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).

On Selling your Soul to the Devil

Ever since the soul has had market value, which is to say ever since we first decided we were special as a species, which is to say forever, people have been selling them. This goes way past the old Delta Blues meet-the-devil-at-the-crossroads-for-mean-guitar-pickin’ business:

“You traded your immortal soul for that?”
“Well, I wasn’t usin’ it.”

 It goes past Don Giovanni or even the original Faust.  Even in these highly secular times, the tradition of soul-peddling has not yet died out, but it has undergone one vital change in response to the modern economy, and that is to shift from being a small, private exchange to a large-scale business venture owned by, you guessed it, huge multinational corporations. And while the big suppliers can offer you several benefits, like imitation souls (very realistic- fools almost 80% of priests!), buy-backs at very low interest (Add just six years in Hell from every month until you’re paid back), Atheism insurance (Feel secure in your avowed disbelief. Collect up to $1 000 000 if it turns out there really is a God) and Holy-waterproof sealant (Call now and we’ll throw in your very own Voodoo Witch Doctor!), they aren’t always what they claim to be. You don’t know how many operatic heroes have made the mistake of not reading the fine print and gotten saddled with a contract they never should have agreed to.

 If you’re going into buying or selling souls as a career or as part of an investment plan, make sure you  have a trusted legal advisor on hand, preferably one with experience in the field. Lucifer’s rates are steep, but he offers free consultations and can usually handle multiple clients at a time, thanks to having three faces.

Sorry to rush lunch, fellas, but I'm meeting with a client in ten. BBM me!

If you’re looking in a lower price bracket, try the Serpent from the Garden of Eden. Not only are her rates very reasonable, but every customer gets a complimentary fruit basket. According to the Rabbinical tradition she also represents sexual desire, so don’t worry about accidentally showing up to your consultation stark naked – just be warned, the fees for her other services are quite a bit steeper than her legal fees. Careful of the fangs.

Finally, if money is really an issue, call Be’elzebub – his usual fee is one pig’s head on a stick per hour, but he accepts any type of rotting flesh you have handy, and the alarming buzzing tones of his voice are sure to intimidate your opponents.

Advisory: Under NO circumstances should you contact Be’elzebub if you are a wise and prophetic epileptic boy. You will die.

On the Watchmaker Argument

Today, William Paley made me late for English class.

That’s not as odd as it sounds, for anyone who’s wondering, “Why would Darwin’s major contemporary critic rise from the dead just to prevent you from going to class? Did you have to duel him? Was it for honour, or survival? Did he want to consume your ideology, or just your physical brain?” No, sorry, Paley would win. Besides, all good natural theologians have their bodies encased in concrete after death to prevent that precise eventuality. I mean, I assume they do.

What really happened was that my new chemistry prof, after an hour’s pleasant but uninspiring shpeil on why science is important, decided to ask a class of life sciences students to refute Paley’s Watchmaker argument. Bedlam Ensued.

My prof’s explanation was that religion and science don’t really intersect, and that it’s impossible to grasp either one from the perspective of the other. I’ve always viewed religion (Perhaps we should broaden that to ‘humanitarian and abstract philosophy’ or something. I'm turning out a pretty shit Agnostic.) as two sides of the same coin and both equally necessary, an old opinion originally applied to determinism vs. existentialism by Kant , I think (it’s always bloody Kant).  Anyway. The prof also expressed my main argument against the Watchmaker analogy, which naturally comes from Darwin – that what Paley called ‘Irreducible Complexity’ is only irreducible in retrospect.

Paley argued that the eye, like a watch, is too complex and too dependent on the orchestrated function of its many parts to have arisen in anything but its current form. But Paley didn’t consider that  simplistic versions of the eye could still have some function. Throughout the Animal Kingdom there are many modern examples of rudimentary ‘eyes’ that bear structural similarity to our own, even though they lack the sophistication of the human eye. Even watches began in inefficient mechanical forms that needed to be wound, before it was discovered that diamond or quartz could be carefully trimmed to vibrate at a set rate of cycles per second.  The ‘evolution’ of the watch isn’t quite analogous to Darwinian evolution, but we can see the same basic principle in action – useful adaptations to their design being preserved, problematic ones never being recreated. I can imagine a lot of dud watches that got scrapped because they did unhelpful things, like spontaneously implode, or things that weren't helpful after the mid-1970s, like contain hidden lasers and circular saws or unzip ladies' dresses or project an electromagnetic field that made the wearer appear human.

For the best and most elegant answer to Paley’s Watchmaker argument, take a look at what Darwin wrote on the subject. It couldn’t really be improved. Darwin doesn’t have all the evidence that has since been collected in his favour, but he doesn’t seem to need it. Darwin’s awesome like that. He was a genius not because of the complexity of his thinking – everything he said was really very simple – but because of its analytical and predictive power. Here was a man who looked at a species of bird in which the male was showier than the female and inferred not just that it had evolved that way, but that it had evolved that way because species was promiscuous, and, since female mating was limited while male mating was not, males had more to prove than the females. Here was a man who could look at these two flowers:

 and say, “Where’s the third? It should look like this:”

And that is just a tiny fragment of his revolutionary contribution to multiple fields. In short, a clever bastard. No wonder anyone from my department would jump him in an instant.

Not that I don’t respect Paley. He put into words (good words, too) the big problem that so many Creationists had, and still have, with Evolution. But logically, it didn’t stand the test of time, and it stuns me that Paley’s perspective is still so widely shared in the face of overwhelming evidence.

I also don’t mean to tell anybody what to think, though I make my own opinion pretty obvious in the header – only to think it in informed terms. I’ve yet to meet an outspoken Creationist I could respect intellectually, because none of them, if asked, could actually explain to me what the theory of Evolution was. I blame this not so much on xenophobic thinking as commonplace scientific illiteracy – it’s understandable to reject what you don’t understand. But ignorance is not a justification. I’d love to meet a Creationist who has studied Evolution thoroughly, grasps its point, and still does not accept it. Then, we would have a great deal to talk about.

Whatever you think, think it for a reason.

All credit to Spencer Barrett for the images of tristyly in Water Hyacinths, for explaining to us what the deuce it's all about, and for finding that missing one that Darwin predicted in a swamp in Brazil after decades of search. Read more here if you're interested.



On the Seasons

Today it is beautiful out and I can't conscience spending more than a little time in front of a computer screen, so I leave you with a poem in celebration of winter finally buggering off.

August, six o’clock

We used to go in there when it was halfway down to dark

To find our wooden paddles standing crossed against the door

Put up our palms and hook them by the ladder’s highest rung

And kick our barefoot questions into trailings on the floor

Our hands laid flat to carousel the kayak’s yellow arc

On brackish sands and flotsam of a thick swamp-magic shore

Let emptiness speak mutters in its own elusive tongue

Dove into moveless mirrors for a thousand days and more



On Apartments

Becoming an adult is sort of like abortive RNA Polymerase initiation (Yes, I’ve had a good think, and those are indeed the words I want to begin my blog with). It stops, it starts again, it sputters backward and gets things wrong and one day I expect it’ll hurl me forward into grownuphood proper, just when I least expect it. Also, it's often kick-started by the process of kissing, and that's the nerdiest joke I'm allowed all month.

When I left home for University I moved into residence, which really just meant I swapped fixing my own lunches for doing my own laundry. I no longer need to be chauffeured around because I live within spitting distance of everything important.

I’ve always thought independence started for real when you got your own apartment. Maybe when I actually get one I’ll be certain it’s when you own a house, but that’s not the point. I wanted to get an apartment by second year. But I’ve always been terrible at organizing these things and even worse at asking people awkward questions like ‘HEY DO YOU WANT TO LIVE WITH MEE’. And there are a lot of people who I like but couldn’t live with. I was sure I’d lose the roommate lottery and unsure where to begin looking, so I resigned myself to another twelvemonth in residence eating rubbery caf eggs and putting towels under my door to block out the sounds of drunken 3.00 AM conversations:

Thing 1: Dude, where's your shirt?
Thing 2: My shirt... oh, right, I had one of those. I, I, I think I left it at somewhere. The pizza place.
Thing 1: You got pizza without me?
Thing 2: I dunno, man. you weren't there. You know? You weren't there. When I needed you. For pizza.

Enter M, a friend and housemate of mine. She’s one of those quietly, understatedly hilarious people who say witty things in such a throwaway manner that you almost miss them. She had only just convinced me I had to watch BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ – which subsequently became my life, but I’ll talk about that another time – and we got onto the topic of housing plans for next year, both of us probably wishing subconsciously we had a Mike Stamford around. She was considering an apartment but didn’t know who she’d share with. And we both sort of came to the same conclusion at the same moment.

Huge relief.

We’re looking at a handful of places within walking distance of our school now. One of them has a pool. My mother, who was against me getting an apartment in second year because I’m her youngest and the moment I get an apartment she doesn’t have kids anymore (and, you know, actual concern for my wellbeing, but good parenting has never been fun to read about), heard about the pool and went ‘Oh, well then go for it!’, but I can’t help thinking that if I’m a second-year undergrad student at one of the two best universities in Canada, with good health and great friends and a bloody pool in my building, karma is eventually going to open up a hole in the crust of the earth and drag me all the way to Detroit.  I might go for the pool anyway.

The plan is to nickname the apartment ‘221B Baker Street’, no matter what the actual address is. ‘Baker Street’ or just ‘Sherlock’ for short. There probably won’t be bullet holes in the wall (although given our area of study there could well be experiments in the fridge). I’m hoping my dad will make us whatever furniture we don’t acquire through the Niflheimr, er, I mean Ikea - My dad is an erudite and delightfully professorial fellow half the time and an insane hermitic woodsman the other half. Whenever he’s not lecturing me about ancient Rome he’s in his workroom cutting up bits of wood and yelling along to loud classic rock. At some point soon I’ll recount my dad’s Adventures in the Canadian North. He is the best dad.

Anyway, the apartment. I’ve had plenty of time to build up an impressive poster collection and I know both of us have lots of books. Homes without books are not really homes; they are like a cell without a genome, dry and sterile and too tidy by half. For the brief period when we were looking for a prospective third roommate, I had the half-joking idea that we could set up a Passive-Aggressive Board, on which to write our grievances. Here is what it might look like:

The only problem with the passive-aggressive board is that eventually it would degenerate into a bunch of badly-drawn trollfaces and I would spend too much time drawing trollfaces to actually deal with any of the complaints on it, so this might bear some rethinking. Today I will be calling landlords and asking them how they feel about having trollfaces tattooed into their walls with bullets, because it’s always a good thing to make sure your landlord know what’s a joke and what isn’t.