felis_ultharus

Another miscellany, after a long absence.

Same-Sex Marriage Became Law in Canada 5 Years Ago Today

We should've listened to the religious right. Canada now resembles a Mad Max-esque wasteland, a landscape of broken shells of buildings, where horrific mutants scrounge for cans of food in the ruins of supermarkets.

In other words, it's not just Esquimalt anymore.

Oh, we saw the signs. As the zombies crept through the streets of Amsterdam, infecting the last survivors, we should have realized. When that meteor hit Brussels, we ought to have known. In the last days before we got it - just as Spain legalized and every Spanish citizen abruptly married a dog - we should have heeded the signs and turned back.

But we walked that path - the path that has made Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada synonymous with living hell on the lips of every person in the world. Even when dogs and cats began living together, we didn't heed the warnings. Now it's too late for us.

Trip West

It was a good vacation, if rushed. The miracle of Facebook means that I'm in contact with many friends long-lost.

Also, I'm back on good terms with a friend I posted about some time ago. I meant to post about that - sorry to anyone who was still worried about me there. But I've been 300 posts behind on LJ forever, and I try to read my friends page before posting myself.

I saw him every afternoon. That was wonderful, and we patched things up, but it meant I was juggling mornings and evenings all week to see others, and I couldn't get to Vancouver. It was nice to see old friends. But now I'm very, very tired. I had very little sleep. However, I am still on BC time, so sleep before midnight is so far impossible.

Oryx and Crake: The Video Game

So someone posted a request for people to respond to a short marketing survey. She's developing a concept for an Oryx and Crake video game - I don't know if she really wants to produce it or not, but even as an idea it's interesting.

At first, I wondered how many Margaret Atwood fans are also video gamers, and then I realized that that's half my friends-list. The survey is here.

So what do you think? RPG? Racing game? First-Person Shooter? It better not be a side-scroller, because this has the side-scrollers-based-on-Canadian-fiction category tied up for the year:

Happy Festival-of-Helios-meets-Saturnalia-meets-Germanic-Solstice-meets-observed-birthday-of-first-century-rabbi-Yoshua-bar-Yoseph. Hope the household nisse brought everyone lots of gifts.

The flooding is over, the pipes are fixed, and after we lost power in half the house yesterday, we have electricity back. My father says the next evil to visit us will be famine, but we have a fridge and cupboards full of food right now, and I think he's just thinking of the Four Horseman. We all got a cold/flu thing, so there's Pestilence.

My sister just called, and she and infinitecomplex won't be able to make it over for Christmas Day itself, but they're hoping for Boxing Day. Vancouver sounds like Caina right now, so I'm rethinking my trip out that way.

Still, it's been a nice, relaxing day. I haven't slacked off on my editing, and I should half done my own edit by the time I go home.

There's been so much chaos this year, though, it hasn't felt much like a vacation, and I think I'll need some time off when I get home to recover from this holiday.

It's been a quiet few days. All I've wanted to do is sleep, and I haven't done much besides sleep, read, edit, and see Sean. Yeasterday and today, I've gotten caught up on LJ, which is why half your inboxes are flooded.

I've finished Un Coeur découvert by Michel Tremblay since I got out, and I've nearly finished another novel, Skinny Legs and All.

( A review of Un Coeur découvert )

I guess the short of it was that it was a good novel overall, though flawed in many respects -- largely by the narrator's personality defects. I guess its lack of a real plot isn't a bad thing, as long as the reader's prepared for something more episodic than most novels.

So I made it successfully to Victoria, and I've been on the run most of the time I've been here,seeing old friends.

I've been writing in the mornings, and I'm sadly not as far into my major edit as I'd like (only 15% so far).

I haven't had time to read my friends' pages -- I will when I get back. Let me know if I've missed anything vital. I'm keeping up mostly on Facebook, as it's faster.

In the meantime -- so this is more interesting than just an update post -- some real news and fake news:

Real news: Gay Italian man has to retake driver's test for "sexual identity disturbance." Apparently, being gay makes you dangerous on the road. Who knew?

And this is why I love The Onion -- a perfect sense of irony. In this case it's being used to explode that loaded term in the American media of "values voters" (which they use to refer to homophobic, anti-abortionist, anti-woman evangelicals). Probably not work-safe, unless your workplace is really fun:

( video follows )

So for anyone who isn't aware, I'll be in BC from this Saturday to the Sunday of the following weekend. I might detour to Vancouver at some point, but I'll be staying mostly around Victoria area.

The last few days I've been mostly making preparations -- including a few shopping trips. I used the trip as an excuse to buy new clothes, which I've needed due to wear-and-tear, and because I've gone down several waist sizes this year. Maybe I'll be able to fit my kilt at Pride.

Other than that, I've been working heavily on my preliminary edit of the novel. I'm nearly 70% done. I want to finished -- and ready for the big edit -- by the time I go to BC.

This has been one of my better trips out here, mostly because I spent most of my waking hours with good friends.

I get back in Montreal on the red-eye flight, and get in some time after 7 am.

My current word count on my novel 20,088 -- not bad for 11 days of work, and I expect to get another 2000 words today. I was hoping for more, but there's only so much I can write in a day without my creative well running dry. I spent the last 24 hours excising one supernatural element -- it shall have to wait for a future novel -- and much of the last week better developing the other.

Neil Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors got better by the end. Murder Mysteries -- a pulp detective murder mystery set in heaven before the birth of the universe -- was very good, and the retelling of Snow White from the Queen's perspective (Snow, Glass, Apples) is quite possibly one of the most chilling stories written, and classic Gaiman.

And cats with captions are funny, but I can't find the really good site we were looking at on Christmas Day. This one is okay, though be warned some of the captions are not worksafe. In any case, I found the place where these are being created: cat_macros.

So I made it safely to British Columbia. We actually arrived early. Just before our descent, we passed through a tunnel created by a thick, piled-up cloud. It was beautiful.

(It's selfish of me, but I like being part of a generation that gets to see the clouds from above. Given the amount of fossil fuels planes use, and that no one even seems to be talking alternative energies for planes, we might be one of the last generations that gets to ride through a tunnel of cloud.)

I was nearly narcoleptic at dinner with the extended family yesterday (having woken up at 1 am, BC time). I crashed, and woke up at 2 am. I've been poring over the edited versions of my novel, as annotated by em_fish and montrealais. I'm actually kind of sad that I yanked the novel back from em_fish, because I'm actually enjoying her notes, and wish I had them for the rest of the novel.

I'm going to do a heavy rewrite, because of montrealais's larger criticisms about the integration of supernatural and ordinary elements. I'm no Neil Gaiman or Robertson Davies when it comes to balancing out two worlds, but maybe I can get better at that juggling act. In any event, my Otherworld needs heavy work.

So I guess my time in BC will be NaNiWri2Weeks :)

Spent yesterday with the Aries (Sam and node357). Today was spent with my Grandmother B*, Great Aunt Mouse, and Aunt Carole. I shall be leaving for the airport in about two and a half hours.

I didn't eat for 24 hours, and then I gorged myself on heavy food. As a result, I feel quite queasy. Thanks to my wild sleep schedule the last two weeks, I'm nodding off at strange times. That probably explains the splitting headache.

Otherwise, I'm coming down with something. 'Tis making it hard to write, and I have scarcely three pages.

Esquimalt in fog at night is very eerie, very scary, and strangely beautiful.

*The B, in case anyone is wondering, stands for Catherine. No I'm not joking. There's a story behind it, but I heard it as a very small child and can't remember.

Various things, before I forget everything in the festivities of Sol Invictus/Saturnalia/The-Thinly-Disguised-Birth-Of-Zoroaster called Christmas.

First of all, thank you again to jc2004 and snowdaemon for playing host. I apologize again for falling asleep at the party. No one was boring -- just a combination of Montreal time and an erratic sleep schedule lately.

I managed to finish my shopping at the zero hour, though I had to use my credit card for the first time for credit, rather than convenience. The only time I've ever borrowed against theoretical future sums has been my student loan.

In spite of always being on the go, I did manage 12 pages yesterday. I finished a major section today -- a background that is, unfortunately, better than the rest of the novel. Today is something comparable, though the mixture of editing and original writing makes it difficult to figure out how much.

( Vancouver Public Transit stuff, likely only of interest to Montrealais unless there are other transit geeks out there... )

And while we're on the subject of things likely only of interest to montrealais, I was mildly amused to discover that Mcloughlin Bay borders on the Hakai Recreation Area. Yes, I realize neither of those words are spelt the proper way, but I still thought it was funny.

In Vancouver. The trip out was good. I have to say that BC Ferries has the most interesting warning signs anywhere. I now know that it is "illegal to transport bees across the American borsder" (why bees -- there are no signs warning of the dangers of transporting anything else). I have also learned that the Ferry service urges us to "not store drums" in their parking lot.

Of course, these were the same people whose slogan was "Cruise the Straits with BC Ferries" until a gay employee tipped them off.

I'm in a tiny internet cafe on Davie Street. Already visited Little Sisters' at their new location, spoke with Janine Fuller for the first time in 10 years.

My favourite cafe in the West End, The Edge, has turned into a Priape of all things! And the Gay and Lesbian Community Centre has gotten rid of their couches and coffee machine, though there are still places to sit and talk. And they run so many community organizations out of that place -- dozens of them, including support groups and community organizations of every description.

Seeing Vancouver's "village" is wonderful, and I missed it a lot, but it depresses me all the same. Montreal has nothing like it. We have a lot of queer businesses, but they're almost all bars and saunas. We only just got a tiny bookstore back. You could fit six of those bookstores in Little Sisters'. What services there are mostly run through university groups.

The community here is vibrant and alive, and large as it is in Montreal, it always feels kind of dead. If a person doesn't like clubbing, the only thing left in Montreal are university social groups -- and nothing during the holidays, or summer. Vancouver, a smaller city, really has a community, and you can feel it when you're here.

And I haven't seen a single bar or sauna in all the time I've been walking around here on this rainbow-draped street. I'm not against things like that, but it often feels that's all Montreal has to offer, and it's not stuff I'm into.