Dave of The North! - Part 1

Readers may recall that in my first blog post, I mentioned my father, the erudite hermitic archaeologist, and promised to recount his Adventures in the Canadian North. Today, after he had finished cutting up bits of wood with a chain saw, I sat down and interviewed him over explosively strong coffee. We went on until my hand cramped, but this is an incomplete history- more will be coming shortly. The world he describes is already fading, but I hope to preserve these stories so that one day my children can read them and imagine a time when the glaciers hadn’t been paved over. I give you part one of Dave in The North, the chronicles of an intrepid little Scotsman in the Tundra.

In 1973, David, then only twenty-two but with four years of Ottawa-based archaeology under his belt, walked into an ugly brown building in Bells Corners which at that time held the offices of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and asked for a job. At that time, there wasn’t a lot else to it. He was to be doing field work – active research missions commonly called ‘digs’, unearthing and cataloguing old tools, bones, and remnants of houses, any evidence of the lifestyles of ancient indigenous groups.

Not long later, David drove from Ottawa to the Yukon, accompanied by Keith A, Carol M, Pamela G, Jeff H, Jeff L (known to all as ‘Ernie’, for no apparent reason), Dick and Heather M (David’s boss and his wife, newly married at a spectacularly drunken ceremony), and Heather’s nephew ‘wee Ian’. It took five or six days to reach Whitehorse to pick up supplies, and during that time the group read ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, which is a very very good road trip book. From Whitehorse, they boated across Kluane Lake to reach their Gladstone dig site. Kluane was mountainous and stunningly beautiful, with massive glaciers visible on the horizon.

Kluane Lake in high summer, at about 11:00 PM.

That summer was productive and fun, but not greatly eventful. Halfway through it David began to see double and had to be Medevac’d out at great cost. It turned out there was nothing wrong with him, except perhaps that the Tundra bug had bitten him – one summer would not be enough.

The second summer, the summer of 1974, was the summer of the bear.

Dubawnt is marked with a red dot. God, did you know there were that many lakes? There's millions.

This time, David went into the true Arctic, accompanied by Chuck A, Jane S,  Midge and Brian G, their young children Charlotte (eight or nine) and Bruce (no more than two), and a pair of squeamish wildlife biologists. The team flew out to Baker Lake, where they chartered a semi-amphibious plane called a Grummond Goose , and flew it to Grant Lake, just north of Dubawnt Lake. Dubawnt Lake is massive, well north of the treeline, always somewhat frozen and completely uninhabited. Apart from two or three parties of canoes, the team encountered nobody at all.

In summer, canoe is still one of the best ways to get about up north.

At Grant Lake the team found a good, well-stratified research site (when material is stratified into distinct layers, rather than having been jumbled up, an archeologist can determine what period an artifact comes from much more easily). They camped half a mile from the site, for reasons nobody seems to have been clear on at the time, let alone after 30 years’ retrospect.

A photo from an actual research site at Grant Lake, acquired illegally from the Museum. Tell no-one.

At camp, they had a food tent, several sleep tents, and a radio tent with a WWII-vintage radio, set up on top of a hill in hopes of getting an elusive signal. Cooking was done with a naptha-burning Coleman stove, and a hole dug down to the permafrost yielded basic refridgeration. Food was a concern, since the nearest town was god knows how far away. The group lived mostly off canned or preserved meats – David remembers an entire Prosciutto, which was an unfamiliar object at the time – as well as canned butter and bacon, jam, and bannock. In later years, when David’s dig teams had Inuit members (Inuit have carte blanche to hunt up north), they would supplement their food supplies with caribou, who often wandered into camp in small herds, dazed by the flies.

I think my dad may have taken this picture. Not sure.

Northern Canadian summers are plagued by millions upon millions of blackflies. There’s a jaunty old folk song about it that goes like this:

Blackflies, the little blackflies
Always the blackflies, anywhere you go
I’ll die with the blackflies pickin’ my bones
In North Ontar-i-o-i-o
In North Ontar-i-o.

That about captures the feeling of it, but keep in mind, the flies only get worse as you head north, and David’s team were in Nunavut, not Ontario. The team would wear baseball caps just to keep the flies from actively tearing their skulls apart, and long-sleeved shirts with elastic bands at the wrists. Every night, peeling off the bands, David would find a black smear across his wrists. It was too hot to wear bug hoods, though some did anyway. The flies would bite until blood seeped from the team’s ears and their eyelids swelled up.  They practically drank 95% deet Off! bugspray like water. One of the wildlife biologists refused to leave his tent for fear of the flies. Every night, after sealing up his sleep tents, David would burn a length of mosquito coil, which stupefied all the flies. Then he would go around the tent and gush each one with his thumb. It took ten minutes to get them all.

Some Nunavut Tundra in summer. No trees, but lots of moss and wildflowers.

Despite the flies, the group hiked almost every day. The landscape was spectacular. Nothing grows taller than about four feet in the Tundra, thanks to holwing winds, deep snow and bitter cold. It is a landscape as alien as the Moon, but one with a savage beauty to it. The team saw Caribou almost every day. Once, a group of canoers passed by and stopped to camp the night, and as David was showing them the research site, one of them said, “Look, you’ve brought your dog along!” Looking up, David saw a lone wolf sitting on the crest of a hill not far away.

Wolves were a rare sight in the summer, but would hang around the camp hoping to steal scraps. They weren’t dangerous.

But wolves are hardly the only thing up there.

One day, at about 11:30 in the morning, while David and his colleagues were working, Brian G’s young daughter Charlotte approached the group. “Daddy,” she said, “Mummy says there’s a bear at camp. You have to come back.” After a few minutes’ bewilderment, Midge G arrived with the two-year-old Bruce to confirm Charlotte’s story. But the team had no gun with them – it was up in the radio tent, on the crest of the hill. This was a stupid place to leave it, and in later years David would make sure there was always a gun with the team at the research site.

Approaching camp, they immediately saw the bear. He was a grizzly bear (the biggest kind, except for polar bears. Remember than fact.), a big old male, and he’d ripped down one wall of their kitchen tent and eaten all their flour. Brian G went to fetch the gun from the radio tent, only to find that it had no bullets – they were down in the sleeping tent with another, smaller gun. In camp. Where the bear was.

A very nervous Brian G managed to get down into the sleeping tent without pissing off the bear, got the gun and bullets, and brought it back, while the whole team watched and chewed their lips. David was quite a good shot. (His father Alex had been a truly crack shot, and it’s through Alex that I learned to shoot, though I never got good at it. Somewhere there’s a picture of me at fourteen, in the Wasatch mountains, with a Glock 9mm in my hands. ) Somebody loaded the bigger gun and handed it to him, and the team went down to the camp en masse, yelling and firing shots. They drove the bear out, but he didn’t go far – only about two miles out, so that they could still see him. He dug a deep pit and lay in it, his dark furry belly jutting out, and fell asleep. “Look,” they would say, pointing at the dark shape on the horizon, “there’s that damn bear.”

They repaired the kitchen tent wall with a sheaf of clear plastic. The sun, David remembers, hit the plastic and lit it up, attracting blackflies, who crawled droning up the tent wall like a tiny Panzer division. David gushed them.

Less than two hours after they drove him out, the bear was back. The team formed a line with David and Brian at either end, cradling the guns, and drove him back again. But after two miles, the bear stopped moving. He wasn’t scared any more. These were probably the first humans he had ever encountered. Finally, with the team about fifty feet away, he stopped dead, laid his ears flat, and looked David in the eye.

Back the fuck up.

That, David knew, was the look of a bear about to charge. The group hastily backed up and retreated to camp. They had driven the bear through a lot of marshland, so everyone was filthy. As they washed in the river, Jane S began to scream – there was the bear, splashing through the water towards her.

Brian and David, who were not stupid, still had their guns. They both shot, and after three or four shells, the massive old grizzly fell dead in the river.

The team hauled him out, skinned him, and ate him. He was crunchy. Age had turned him gristly and full of bone. When they couldn’t stand any more bear meat, they dug a hole and buried him. They didn’t tell anyone until their return to town.

The research site was in a game sanctuary. Before they had gone up, their guns had been sealed, so it was obvious that they had been fired since then. At this point, game officers in the north were still all white. These days, they’re native, and much more understanding, but the white game officers tended to be self-righteous and hard to deal with. This one was a real bastard. Even though David and his team had done nothing wrong, having tried twice to ward off the bloody thing, the officer was furious that they hadn’t informed him immediately – how could they have? – and seemed to think they were trying to smuggle the bear pelt out, when in fact they had buried it. He very nearly arrested them all.

In the end, everyone returned home safe, but there is a moral to all this: If you ever have to shoot a bear, save the pelt. Most of us will never get the opportunity to apply such a lesson – but then, we are not wee, intrepid Dave of the North.

Tune in next time for more Northern Adventure!

On The End of School and the Start of Academia

Well, it’s over. It’s really, truly over.

Yesterday, I received my final marks for the term on this thingy called ROSI that orders the stars in the cosmos and the flimsy lives of man, which means yarp, there’s nothing else for me to do. Not even sit in front of a screen hitting ‘refresh’ over and over and crying pitifully over question nine in the short answer section. I have been home (that is, the insane cabin in the woods surrounded by acres and acres of plaid) for a week now, and it has been one of those lazy wonderful accomplish-fucking-nothing weeks. Here’s how it goes.

Monday: Wake up heinously early and write English exam. Emerge from English exam, mewling about hand cramp (Any university students reading will nod gravely and say, ‘hand cramp has affected me, too. It took my aunt and my grandmother. Remember, you don’t need to suffer alone.’), and walk through rainstorm to future apartment to finalize details with landlady. She now thinks I’m a sea witch. She’s too nice to say, but I know. Get taken out for pizza by my great friend, the nonpareil K.

WAIT. I must pause for food porn. 

Normally, when someone offers to take you out for pizza, you expect Pizza Pizza. K is not that kind of a dude. Nooo indeed. The place we went was so fancy that I’m surprised I didn’t spontaneously combust upon crossing the threshold for the crime of wearing muddy runners. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. We started with spiced breadsticks, prosciutto, fancy salami and several kinds of hard cheese, with nuts and honey. From there we proceeded onward to thin-crust gourmet pizza: More prosciutto, mozzarella, gorgonzola, specks and baked pears. Baked fucking pears. All this was underscored by a bottle of rich, velvety Barolo that was better than any wine I’d ever had. We split it between the two of us and got slightly tiddly. It was the most enjoyable night in recent memory. End food porn here.

With the help of an old schoolfriend, I caught a ride home the next day. On the way we watched the Phineas and Ferb movie with her little sister. I was considerably more excited for it than her sister was. Since then, I’ve spent the last week stooging around the house watching Downton Abbey, reading Game of Thrones and starting work on the webcomic that will probably be running my life for the rest of this summer. To give you a quick pimp:

Disclaimer: Most of the comic art will be lazier and worse than this.

‘Academia’ is a working title, but I may end up sticking with it. Anybody who gets the joke on the skinny fellow’s shirt gets a big mental hug. Alright, fine, I’ll give you a clue. If there was an ‘N’ instead of an ‘As” at the centre of that compound, then it would be called a Nitrole. As it is… C’mon, you can figure it out. Not to give too much away, the plot involves the tension between the arts and the sciences in universities, Dante’s Inferno, and, of course, an octopus. It will be published, with a little luck, starting in September.

I am now in Montreal, sitting in my brother’s apartment while he watches a review of a terrible movie. My brother takes delight in all things awful. He knows every line of ‘Troll 2’ and ‘Manos, the Hands of Fate’ and reads bad fanfiction on youtube as a long-term pastime. He is my sounding-board for the webcomic.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading home to Ottawa in order to return to my position as service industry zombie. I’ll try not to complain about that too much, because the worst I can really say about that job is that doing dishes is gross and it gives me new motivation to finish my education.

On a Long, Long Day

It seems I’ve been remiss in my blogging. Apologies. These past two weeks been fairly gruelling between exams, end-of-year administration, and trying to find a place to live next year.

Anyway, I don’t know if anybody would really want to read the stuff that might come out of my head if I were writing this before I finished my science cluster of exams (formula, formula, stupid math joke, soul of dying orphan child, formula, blood, demon), so perhaps in that respect it’s a mercy I haven’t written.

I had a chemistry exam at 9.00 this morning. I won’t complain about that, because it wasn’t that bad. It was what happened after that was the real pain in the fundament. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

So M and I have been apartment hunting throughout the month, and after a few false alarms we found a place that seemed perfect. Big, light, spacious, good upkeep, a good-sized room for each of us, and butt-cheap, even with everything included. This was Tuesday. We got the paperwork from the super and realized we’d need a co-signer, since we’re both students. Only problem? We both live well out of town and don’t really have anyone in Toronto who could co-sign for us. We get the super to find out if we can fax co-signer signatures. The answer is yes. I fax the documents to my dad in Ottawa to have him fill them out, while M gets a certified cheque. This is Wednesday. Faxing my dad the documents turns out to be a massive pain, because fax machines are hard to come by and rental forms are so confusing that neither he nor I know what to put where. We get our wires crossed a few times. Also, while, sending the fax, I witness an abusive fight between U of T management and some kid who wants to pick up his $7 dollar deposit a month late, which ends with a call to campus police ($7? Seriously?). My faith in humanity slides down a notch.

By Wednesday afternoon we pretty much have all our crap together except for a few details, but we know we won’t have time to actually sign the lease, because the place is a little ways away, and signing a lease takes time, and we both have a chemistry exam the next day which we NEED to study for. The apartment had only just been made available, was poorly advertised, and didn’t seem to have anybody else looking at it, so I figure we should be fine if I bring in all the paperwork this afternoon, after my exam. The exam runs from 9.00 to noon. I get to the rental office by maybe 1.15. The super, who’s a very sweet Argentinian lady, looks up, and I can tell by her face that something isn’t good.

“I’m sorry, honey- it’s just been rented! A man came in two hours ago with all the paperwork ready and it’s gone through!”

Two hours.

I scream “KHHHAAAAAN!” a few times within the privacy of my own brain. Then I ask what else is available. Turns out there’s a bachelor, which we had a look at as well, when we saw the apartment that’s just been rented in our little narrative. It’s a hundred a month cheaper and it’s available a month later, which is a plus because we won’t be here in the summer. I’ve already got all the paperwork. I call up my compatriot and she agrees: Fuck it. Give us the bachelor. We won’t have much privacy, but at least it’s a decent size and in very good shape. Because my dad is a co-signer, we fax it to him at his work, but it takes more than an hour to get to him, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. During that time I’m sitting on my thumbs in this lady’s office feeling as anxious and uncomfortable as I have in my life (well, no, breaking my femur at the age of fourteen months was probably worse, but I can’t remember that. Does that mean it wasn’t actually me that it happened to? Curse you, John Locke.),  while my dad waits in the fax room over in Ottawa getting more and more annoyed. My dad is proof that nobody gets mad like a Scot. He manages to convey so much wrath in the word ‘fine’ that it blows my mind. Finally it comes through, I sign, and the shit is over with.

When I get back to res and attempt to do a little laundry, I manage to spill liquid laundry soap over everything. But by this time, I’m too worn out to find any further misfortune of mine anything but fucking hilarious. I’m giggling like an idiot as I scrub the blue gunk off myself. (Fun laundry soap fact 1: Laundry soap molecules have amphiphilic polarity, which means they’ll stick to ANYTHING! They’ll also be absorbed by the spongy tissue under your skin, so they’re INCREDIBLY difficult to wash off! Fun laundry soap fact 2: Laundry soap is very alkaline! This means, if it stays on your skin for any length of time, it BURNS! :D )

It’s around this time that I realize I haven’t eaten in nine hours. I get poutine. Suddenly the world is a much nicer place.

I save lives.

Thus ends the chronicles of my incredibly strange, intense day. I suppose it could have gone much, much worse, but if anyone happens to find the top of my head lying around I wouldn’t mind having it back.

On Octopi

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about octopi. I say this without a hint of irony. The octopus is a deeply weird creature. There’s a strong tradition in fiction that if you need to portray an alien as intelligent but completely nonhuman, you make it look cephalopodan:

"The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth--above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes--were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous."

"Take evasive action! Green group, stick close to holding section MV-7!"

 

"The Beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war against God."
"I'm sorry?"
"Apologies. I said: I hope you enjoy your meal."

I suppose it’s no real surprise. From the perspective of a terrestrial mammal, octopi almost as foreign as aliens might be, for a couple good reasons. For one thing, they inhabit a world completely different than ours, where the buoyant quality of water eliminates the need for a firm body structure that’s so ubiquitous to terrestrial animals. They are also the most evolutionary distant group of comparable complexity from humans. In fact, they’re more or less as distant as they could be while still being animals. The protostomes, the phylum containing octopi, snails, earthworms, crustaceans and insects (among many others), diverged from our phylum, the deuterosomes, so long ago that we’re closer related to sea stars than we are to octopi. Octopi, meanwhile, are closer related to butterflies than they are to us.

Aw, so cute.                                                                                                             Oh dear god.

Octopi range in size from miniscule to bigger than you want to think about. Classic invertebrates, they have no bone; some have a sort of a vestigial cartilage shell inside their mantle, while other species are entirely soft and squishy except for a hard parrotlike beak. This lets them do mildly disturbing things like squeeze an eighty-pound body through a hole the size of your fist. They’re also very muscular. Each arm is usually stronger than a human’s  - Though that depends on both the octopus and the human, I guess. There must be big buff octopi who go to the gym and obsess over ‘gains!’ and flabby nerdly octopi who write blogs instead. Even the nerdly ones can hobble about on land for short distances, looking quite silly but still standing up to gravity pretty well. They can carry large objects by squeezing them under their mantles and their tentacles are dextrous enough for crude manipulation.

But the thing I find really crazy about octopi is their brains. They’re geniuses, not only compared to other invertebrates but to most mammals – they’re smarter than dogs and might even be as smart as pigs. For a ‘lower’ order of animal, that is really bizarre. Octopi can learn to navigate mazes, distinguish between images, open jars and traps to get at food, and mimic their surroundings in some ways that will blow your mind. They can even use tools.

Some octopi gather coconut shell halves, carrying them at great personal risk until they get two halves they can use as a protective casing. The effortful, pre-planned act of gathering the shells constitues sophisticated tool usage. Whether they figure out that if you bang them together it sounds like a horse, we shall have to wait and see.

 But it’s key to remember that evolutionary distance thing, because while octopus intellect may be comparable to mammalian intellect, it works completely differently. Dogs are really just very very stupid humans. You can look at a dog and have a pretty good idea what it’s thinking. You can’t do that with an octopus.

The octopus brain is actually smaller in proportion to its body that that of most mammals and birds, but it makes up for it with sheer complexity. It looks a bit like a pair of kidneys connected by a lot of string:

The kidneylike structures are optic centres, while the memory centres are distributed around the vertical and superior frontal lobes- the thing that looks like half a pumpkin and the surrounding area. I’m mostly ignoring the letter labels because they intimidate me. The spreading-out of memory is a trait we share; human memory is located all over the brain but primarily in the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the cerebellum. Complex motor function (we’re back on octopus brains again) resides, as far as I can tell, in the small wedge just above the half-pumpkin.

Now here’s where it gets really weird. The processing power of an octopus is not entirely located in its brain – it quite literally thinks with its arms, thanks to a bundle of nervous tissue in each limb that controls all the complex motions of that limb, relatively independent of the central brain. So yeah, nine brains, of a sort. Before you get totally creeped out, I’ll try to orient you with a human comparison.

Psychology time! You know the phrase ‘gut feeling’? According to the somatic marker hypothesis, which has a lot of support, it’s actually quite an accurate saying. Nervous centres throughout the body and especially in the gut seem to initiate physical reactions to stimulus that inform our brains, rather than the other way around. And I’m talking complex, subjective things here, like disgust, mistrust and anxiety. People with damaged ventral pathways in the prefrontal cortex have trouble receiving and interpreting these somatic signals, even though all their cognitive function may be intact. As a result, you get perfectly intelligent people who make countless bad decisions because they can’t rely on the body cues that we might call ‘instinct’. Researchers had their subjects ‘gamble’ by picking cards from two decks, one that tended to afford small cash wins and one that gave the occasional big win and many large losses. People with normal prefrontal cortices started to sweat every time they chose the ‘danger’ deck and soon stopped picking it. Subjects with prefrontal cortex damage sweated in the same way but kept taking from the danger deck anyway. So yes, some of our decision-making actually happens in our bodies.

Octopi turn that all the way up to eleven. The brainlike nerve bundles in their arms receive signals from the central brain, but don’t seem to relay things back, instead using their own processing capacity to act out orders all by their lonesome. The octopus sees the prey and the brain tells the arm to go get the prey, but the mechanics and details of actually getting the prey are entirely up to the arm. Picture having an employee, telling him to do things, and never hearing back about whether they got done. In fact, the octopus seems to have so little sense of his arms that it doesn’t actually know where they are or what they’re doing except by looking at them. Imagine that for a second. Baffled yet? Good. It explains that clumsy searching quality in tentacle movements; though each tentacle is extremely flexible, strong and sensitive to surfaces (they even contain chemoreceptors that let them taste what they’re touching), each one is also a lost blind child who’s been told to get dinner but not where or how.

Then there’s camouflage. Octopi are second only to their cousins the cuttlefish in terms of blending into backgrounds, and they’re better than anybody at manipulating their bodies to look things other than octopi thanks to their flexible body plan. Their skin contains layers of pigment cells that respond to electrical signals by reflecting or absorbing light in response to visual cues:  chromatophores (red, yellow, brown), iridophores (iridescent blues and greens) and leucophores (white – think leuko as in leukocyte or white blood cell).

Halfway through a colour change. 

The very poisonous blue-ringed octopus. Bright colours: nature's way of saying 'Fuck thee not with me, for I am one bad motherfucker.'

Now, do we know enough to start talking about octopus consciousness?  Octopi are not at all social but still demonstrate signs of being able to recognize other octopi by memory and even learn by observation (I know lots of humans who can’t do that). Two ‘stranger’ octopi will investigate each other curiously, but once they know each other they leave each other completely alone. They have sophisticated sensory systems but very little feedback from them, and they’re hard-wired to do whatever they can not to differentiate themselves from their surroundings. To me, what all this suggests is a sense of undefined boundaries and perhaps a lack of self. I’ve long suspected that social animals have a stronger sense of self than non-social ones. Could you define yourself as an ‘I’ without a ‘we’ or a ‘them’ to compare yourself to? Would you define yourself as you do if you weren’t constantly comparing yourself to others? The octopus recognizes other individuals in what seems like the same way it might recognize any other potentially dangerous part of the landscape. Then there’s the arms and their limited communication with the brain – in what sense do they actually ‘belong’ to the same consciousness that lives in the brain? Would an octopus define them as part of itself?

Clearly someone needs to write a book from the perspective of an octopus. There is an untapped well of mindfuckery to be had there. Perhaps in its own eyes an octopus is a centre of concentrated consciousness, from which the self diffuses outward along the path of its arms into nothingness. They would make natural Monists.

How strange to be an octopus
With each limb as its own
with arms unfurled to wander thus
In lands unseen, unknown

How odd to be an octopus
To fan each hand against the tide
And think not ‘I’ but rather ‘us’
And mantle nothing else inside

No secrets or illusions
hid within your golden eyes
A squishy self that bends and yields
and yet is strangely wise

For more cephalopod facts, visit the wonderful blog Cephalove, whose cogent explanation of octopus neurology I stole and then butchered. And lots of other people who make their livelihoods investigating these lovely freaks. Lucky bastards.

On Kicking the Habit

Blogging is not my first major foray into the field of compositional online timewasting. I, like so many over-earnest, chirpy tween girls before me, got my start in about grade seven in the field of online text-based roleplaying. No, not the sexy kind, or the kind with paladins and wizards (for the record, and in defence of DMs everywhere, I should point out that the sexy kind and the paladin-y kind are not mutually exclusive). I mean the kind where you make a character, and some chick in south Dakota makes a character, and then you write out ordinary encounters as a dialogue between you. To all you noninitiates, this must seem like a fantastic waste of time. And, I mean, it is. But when you start doing it, it’s illogically, addictively fun.

I did mostly what’s called ‘everyday’ RPs, which revolve around ostensibly normal people in a high school or community, but there are also sites where you can play ponies or superheroes or superhero ponies or or crime lords or Harry Potter fancharacters or pretty much anything at all. It’s all done through proboards or invisionfree sites that are put up and maintained by people who know how to write or steal UBBC code - no picnic, by the way. It took me a whole day to make a 200x400 box with a border, a picture of some trees and a line of superimposed text. Oy vey. But usually when you join these sites, the code is written for you. You start by creating a character, which means filling out a form about everything from their scarring (naturally) backstory to their preference in fizzy drinks. Then you pick a famous person to be their face, or ‘playby’, and post a few pictures. Then you start writing. You’re narrator for your character’s thoughts and actions, but nobody else’s, which means that an RP occupies a weird space between normal fiction and real life. You can make your character as likeable as you please, but you can’t actually make other people like them.

Naturally, the medium has its pitfalls. Quantity and frequency of posts tends to be favoured over quality. Because everyone on the site has a real life on the side, storylines never proceed in real time, which compresses everything weirdly; your characters could go from complete strangers to best friends or lovers over the course of one conversation.  Characters are dreamt up so quickly they’re usually flat as pancakes. Also, keep in mind that 95% of the people on these sites are teenaged girls. That means things often have this weird, emotionally repressed, immature sparkly quality to them – think of what your fantasies looked like when you were twelve.  Yeah, that. It also leads to a phenomenon I like to call attractiveness devaluation, whereby  everyone picks a superhumanly good-looking playby because a) they want their character to be the centre of attention, b) they want to look at a pretty picture when they write, and c) famous people are attractive. The result? Everybody’s gorgeous, so nobody is. They also all have names like Chad Hartfield and Kendall Brae that nobody in real life actually has.

Mind you, all that is the dark side of roleplaying, and there is a light side. The better websites, which are run by college students instead of middle-schoolers, have good writers, varied and well-thought-out characters, and better storylines. They also tend to shy away from the go-to Hollywood sparklies as playby choices, so something of the normal ugly-to-pretty-people ratio is maintained. The best site I was ever on was based on the premise of taking Disney animated characters and turning them into human teenagers who were realistic while still maintaining the core of their original character. Part of that process was finding a young playby who actually resembled the character facially:

See? It’s fun!

With like-minded people, you can have a shitton of fun on these sites, creating bizarre people, writing pithy dialogue and having escapades that, because you only control one person, often spiral off in directions nobody saw coming. I liked it because it was a good way to try out new characters and get a feel for writing them in real fiction. I also made a conscious effort to rebel against the ‘everyone is attractive’ thing. Some of the more peculiar people I’ve written:

-          A 6’6 motorbike-riding Quebecois historian who, despite a terrifying appearance and extensive collection of leather jackets, just wanted to make quiche and read Homer

-          The human version of Trixie from Toy Story 3 (see above), a socially anxious, boy-obsessed improv performer and D&D dungeonmaster

-          A massive douchebag

-          A Potterverse Slytherin who was unassuming and nice and asked questions like, “why don’t we ever learn math in school?”

-          A Darwin expy

-          Stephen Hawking’s personal assistant, post-zombie-apocalypse

-          Several characters from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in a Film Noir setting

-          An albino physical chemist/explosives and fireworks designer who turned from stoic badass to babbling child when he took off his sunglasses

-          Finally, my personal favourite, an obese teenaged boy with a secret talent for writing philosophical literature, whom I had all set up to be an embittered and brilliant outcast until he inexplicably got very popular and wound up dating an Olympic hopeful. I still don’t know how that one happened. Anyway, one of my fellow roleplayers summed him up as “Jewish Santa Clause – but with hidden depths.”

As for strange and unexpected scenarios, my characters have:

-          Blown up a major laboratory entirely by accident

-          Rigged up machines of Rube Goldberg –worthy complexity to cook latkes in the absence of electricity and a stove

-          Stowed away to Minsk

-          Broken a rib in a fist fight over leaves, of all things

-          Taken refuge from Zombies atop the racist Teddy Roosevelt statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History

Lookit the pretty cultural insensitivity.

-          Expected the Spanish Inquisition (actually)

-          Gotten stranded on a deserted island in a hurricane and stayed there for several weeks

-          Discovered and named the okapi (historical liberties, feh)

-          Given a monkey a shower

-          Gotten drunk on absinthe and staged a puppet show with their shoes

-          Been awarded the job title ‘official clockwork monstrosity designer’

-          Ruined Christmas

Yeahh. Before this gets too self-indulgent, I should add that I have now quit roleplaying. For good. Totally. I’m not going to find an interesting-looking site and start up again like I did all those other things. Because I’ve never spent so much time on something and had so spectacularly little to show for it. But damn, it was fun while it lasted.

… I worry that someday I’ll be writing another one of these on the subject of blogging, as a preface to a book that I’ll never finish. God, I hate my prophetic moments.

On Clement Weather

Canadians are like crack addicts about nice weather. You can’t really blame us. Our summers don’t hang around long enough for the novelty to wear off and our winters are the stuff of legend. That means we have to enjoy the little that we get to the absolute fullest or else take a vacation to somewhere warm, and I’m clearly far too Scottish for that (read: too cheap).  

The GTA has been graced with a week of lovely, clear, warm weather (after a startlingly mild winter that was the meteorological equivalent of Robarts Library – not actually unbearable, just massive, grey, mediocre and butt-ugly) and it has turned my quad into a public sockhop.

Look at it. I mean, really LOOK at it. It is a fucking CHICKEN. WHY?! Why would anyone be compelled to put books into a chicken? And don't give me any on that 'it is a regal peacock' shit, I know a book-chicken when I see one.

Every day about six of the common room couches, which feel a lot like church pews and invoke in me the same reaction of nonspecific guilt and shame, are dragged onto the grass by midmorning. By noon the guitars are out, there are at least three games of football going on, somebody is playing fetch with a large dog and/or small child, and there are several people in the sycamore tree beside my window.

A brief tangent: Sycamores are not common in Canada, to the point where I’d never seen one before I noticed the maples with the curiously mottled, impressionist-painting-esque green bark in Central Park on my first NYC trip. The really weird thing about sycamores, besides the bark, is that in late fall they produce hundreds what looks like a conker with an attitude problem:

These little dudes stay on the tree all winter, dangling alarmingly over your head but just far enough out of reach that you can’t get a good look at them. Sort of like the sword of Damocles, but fuzzier. So anyway, the nice weather and the people and stuff.

 There is a holiday feel to it, as if it’s already summer, and all of us dream of warm, humid afternoons outside, talking aimlessly, measuring time by nothing but the passage of the sun. The only shitty part is that it isn’t summer yet, and I still have hours of reading and a formal lab report to do before I even begin studying for exams. It’s cruel, I tell you. And nothing rubs salt in the wounds like watching other people enjoy it. I find myself sort of hoping the novelty will wear off soon and everyone will go away. And that’s… sad, somehow. I never really wanted to be one of those people who’d wish apathy on anyone. But hey, combine that with a BSc and I might make a good supervillain.



On He Who Must Not be Named

I’m not the only person who thought of this. Bit obvious, really. These are from this summer, but there will be new ones to come. C’mon, guys, it’s gonna be a thing.

Socially Awkward Voldemort



I know, I didn’t do the hug. It seemed unnecessary. But there will be more. Suggestions welcomed.

On St. Patrick's Day

Well, as google doodles was so good to remind us today, it is St. Patrick’s. I say that with a sort of an uneasy smile -the kind you make after a fart or racist joke that’s still funny- because I’m somewhat conflicted about this particular holiday.

Despite having the most Scottish name in the history of the planet, I am, in fact, at least half Irish, going back a couple of generations. I look Irish, the type that’s referred to in old songs as a nut-brown Colleen or Jenny (dark hair, pale skin, freckly as all fuck), and I’ve probably kept up with Irish culture better than your average Canadian. My friend even informs me I have a slight Irish accent, though he’s Italian, so what the hell does he know. So while I love the concept of a day for celebrating Irishness and a great party, I can’t help but find the way it’s celebrated in Canada… sort of crass. I mean, look.

If you’re actually, culturally Irish, none of this will be interesting at all. But if you’re not, or you’re very distanced from your roots, and you want to enjoy St. Patrick’s without turning into that guy, here is a little list of Irish things that are great without being so exaggeratedly ‘Irish’ as to turn into the parody above.

1.       Genuine, good Irish folk music:

Here, the emphasis is not so much on genuine as on good. There’s lots of terrible sappy stuff out there that, while perfectly genuine, manages to be crass anyway because it’s terrible. Here’s some of the good stuff:

(Technically, Van Morrison is an Ulsterman, and some of his other stuff is exactly the sap I was talking about earlier. This song works because he sounds so completely pissed. Seriously. He’s talking about the girl he loves and it sounds like he wants to haul off and punch someone in the face.)

2.       The Book of Kells:

You know today’s google doodle? This is where that comes from. It’s probably the finest illuminated manuscript in the world. Also called the Leabhar Cheanannais in original Galeic, it contains the beautifully decorated four Gospels of the New Testament in Latin, as well as several pages of illustration in much the same style, all in minute detail. It was produced in the Abbey of Kells, circa 6^th Century, primarily by the monk Lindisfarne, at a period where literacy was more or less only preserved (within the isles) in monasteries. Here is my favourite page, the chi rho:

If you like it, you’d probably enjoy the curiously areligious but otherwise pretty historically correct animated film The Secret of Kells. It’s animated in a style inspired by the book itself and features voices by some of the fellows I’ll mention below.

3.       Guinness:
Yes, you already know. This dark, bitter, beautifully smooth beer is by all reports horse piss compared to the Guinness they serve in Ireland, but compared to most Canadian beer it is sublime without being at all pretentious. Note: Guinness is a stout. It is meant to be drunk at room temperature.  Please do not dye it green.

4.       Liam Neeson:

You know him as the stepdad in Love Actually, the protagonist in Schindler’s List, the Jesus-Lion in Chronicles of Narnia, and probably some other stuff. He is a badass and a sweetheart, and also the most paternal creature in history. Here he is as Michael Collins, leader of the revolution that gave Ireland political freedom but also got pretty freaky at times.

5.       Brendan Gleeson:

Similarly a badass, though a bit less paternal. He doesn’t bother to tone down his accent as Mad Eye Moody.

6.       Cillian Murphy: One of Ireland’s many leading pretty-boys, and a frighteningly versatile actor. In The Way We Live Now you want to run off and build railroads with him. In Red Eye you want to get as far away from him as possible, even if it means a hasty exit from a plane at 10 000 ft.

7.       Cable-knit sweaters: Simple, stylish and cuddlier than an oxytocin junkie.

8.       The Irish accent: Truly, one of the finest and most pleasant accents, when not being feigned by a demonic little leprechaun.
9.       St. Patrick himself. Whether or not you feel a righteous glow at the thought of turning Pagans to the church, the dude converted a whole langely uncivilized island without one single martyrdom. That never happens. Awesome.

There are more, of course, but being only quasi-Irish, I shouldn’t harp on (heh. Harp.) for too long. I will leave you with a quote from Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True:

“[The gene] is called Mc1R, and one of its recessive forms, especially common in Irish populations,  produces freckles and red hair.”

(Becomes funnier if you recall the most common prefix in Irish last names).