Shutterbug

I was thinking to myself on the way to school "I'm carrying my camera, I should be looking for photo-opportunities" and at that moment I looked up. (This was taken some days before the rest of the pictures in this post)

Usually I don't put up pictures where the content is more notable than the form, but I saw this old-style car today and thought it was pretty cool.

I'm doing this content-over-form thing TWICE today because I thought Gold would like to know that converting a church into your house actually happened right here in Halifax. Who knew?

A lot of the public spaces here are open "until dusk", which means that sunset photography feels a little bit like a race against time.

This is the best picture I got of this structure today. Doesn't quite convey the ridiculous magnitude of these...grain silos? I think they are, anyhow. Trivia: did you know that Halifax has both a "Bland" and a "South Bland" street?

You can't really read the placque from this angle, but this place is named for a Father of Confederation.

And another burial ground. Guess it must come with being an older city?

2009: Best Night Out - Burlesque Show (Technically a day late)

The one who is like unto a Gnome once again delights and astounds with her ability to post consistently and compellingly. Her latest is a series on the Best _____ of 2009. Looking over the list of prompts, there are more'n a few which don't really apply ("best restaurant moment" comes to mind), but today's I can do. Today's is "2009: Best Night Out", and for me that night is without hesitation the Halloween Burlesque Show.

I was not, I must admit, very enthusiastic about the event to begin with. Though I have in the past tried to enjoy nightlife, it just turns out not to be my scene. I try to be a good sport, of course, but with no particular prediliction for dance and a high level of social anxiety in the company of strangers, the experience amounts to awkwardness and expensive drinks. So when it came to be that my Halloween plans were usurped by this "Burlesque Show", it was a little disappointing; I had hoped for no more than the company of good friends, a pumpkin, booze, and candy. Instead: loud music, strangers, downtown.

A week or two later it's Halloween and having enjoyed the Strange Adventures (local comic book store) party the day before my spirits are somewhat lifted. My costume (scientist) is more than a little lame, but at this point I have financial resources totalling fewer than zero dollars and a labcoat, so what else am I to do. At some point I make the best decision I could possibly have made and elect to bring my digital SLR to the party.

There's a series of minor miscommunications and we're off to more than a bit of a late start. There isn't a lineup when we arrive, so we needn't have worried. A friend of a friend has brought a cigar as part of his costume (early-to-mid 20th century gangster). I have a puff or two, feel a little guilty and reaffirm my commitment never to take up cigarettes. We watch the passers by for neat costumes, lo and behold there's a woman in the princess Leia slave bikini. The same homeless dude canvasses the queue four or five times for change. I don't have any and feel bad at least the first two.

The doors open at last, and we are admitted to the Seahorse Tavern. There are seahorse figures carved into some of the posts with their eyes lit up red. It's an appropriate effect for the occasion, but I hope that doesn't stop them from doing it all the time. We find good seats. We buy an underwhelming amount of unspectacular beer, and it costs too much. I'll need steady hands and a good eye for the camera, so that is probably for the best.

The Burlesque troupe is largely staffed (run?) by Kings' ladies, so there are a great many familiar faces in the crowd. None of them do I really know personally, but through another friend who has accompanied us here. We hit the floor to say hello, which turns out to be another fantastic decision down the line. The first band begins to play, although there is as yet no sign of any dancers. I start looking for interesting photos in the crowd, but I take far fewer than perhaps I ought.

By and by the dancing starts, and I begin the aggravating process of calibrating my camera settings such that I get usable pictures in the dark without a tripod or too much flash. I miss a lot of really interesting action, as well as some very pretty faces. That doesn't really change as the night goes on. I'm by no means the only one taking pictures, and there are in fact a few others in the crowd with DSLRs. One is a pretty, blonde cowgirl with what looks to be a recent model Sony. She takes a fall and I get a picture as she's standing up. I don't notice until much later when I'm reviewing the album on my computer that she's very likely looking at me.

I end up in all kinds of places around the stage, some much better than others. I'm standing close to where the rest of the group has been sitting (I think I may have gone over to talk to someone, but I can't remember) when a hand taps me on the shoulder, and voices from behind request that I take a picture of the couple in front of me. I am not quite sure what to make of this request: even if I do this thing for them, will they ever see it? Regardless, the opportunity presents itself perhaps minutes later and I successfully capture a moment of true happiness, or something that looks very much like it. The light catches the girl's face and she is glowing twice over. I don't hold out much hope of finding the people who asked for this picture, but in my wildest imaginings I allow myself to think that through some chain of friends and acquaintances (the magic of facebook) these people might come to see what I have captured.

Later I end up at the very front edge of the stage, across from the Sony-wielding cowgirl. There's a break in the show and I take some pictures of her. She may have done the same, but I can't say for certain. I do recall I saw her smile, once. I'm uncertain as to the content of this exchange. I still am, I think. It felt exciting at the time, and while I can hear the chorus of voices telling me that it's no more than the shutterbug equivalent of batting eyelashes, it feels like a big step in the right direction. It feels like a step that I'm making with confidence. Tonight, I'm not the art-school dropout slowly wasting away in technical college; I'm Loud the photographer, Loud the artist, Loud the maybe-handsome-enough-to-warrant-a-second-glance? It's a feeling I haven't felt for a long time before, and won't feel for some while hence.

Some crucial shots (most notably those of the friend whom we were attending the whole event for) don't turn out right because I'm not fast enough with the dials or the button. There are certainly enough that I'm happy with, though, and I figure that anything I didn't get *someone* else must have! I'm one of the last of our party to leave: the rest have work or have to be up the next day and have been trickling out accordingly. As I leave, I scan the crowd for the cowgirl in pink, but to no avail. I have pictures, but she is one of very few individuals not tagged on facebook when I upload them.

On the walk home, I consider burlesque art: I have seen people that I actually know in intentionally, publicly sexy displays. Do I feel different because I know them? There's no hypocritical sense of revulsion (thank goodness).

The day after I post the (good) pictures on facebook I get a message from the woman in the couple whose picture I told you about four paragraphs ago. I hadn't honestly imagined that she would see it, so I can't shut up about how awesome the world can be for the next couple of days. People get tired of hearing about it. Five or six of the pictures I took are used as profile pictures on facebook. My ego swells a little, but inevitably most of them are supplanted by others. So it goes.

This was unquestionably the best night out of 2009 for me, and though one might imagine that's because I don't go out often or at all, I think that if I try to imagine the ideal night out, it looks very similar.

-LOUD!

May This Be Love

If there is one aspect of rational scepticism that I can be said to dislike, it is that I can't really believe that coincidences are fate. Certainly, I do find it preferable on the whole to think that my future is unwritten, that I'm not simply going through the motions of a destiny that has been fixed since the very beginnings of time. From time to time, however, events will occur that I imagine would make much more sense if there was such a force as fate at work in the universe. Sometimes small things; running into old friends you hadn't expected to see again, a second-grade test score which doesn't earn you a seventh-grade transfer to a different school which, in turn, leads to you hanging out with people who influence your choice of high school leading to a tenth-grade dream girl. I accept such events as random chance, just the one branch of possibilities I happened to experience instead of all the others. I've just been watching enough Heroes to make me wistful, I suppose. The particular coincidence which provided the creative spark for this post, well, it's part of a bigger story*.

I would love to start at the beginning, but should I try to isolate it I fear I would wind up starting this story with the genetic material which dictated the very chemistry of my brain. But then, ADHD being still poorly understood as I hear it, maybe the genes are just a part of some greater set of causes. At any rate, I would not be starting in a useful place, so let us skip a few chapters to the tenth grade dream girl. The chain of events from this point onward is somewhat more relevant. There's a three-year long relationship which she moves on from and I don't, for whatever reason. There's a friend who believed that my life in Ottawa had thereafter become stagnant, and so invited me to live with him in Halifax. At this point the ADHD – which I have been unsuccessfully attempting to deal with sans medication for several years now – comes right 'round and bites me in the ass. I have, therefore, been - how shall I say this? - “persuaded” to spend this year reflecting on my personal and academic ambitions in lieu of pursuing my previous course of study. It seems, so far, that my ambitions seems to revolve a great deal around the three-tube CRT projector in our living room in Halifax. Not much of a life, but I've seen some good movies. Art criticism, then? I imagine that's a hard market to break into.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I made it plain that my ambitions did not include spending a year in Ottawa living some two blocks away from the walking emotional torture rack I used to call my girlfriend, the next step was to ensure some sort of income for myself in Halifax. Gotta pay the bills, after all, and as “technically not a student” a number of previous avenues for the acquisition of wealth have become inaccessable. My parents considered putting me on a plane, but eventually decided to drive down in their newly- purchased 1982 Volkswagen Westfalia (camper type). Some of the prettier stops along the way I captured on film. Turns out that means mostly waterfalls. To wit:

 

These falls are just outside Quebec city. There is also a pedestrian bridge over the river, further down:

And the crossing (very wobbly, though you'll not see it in the picture):

 

Next, the view from the bridge looking away from the falls:

 

  

 Continuing on the other side, there are bike trails which enter a forest. Therein can be found the following pond:

And, finally, there was this little man-made rock formation (lower middle, to the right) which was too darling not to photograph:

Part one of my much-vaunted coincidence occurs maybe two hours after these photos were taken. Two hours east of Quebec city in another town along la Fleuve Saint-Laurent, as they call it in those parts. This town:

Of course, we didn't actually arrive in Riviere-du-Loup proper until the next morning. Our van broke down on the highway as I was driving. We were maybe 40km outside of town. I had been driving a little fast that day, so at that time it seemed possible that 7 hours at what might have been 110km/h had simply been too much for the old girl. I say “what might have been” because at some point during its long history, our VW's speedometer had become calibrated to a system that was neither metric nor imperial. My father and I used mileposts and counting to discern our speed, and it turned out that what the VW said was 70mph was actually about 90kph (some 57mph, if you want apples-to-apples). Of course, it took us a while to get the counting right, so for a while we thought 80mph might be 90kph, that sort of thing. I affectionately dubbed the big numbers which had used to denote speed in mph “Intergalactic Units”. At any rate, the engine did not want to start again. One CAA towtruck later, and we were parked beside a 24-hour garage (sort of? Their towtruck service was round-the-clock perhaps, but their mechanics were not), worrying that the van would never start again. We cooked dinner on the propane stove (this is why you buy a Westfalia, people!), and then slept the night, hoping against hope that it might just be that the fuel filter had clogged. The next morning:

DOG! (^_^)

Riviere-du-Loup sits very near the teeny-tiny town of Cacouna. Shouldn't mean much to me. Shouldn't mean anything to me at all, except it does - because it mattered to her. The next day, with there being no sense waiting around in a place where the closest thing to civilization is an Irving Big Stop, we rented a car and headed into town. It was like walking with a ghost. It's one thing to avoid the sort of stimuli that remind you unpleasantly of an old flame, but when it's a place, well, there's really no escaping it. Of all the places we could have broken down, it was there. Times like those, you really wish it all meant something in the grand scheme of things, like you were meant to break down there and confront the demons of a failed relationship. But no such luck.

Stay tuned for Part II!

Far Cry 2: (if) Anything Goes (wrong with SecuROM, you're fucked)

Today's title is a not-so-clever play upon the title of one in a series of trailers for the inexplicably-named Far Cry 2. Inexplicably named?, you wonder, whatever could he mean? Put simply, Far Cry 2 has, besides being a shooter which takes place mostly out of doors with fairly remarkable human AI and semi-realistic weapon handling dynamics, nothing to do with Far Cry. Neither the game engine, nor the development team itself are constant between games. The closest analogue to the situation that exists with Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Crysis was that of the Age of Empires series compared to the first Empire Earth. The latter was the far more audacious brainchild of original AoE developer Bruce Shelley, who split with Ensemble studios, whose plan for Age of Empires 2 was simply more of the same. Crysis in relation to Far Cry is very much like AoE 2 versus 1. Certainly some aspects of the design have been improved, but along the way the developers seemed to lose sight of what we all found so charming in the original. Where Crysis is essentially a punishing benchmark for the PC hardware elite, it looked to me as though FC2 was shaping up to be a little more innovative, a little less stale. I was (the operative word) looking forward to the ability to roam 50-odd square kilometers of map at my leisure, to experimenting with different approaches to combat, and to interacting with the various in-game factions.

Well, what really separates Far Cry from its successor in my mind is that I cannot, in good conscience, buy FC2. Even on Steam it is saddled with a 3-computer 5-time semi-refundable secuROM-based DRM solution. Let's break this down, shall we? Even if I buy the game on a platform with tough, integrated DRM, a platform that requires me to be connected to the internet, a platform that knows my name, a platform that TRACKS MY GAME-PLAYING HABITS...UbiSoft still doesn't think their IP is safe enough. For the record, if I'm going to go into the kind of trouble it must take to crack a Steam game, do they really think I'll stop there? SecuROM, like every other kind of DRM, has attracted the usual posse of gamer-hackers and pirate-hackers who for reasons ranging from legitimate (secuROM is notorious for butchering system performance and flat-out not working, or so I hear) to the morally ambiguous (they do it for the lulz) to the nefarious (read: piratical). So, what they are asking me to do is to potentially devalue the money I spent on the kind of kick-ass hardware one uses to play current games by chaining me to a stupid activation system that doesn't seem to offer any more practical security than Steam already does (you know, locks and honest folk and that...). Oh, but it DOES limit how much I can use their game. To me, this represents the height of irony. Game developers are going out of their way to create the potential for what they call “emergent gameplay”, they are trying to give the player more control over the interactive experience. At the same time, game publishers are working round-the-clock to limit the number of times you can install the games that YOU pay to use with YOUR money, and piracy continues unabated. In fact, piracy was marketed as ACTIVISM when Spore was released with unreasonable activation limits. “Make Spore the most pirated game in history,” was the rallying cry “show EA that this DRM shit does not fly with gamers”. I didn't pirate Spore, though. I can't say that after seeing gameplay past the cell stage that I really felt I even wanted to play it. Everywhere you see people variously toasting and lamenting the so-called decline of the PC as a platform for games. Everywhere you see developers blaming piracy, but I don't think for a moment that we should be so naïve. Games are getting bigger, prettier, louder....but shorter and costlier, in general. This has been a recognized pattern long before people started whining about piracy as they have in recent months. If you read the newsposts on Penny Arcade (I only read it for the articles, I swear!), you'll see that Tycho always says the same thing about PC gaming: people – not counting the small but vocal minority of hardware aficionados, ie. Yours truly – just want to play. They don't want to worry about the kind of issues that will necessarily cause problems on a platform so variable and diverse as the PC. Consoles are cheap, their games tend to sell better than PC titles, and for the most part they are idiot-proof. While the move towards hard drives and firmware updates and downloadable content may complicate the gaming console experience, I doubt that the “insert disc and play” functionality is going to go anywhere. Well, at least until game cartriges make their inevitable return to prominence, but even so maintenance will still be as simple as “blow on the contacts”. Truly, what would make the most sense for people who want a thriving market for games with the kind of complexity and indie content that only PC gaming can provide as present, the 90% of gamers who don't have a hard-on for their hardware should just buy Macs, thereby creating enough of a market to make development worthwhile. Macs, with their (generally) standardized hardware, could then move into direct competition with gaming consoles, and proceed to beat the stuffing right out of them. The power of Steve Jobs to make relatively unremarkable products look like Yaweh's own gadget collection, combined with the kind of market share that would allow Apple to exert serious power over hardware manufacturers (hell, they somehow have Intel half in their pocket already!) would combine to form a super-gaming entity that could somehow convince consumers to pay three times as much for a piece of hardware with identical capabilities and upgrade options to a gaming console. Of course, Apple's record of having pretty strict control over media (the plan not to allow third-party iPhone apps, anyone) might antagonize indie developers for a while, I think that the larger problem would be in the long term. The few of us who love to tinker with hardware would just suck it up and hack MacOS onto a gaming PC...but the supply of hardware would eventually dry up. The mac platform would, due to its homogeneous nature, be a potential coup for DRM, which could be encoded into ALL HARDWARE.

Where I'm going with this is that PC gaming would have to sacrifice the strengths of our platform in order to achieve mainstream success. It would lead to a momentary renaissance of gaming, but we would be effectively signing away our last vestiges of control over digital content in the process. The other extreme is the abandonment of DRM, making the PC attractive as a platform through an unofficial “try-before-you-buy” culture (for the honest folk, at least). The lifting of DRM restrictions would create a lot of good will in gamers, and it might even lead to a momentary jump in sales...but big-budget games would inevitably disappear from PC, which would become a sort of starting point for would-be game developers, releasing freeware and shareware content in a bid to land spots at a major label.

The reason I'm not going to buy Far Cry 2 is because I am following the third path, which I believe has the potential to lead us toward victory in our fight to remain a viable, free environment for gaming. Of course, it is marked as a “top seller” on Steam, so the fight may already be lost, but I object to the DRM enough that this won't change my decision. If gamers don't buy games that come with unreasonable terms of use (ie. The retail version of Bioshock at launch), game companies WON'T MAKE MONEY. When they decide to treat their customers like vermin. Pirating games may feel good, but it's not the answer. I contemplated buying FC2 and then pirating a version with the DRM removed, but UbiSoft would only see my money if I did that. They would not see the gamer, fighting to preserve his favourite hobby by any means necessary. They would only learn that they can get away with bullying us, and everyone who went to school knows that if you don't let the bully use you for his or her personal entertainment, if you refuse to react to their provocations, they will (hopefully) stop trying. If you continue to react, they'll only come back more and more often.

So if you're listening UbiSoft, you just LOST A SALE of Far Cry 2. I sincerely hope it's not the only one you lose.

In the interests of striking an emotional balance in this post, I shall now shift gears entirely.

To be succinct, I've got love on my mind. Stop. Did you click the link before continuing? If not, open it in a new tab and keep going. It is thematically consistent with what I am going to say, and it will also make the experience of reading this blog 100% more FUNKY.

DDR players who own Supernova 2 are excused now, although they're likely to have reached for their dance mat upon hearing the first strains of music after clicking the link.

Now that we're all groovin', I can continue. This thanksgiving marked for me an entire year of being single, possibly barring an incredibly mishandled affair around the holidays. You know who you are and in retrospect I'm really really really sorry, even though I'm pretty sure you're not holding a grudge. One year of being single has taught me that, well, I don't really like being single. It has also taught me that I don't hate being single either. If I were surrounded by happy relationships, or incredible-yet-too-intimidating prospects, I think I might be a wreck, but neither is the case. Being single is totally stable, and relatively functional. The impending visit of my Ex-girlfriend does, however, have me in a bit of a rush. I'd love to have a date for next weekend, not only for purposes of escaping the house, but as a show of strength, a defensive maneuver of sorts. Unfortunately, dating someone for those reasons is a violation of the second formulation of the categorical imperative – the long way of saying I am uncomfortable with using people. Relationships being organic as they are develop at uncertain rates, and with a week's notice I really don't have the highest of hopes. It's not as though I haven't been considering the issue since much earlier in the year, it's that I have yet to really find an individual of the female persuasion with whom I have the right kind of rapport, ie. The kind I can talk to naturally, without watching my words to make sure I'm not geeking out too hard. As you probably know, this would already be PRETTY RARE even if I wasn't beset with a terminal case of shy.

So boo-hoo, I don't really talk to girls. At least I don't pop my collars.

What I have at the moment are prospects, but nothing more. In each case there are too many unknowns to allow for a solid plan. Missing first year university here has been academically painless (although I think I'd be better off having taken FYP, that's another story), but it has the unfortunate side effect of alienating me from the social dynamics which have sprung up. All I know is that if people like my housemates they tend to be ok with me. This would be awesome if girls visited this place more than once or twice in EVER. The only other constant that I have become aware of is that if I meet someone at Dal, chances are it turns out they're a King's student anyhow. Some have voiced an opinion to the effect that this just goes to show that I attend the wrong school. I guess at least that when I meet girls at Dal my housemates will invariably know something about her.

Fifty bucks says that no matter who she is, it's always:

“Oh, her. She's dating a guy in my tutorial”

(or something to this effect)

• Loud!

PS. My heartache is over and indeed I can live without you.

PPS. Have you listened to Holy Fuck? That shit is bangin'!

PPPS. Maybe I should just take the hint* and get a haircut?

*assumption that there was a hint to be had? ASSUMED!

(Whatever Happened To) The Man I Used To Be?

I'm hardly one to believe that the answers in life (where any exist) are so simple, but here we are. I'm making some small strides, even - dare I say it - improving perceptibly? Today (and yesterday, and the day before that and so on) the dishes. Tomorrow: the world! I mean, I'm still getting used to some of this stuff, but I've been eating well (save two donuts and today's chocolate chip binge, and I guess all those graham crackers), and I've been trying to keep at least the kitchen clean. I'm about to do my own laundry again. I still spend a lot of time on the computer, but I've been walking and playing DDR to keep fit-ish. It's not what I'd necessarily call a quantum leap, but I'm just happy to have my sleep schedule in a better order than it used to be.

Observations on Halifax: pretty, and the stores are better than their Ottawa-based equivalents. There are actually independent stores here, and not the endless parade of chain stores. Those are still here, of course, but at least they're not the only gigs in town. The terrain between here and the university is a lot flatter than it was between me and Carleton back home. Will have to go down the hill to downtown on the bike if I want exercise, but at least my necessary commute will be less of a chore. What mom says is true, and people seem to be a smidgeon nicer around here. I hope it rubs off on me. The courtyard in the center of Dalhousie's library smells and sounds like fifth avenue court back home. If Westjet is making money on the return tickets I just bought on sale, I am so disgusted by the profit margins of the airline industry and this business about higher fuel costs forcing ticket prices up is utter bullshit. Why can't people hold to a more Adam Smith kind of capitalism?

I promise you all something more polished at a later time, but right now I'm still reading some new material to think about. I've finished The Trial of Socrates, working on a book of white papers on sustainable architecture, also Aristotle's Politics, and a little of Douglas Coupland's Jpod.

-LOUD!

Halifax

I think I owe some people an explanation, or some people think I owe them one, or something. Here it is, regardless:

Plan is that I'm going to attend University in Halifax, and the very first reason for doing so is that I have to leave home. Commuting from home to University left me out in the cold with respect to the social aspects of campus, so much so that I barely even feel like a student, to speak nothing of someone who is involved. On the other hand, I don't want to live in residence here, because it would mean paying an incredible amount of money for a level of convenience I already have. I think I just did things wrong here, and if I stay I don't know if I'd ever set them right. Leaving home will hopefully be enough of a shake-up that I can get some other changes to my usual routine made. Second reason is that I have to learn how to live with people, and the longer I put that off, the worse it's going to be. Next, I want to try living in new places, having never moved in my lifetime. I want to meet new people, I want to try some new things, like having a work ethic, cooking all my own food, managing my own internet connection, paying my own taxe...hmm, ok, so maybe it's not all roses, but whatever. It will be a learning experience.

My options in Ottawa for moving out with someone would have been pretty much limited to rooming with Star, and as much as I love the idea of living in the same place as my ex who can barely tolerate me at the best of times, I just had to pass on that one.

I'm going to miss this place, I'm not abandoning you Ottawans here out of spite, or anything. This year just didn't work out particularly well for me, and somehow I doubt that repeating the experience – even for rigor's sake – would be advantageous to my academic or social life.

Also, because I was promised that every night would be “burrito night”

I couldn't argue with that

-Loud (who still loves Ottawa and all of you)

5/7

PS. The Halifax-ward migration of still more of my friends is also an excellent incentive. Next year I think it will be at least five friends (plus those I make while there) plus one cousin going to Uni there.