frandroid

Chester Brown’s Paying For It, his autobiographical account of being a john, is a bit of a Canadian comics classic, and I had wanted to read it for a while. Sook-Yin Lee (former VJ, eclectic Canadian artist/personality), who was his girlfriend at the beginning of the book and has remained an indefatigable supporter, decided to bring the comic to the screen. The film came out this spring, and I wanted to read the comic before seeing it. Finally it came through the holds queue recently.

( it's long, sorry )

Oh yeah and I think I forgot to write, regarding romantic relationships, that Brown doesn't address polyamory at all. Not surprising, but his thing about marriage being a liberty-infringing contract is blown up by ENM. Anyway...

What is something that's bothering you right now?

My exploding relationship. My massive ADHD.

What was the last sporting event you attended?

I think it was a Marlies game (the Leafs' AHL farm team) at Ricoh Coliseum, before the pandemic. I used to go on my own, get smashed on a couple pitcher-sized beers and enjoy the cheap hockey and the family-friendly atmosphere. If you went to a weeknight game and they won, they gave free tickets for a later game, and sometimes I was able to snag more than 1.

Do you enjoy staying at hotels?

Sure? I liked stayed in rooms in people's AirBnB homes. You got to meet a local who could tell you a bit about the place, or something. But then we got into a few rooms where the whole house was AirBnB'd, and F started wanting more privacy. She always needed a lot of privacy.

What was in the last package you got?

Zines. I'm low on zines and I've been rushing to re-stock on some stuff for the fall tabling season.

Who is/was your favorite animated character?

I can't think of clear favourite one. I remember liking Albator, known in English as Captain Harlock, but I think I liked the show's æsthetic more than anything else. They came out with a film a few years ago that I didn't watch. Maybe I'll get to watch that now.

If you could move out of your home country permanently, would you?

Moving to English Canada has always felt like moving to a different country. So I feel like I have. I could see myself move to a West European country for a lover, or to the United States for a job. I know a number of developer friends who took jobs in the Valley. But it's not something I'm seeking out. If anything, I might move back to Québec one day. The likelihood of that is going up.

Do you play the lottery?

F was dreaming of winnign a jackpot so we started buying tickets. I would sometimes bring her tickets home as a small gift. Myself, I'm in the "it's for people bad at math" category. But then again, some relatives won a big jackpot recently, so who the fuck knows. These relatives won their share of a jackpot in a purchasing group, which seems like a much smarter way of buying tickets. It doesn't seem to be a thing here, whereas in Québec tons of convenience stores manage purchasing groups.

Do you shut off the water while you brush your teeth?

Of course.

What was the last good news you received?

Getting hired for this current job was pretty cool. I might also make a big move in my life soon, it feels imminent.

Are there any projects or goals you've recently abandoned?

Repairing a relationship.

What are your top five books?

I used to read voraciously but the internet ate my brain. I don't really have favourites at this point, just some books I've enjoyed more. I used to mention Dune here but I've re-read it last year it left me wanting. Actually God-Emperor was my favourite book of the series, and that one I've only read once, though it's pretty seared in my mind. Maybe I should finish reading the series a second time. I'm curious to know whether I would enjoy Dune: Messiah more because it was really meant to be Dune's part II, and was also more philosophical, like God-Emperor.

Would you ever sky dive?

My mom did it at age 55. It was a life-long dream of hers so we bought a tandem-jump for her birthday. I'm afraid of heights but it's a balance thing, so once off the ground I guess I'd be fine.

If you could "install" three complete languages in your brain what would you choose?

Spanish or Italian. I feel lots of closeness to these languages for obvious reasons; one of these two would suffice. Turkish or Kurmanji, though these days I'm feeling like walking away from the Kurdish freedom movement, or at least the Toronto component of it. (Turkish because that's the true language of the PKK, or Kurmanji if I felt more like working on the cultural side of things.) I would have said Gujarati in the past (maybe even Hindi!) but my interest in that is now gone. Arabic.

What holiday is your birthday closest to?

Christmas. Between those two, F's birthday.

Do you use a wall calendar?

I looked at the calendar on my office wall last week, an art calendar provided by an indigenous education organization I donate to, and noticed that it was from September 2022. I took it down. I like the idea of wall calendars but that age is over.

First foreign vacation?

I don't know if the USA counts as foreign too much, and my first couple trips to the U.S. were more like gatherings with BBS folks. Ah! I went to France in October 2001, right after September 11. That was really weird.

Actually, now I remember that we went to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, when I was 6 or something. Back then we didn't speak English so that felt foreign enough, though the beach was like, half Québecois.

Do you watch any anime?

There's some hentai I find amusing but I don't seek it out. Akira remains a classic for me, Ghost in the Shell, Murakami... I think that's it. Well, when we were kids there were a number of French-Japanese animation co-produced TV series, I watched a number of these back then. There was a Three Musketeers one where the characters were all dogs, and my first contact with Treasure Island was with a French/Japanese coproduction as well. I watched the hell out of that one. The Cities of Gold, that was also a huge mainstay. (I cringe, wondering how racist/colonial that might have been? Even with a main Maya character...)

Do you prefer to keep a clean workspace or are you somewhat messy?

It's a horrible mess. Yesterday a plumber was here to fix my leaking toilet, he realized that the toilet's water valve was leaking a bit too, so I had to shut down the apartment's east-wide valve, which is in my office. Not only was it behind my bookshelf, but I had a file cabinet in front of the bookshelf, and a whole ton of crap in front of it. I think it took me 25 minutes to make space. And it was dusty, so dusty.

I might have to take all of this away soon.

What portion of your day is typically spent outdoors?

Almost none. Now that it's raining more and gardening is over, possibly less. But I'm turning into a zeppelin so I need to go out more. I need to buy a bike. I miss riding my bike.

Did you get an allowance as a child?

I *sometimes* got $5 for mowing the lawn, but rarely. I sometimes got paid for splitting and cording wood for my dad in spring, though I actually enjoyed the workout and was willing to do it for free. My parents preferred to watch me search through garbage bins at the gas station across the street to fish out cans and bottles with a return deposit. (In Québec, aluminium and glass pop containers have a return deposit so there's a lot more of them than just the alcohol containers). It was a busy gas station so during the heavy summer vacation days I could make $20, $30 bucks for an hour of work once or twice a day, which is worth about twice that much now. I think it was very cheap of them not to give me a basic allowance instead; I think with just $5 a week I would not have bothered with the garbage. My father was making good money working under the table at night on top of his daytime union job. I remember asking my parents if we were poor, because my father was so tight with money. We were not poor.

What are you currently reading?

Continuing to read Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands.

( CW: Starvation, Genocide, not that I really have to explain it... )

What have you finished reading:
12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson.
Well, I'm finished with it because the library threatened to fine me charge me $20 for "losing" the book. So much for "we don't fine users for lateness anymore." It wasn't sustainable but they should have just kept the old lateness system.

What are you reading:
Build: An unorthodox guide to making things worth making by Tony Fadell.
I'm a big sucker for startup dudes' stories. I can listen to Steve Jobs for hours, though I'm not really a Youtube person so I don't. Anyway, I listened to that dude's interview on the a16z podcast recently and he seemed interesting, and he's the guy behind the iPod, the iPhone and the Nest, so I thought I'd get his book.

I'm just into the second of six sections, but what strikes me here is that by the time he got to the iPhone, he had tried to make a portable computing device 3 or 4 times before since the early 1990s. This really contrasts with most other accounts of the iPod/iPhone, which are very much "we took one look at the market and figured out how to make it better".

This is much more a collection of advice for people who want to accomplish great things in their life. It's anchored in the tech/VC world, but it seems like a good general life/work advice book. The chapter I just finished was titled "Assholes", i.e. how to deal with them at work. (That advice was not particularly insightful, though decent.)

Anyway, so far it's reminding me to focus on what I want to do, and to deliver on what I need to do. Both things I struggle with.

What are you reading:

The Ruby Way: Third Edition

Started to read this. I should be further along. On the other hand, it looks like I won't be doing Rails anymore soon (yay) but I'm still determined to read this book.

What have you finished reading?

Rojava: Revolution, War and the Future of Syria's Kurds by Thomas Schmidinger

Started that one a while ago and then just let it sit... It's a bit dated now but it's a great political and anthropological look at the nascent Rojava project. There is a lot that has been written about the Kurdish struggle in Turkey but fairly little in Syria. It's focused on the recent times so there isn't too much about the 20-odd years the PKK was based there, since I guess that wasn't internal politics per se, but the PKK's historical presence is definitely at the root of local organizing, whether affiliated with it now or not. There's a fair bit of history of various parties and factions, in the traditional Kurdish alphabet soup way. One thing that's great is that the final chapter of the book, which is actually over a third of the volume, is made up of tightly edited interviews with various players of all factions. There Schmidinger shines, challenging interviewees and making them reveal more of their mindset than the platitudes they thought they'd be regurgitating.

A Short History History of the Blockade by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

That was interesting, but I think I'm a little too cartesian to really dig it.

What are you currently reading?

Learn Ruby the Hard Way, which is actually way too easy, but was just at the right level to review on the beach.

What are you throwing out?

I went to put the Rojava book on one of my politics shelves and it was packed. I'm kind of running out of shelf space, so I took a look, took out Uncle Sam and Us by Stephen Clarkson and put it on the "get rid of this" pile in the dining room. His thesis was that international agreements like NAFTA, the WTO and others eroded national sovereignty and form a kind of supranational constitutional order. I don't think that subsequent history held that up as much as he'd proposed.

What are you currently reading: A Michael Crichton novel, Pirate Latitudes. I know, I know. The recommendation came through a commenter on the Straight Black Sails group, too, which should have been warning enough. It contains many of the bad sexist/racist tropes you expect from pirate novels, though not many references to slavery or black people in general, I think? One character has a name, but keeps being referred to as "The Jew". This was published in 2010, not 1974... Also, the novel is realist for about 2/3rds of the way, but because Crichton got even lazier in his writing, at that point a pentagram is drawn to calm down a hurricane, and then afterwards our pirate crew meets a kraken. It would have been basic writing to link the two events (i.e. invoke the devil, face a creature from beneath) but that connection isn't even made. Also, most of the killing happens not in valiant sword combat, but when people are drunken/ly asleep, because our pirates are always attacking places with much larger crews/garrisons than pirates on hand. So crafty! The one good thing I got out of this book is an explanation of what breeching a cannon entails. There's a bit of decent naval combat writing but in the end everything is mostly about our good Captain and his smart associates thinking of engineering solutions from a century ahead to resolve their present-day problems.

Speaking of Black Sails, I'm now at Season 4 of my re-watch, along with the Fathoms Deep podcast, and it's A Lot of Podcast. The podcast started after S3 was out, so the main host had watched the show a million times and was able to provide lots of guidance on details and make lots of in-depth connections as they were going through the episodes from S1 thru S3. For S4, they put out the podcast as the episodes were coming out, so there's less in-depth analysis, and more first impressions. One part I'm enjoying is listening to their speculation on what's going to happen in future episodes. One other thing that's interesting is that the podcast got more popular and at that point they were able to get some cast (including Toby Schmitz, sabotabby !), writers and directors on the show. (They're seriously fangirling over the actors, which is a bit annoying as a listener...) They even got one of the showrunners to come in for an interview. Looking forward to more interviews once they've finished the series so they can comment on everything without spoiling the future.

*** ETA: It turns out that this novel was found in Crichton's papers after his death. So even he had recognized that it wasn't that good, but obviously his estate only saw dollar signs. :P

F. was very excited today because she has found out that her book has made it into a whole slew of academic libraries. While looking for the most impressive library it has made its way to, I have found this great book locator; simply put, it shows you on a library map where exactly the book is in the library. Pretty cool stuff.

I've started reading Thomas Homer-Dixon's The Ingenuity Gap on the train back to Toronto and it's fucking boring. It's got lots of interesting tidbits, but other than saying that we may not be smart enough to solve global warming, ecological stress and overpopulation catalclysms facing us, it's not really delivering any original ideas. I'll keep going at it because there are lots of interesting tidbits of information (for example: 60% of newborns in India are in such poor condition at birth due to malnutrition, poverty, etc that they would be admitted to intensive care, were they born in California) but it's kinda useless so far.