in yr gut.

RIP Mr. Cash.

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Friday was Charles Bukowski's birthday

August 18, 2013 - 8:17pm - by admin

even though he's dead but you probably knew that. It's important, I think, to remember stuff like that anyway. People who move you should always be remembered. Bukowski moves me.

I started reading Ham on Rye over Christmas break and it was the first Bukowski novel I've owned and read which is embarrassing to say out loud.

A few months earlier I was getting my hair done and my amazing baber at Hunter & Gunn, Mason, told me about when he lived in an awful, dingy, dark apartment. It was in the basement of a sketchy building with old, yellowed plastic venetian blinds in the windows and he talked to me about reading Bukowski at night.

"You have to read Bukowski" he said "you'll fall in love". So I did.

The feeling of love I get when I read Bukowski is the sickening kind. It's heavy like when you lock eyes with someone across the room and your stomach sinks into your toes. It's good but in a way that makes you feel not yourself.

Bukowski is harsh truths. It's the side of people we don't want to read about or would rather pretend isn't there at all. Reading Bukowski isn't like reading about serial killers and bloodbaths and people we can distance ourselves from. Pretend like we're different.

The personalities in his books are us in all our filth. Our hate. Our depravity. The disgusting things we think about each other. The fucked up and awful things that we do to each other for no reason.

Reading Bukowski leaves you feeling hollow afterward. Like someone came and scooped out your humanity while you were turning the pages.

Even though I'm a few days late, today I'm going to have a stiff drink and read Post Office.

It feels appropriate.

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Almost got hit by a car on my run

August 16, 2013 - 3:12am - by admin

I was running along the sidewalk on my way to meet Kat
and there's a pedestrian crosswalk at Balmoral and Young
one of the ones with the white painted lines so you know who has the right of way
that thing
and I looked to my left and saw no traffic
on the the right in the incoming lane there were two cars and one of them was turning left
onto Young
and I paused for a second and he waved at me, one of those "go ahead" motions
so I stepped out into the street and as that happened a car came swerving around the corner
some flashy silver thing
I think it was a BMW based on the hood ornament but I can't recall
and he slammed on his brakes and stopped a foot or so from my left leg.

I looked at the guy in the car and he looked back and me
with this mutual disgust and hatred
me, for his reckless driving in a residential area in a school zone
he, for, I don't know, having to stop quickly?
for having the evidence of his own recklessness pointed out to him in such an
obvious
physical
way?

who knows.

After a pause I kept running because what could I do, really?
kick the hood of his car
yell
scream
YOU ALMOST SHATTERED MY LEGS YOU IDIOT
go on at length about how he would have definitely put me in the hospital
broken at least several of my bones
and how I would have sued him and taken him for all that he was worth?
No.
There's no point.

As I jogged away it struck me how lucky I was that he hit his brakes
or that I had waited that one second to check with the other car
and how often

lately I've been telling myself that I'm lucky because my life is good
but those are all things I've done.

I chose my friends
my partner
my job
as well as the plethora of other decisions which have put me where I am
after years of hard work and stress
fighting and arguments and trying to smarten the fuck up in the process.

Which isn't luck at all, really.

That's just life.

Now, not getting hit by that guy in the car today
that was luck.
Or the universe working in its bizarre and unpredictable way
if you want to get fancy about it.
Because I don't think luck is something you earn, or create for yourself
it just happens to you
(or it doesn't).

Like tonight.

That was lucky.

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Facebook in the 90's

August 13, 2013 - 3:05pm - by admin

Nothing ever really changes.

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#ThrowBackThursday: My Friend Iceland

August 8, 2013 - 8:27pm - by admin

Today I became friends with Iceland.

It sent me a really cute email confirming that we are friends:


* First published on 10/18/10

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On this day 48 years ago The Beatles released "Help"

August 7, 2013 - 3:58am - by admin

Which in addition to being a great and hugely influential album holds a special place in my heart.

As a teenager I went through a really bad breakup. Saying I was a shitshow afterward is putting it lightly and I spent a lot of time sulking in my room and fighting with basically everyone.

I don't remember why my brothers were gone on one particular Saturday but my mum decided to take me out to do errands with her.

We weren't getting along at the time and I don't even remember where we went -maybe we just went for a drive, I don't know- but that drive is one of the few times I actually remember getting along with her during that period of my life.

We came home and my dad and I hung out in the basement and we listened to "Help!" on vinyl and had a really big heart-to-heart about my feels.

I wasn't really into opening up and talking about how I felt, but sitting there having a hot chocolate and a rye n coke (my dad is cool) and listening to The Beatles helped me open up and start to deal with shit.

That night was the first night in a long time where I felt like I had the capacity to be happy and listening to that album is a huge, important part of that memory. That album means a lot to me.

It still does.

HBD "Help!"

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