Though I procrastinated terribly throughout June, I managed to sublet the apartment and move into a long-running house nearby. I have a new address, anyone sending me mail should get it from me. The beloved home in Montréal spoiled me, didn’t want to live alone anymore, and paying $450 less a month helps!


Today I witnessed a precious/tragic moment with a friend after experimenting with exploiting glitches in Home, Sony’s bizarre Second Life-y PlayStation sandbox. Someone with the username “mormylove” spoke to her avatar. After we discovered his 19-year-old Utah-ianity, it quickly turned hetero, as seems common for her. Presented with commentary removed:

him question?

her g’head (paraphrased)

him is sex really as good as they say it is?

I’ve extracted what I believe to be an example of “aboot” from Degrassi Junior High.



I’m pretty sure I don’t say it the way Caitlin does the first time. Isn’t it weird how it changes every time it’s said? I don’t understand enough about linguistics/IPA to decipher this article. Sound samples would go a long way.

I uploaded some photos, not all that exciting. This one is of me soldering a radio antenna. The last adventure I planned in Montréal involved a radio transmitter. I’d never soldered before, but I figured it out and felt good about it.

There were requests for the photos I took of Michigan Central Station, they are here. I didn’t mind climbing that incredibly-tall ladder, but after taking photos from the roof, I found a staircase down, heh.

Here is my tragic Flickr story. I made a donation toward the development of the Game Neverending and got to play the closed beta. I loved the game and community. Flickr quickly outgrew the game and development was shut down. Everyone who had donated was offered a Flickr Pro account. Bitter about the game ending, I said it was useless to me, since I didn’t have a camera. They said that if I ever got one, they’d give me a pro account.


I should have taken it then, obviously. Flickr was bought by Yahoo and I doubt very much they’ll give me one now. I’ve sent an inquiring email, but I’m not optimistic. I’m more likely than I used to be to use existing tools instead of making my own, but I don’t like having to pay for something I know I could set up reasonably well. U$25 isn’t that much, but my current income is nil.

I will be back in Winnipeg soon, but without a bike. Does anyone have one they could lend me until I construct one from what I salvage from the touring one? It would be a great help to plan my next event.

I feel weird about the nuances of this, but I don’t think I can let it go unnoted in this space.

On Friday, I got an email from a reporter that “one of the officers [I] quote on [my] blog” was charged regarding a shooting that happened in 2007. I immediately assumed it was my nemesis Kevin Smith, but it turns out to be Kris Overwater, whose hilarious pronouncement marked the beginning of my court writings.

The reporter must have Googled the names of the officers and found the commentary. Giving disgraceful police a web presence was one of the side benefit of the effort, so it’s neat to see it play out thus. Perhaps they would have found out anyway, but this made it easier. The media connexion between attempted murderer Selley and evidence falsifier Overwater’s actions at the May 2006 Critical Mass and the 2007 shooting and coverup hasn’t made much sense, but it’s still somewhat pleasing to have the extreme fallibility of the police given a high profile.

Speculation is rampant regarding what implications this might have for the Critical Mass trial. It’s been nearly five months since I was back in Winnipeg for court and there’s no trace of a verdict, whoa. Did the police and/or crown know during season two that Selley and Overwater had fabricated evidence? Surely it’s an isolated incident and not routine behaviour on the part of officers! Certainly they would never, say, conference after a mass arrest and decide what story to enter in their notes.

What do people like John Barr and Krista Piché think when they hear about things like this? I don’t expect we’ll ever find out.


In other news, my charge of presence at an unlawful gathering in St. Paul was dropped. Yay! Now when I cross the border, can I pretend I was never arrested? HMM. I have significant notes about events preceding the arrest that I could share, but it all seems so remote to me now. Really, we were having a fairly routine anti-war demonstration, I have no idea why I was arrested. At least now I know what compression grenades look/sound/feel like and will be more aware of being corralled.

And thus I return to a life of crime.

Today I did a lot of thought labour to figure out how to organise my next event, tentatively May 9. It will be bike-y and map-y. In Winnipeg, I have access to map data and applications I’ve written to use it, here I will have to use different sources. Open Street Map might suffice, but I was searching for other possibilities and found this McGill page. The coincidence is the map they give as example:



That’s almost exactly where I default centred the map application I worked on for years!

One of my primary failings when it comes to the events I plan is documentation and promotion. I’ve put up a page describing Surréal 3000 so people can look back and have an idea of what these events are like.

This photo was taken the day of as I tagged along with one of the teams traversing the Métro. You can see the neato UV flashlight I got at the Museum of Science and Technology sticking out of my pocket, part of my super toolkit.

People seemed quite into the event. Using UV flashlights to reveal secret messages is exciting. One thing I love about the time after events is seeing the traces of them last into the future. I probably won’t get a Métro pass next month, though, sadly.

I hope to plan one more event before my trip back west, maybe the week before the Anarchist Bookfair. I have a core thing to organise it around but no mechanism for it to work, and that deadline is soon!

Thanks for the advice on the last post. Reinstalling Windows turned out to be a huge pain, I couldn’t get the computer to boot off a CD and after that had none of the drivers necessary, blah blah. Really not my area of expertise, but I muddled through.

Many people I know here are suffering through spyware/virus/trojan horse infestation. Though I am not fond of Windows support, I’m less fond of sending them to places that charge the big bucks.

I have a copy of Windows XP so I can format a friend’s drive and reinstall, but what do all y’all use to prevent these things? I realise the wisest course is to avoid sketchy activities that tend to bring such things about, but people don’t understand about that. Also, I’ll have to scan the files we’re preserving, anyway.

photo from The Link by Ion Etxebarria

On Sunday I attended a demonstration for the International Day Against Police Brutality. It’s odd to have a scheduled riot, a yearly smashing of things. 221 people were arrested, but my group left before most of that, when they started firing rubber bullets. I’ve talked to many people to hear their experiences and have a better understanding of it now. Someone I know was searched twice, roughly pushed against walls, while walking toward the meeting point; illegal, but since when has that stopped them?

There were some intense moments for me when I had flashbacks to St. Paul (compression grenades, riot gear), but it was mostly excellent, even romantic! Something I found fascinating was the intra-demonstration debate over tactics: occasional booing, choruses to speed up or slow down, the undoing of the work of others, an overheard “save your rocks for the pigs” (en français). Not much time for reasoned dialogue.

Another thing I’ve been up to is letter writing. I enjoy it! The first thing I drew in this new era was a copy of this comic that I saw and loved in a friend’s bathroom to include in a letter. The attempt was hilarious at times, but ultimately fulfilling.

Maybe the comic is a bit too smug? I still like it. The “what do you do” question has been an interesting one during my time here. I notice people at least often add a “Answer that however you like” disclaimer.


Things I have attempted and am still struggling with:
Dogs. I’ve long been a dog-hater, but it seemed right to try to let it go in close proximity to one. It was okay for a while, but the dog has taken to lunging at the booties I wear to keep my feet warm in our cold building. It is terrifying and knowing fear worsens the reaction doesn’t help at all!

Prescriptivism. Yes, though I’ve realised my tenacious hold on spelling, grammar, syntax, and so on is problematic, I’m still deep into it.

I feel like I always write similar things after an event. It went off nearly flawlessly and people told me they had a great time. Security at the outset wasn’t too thrilled to have us there but were placated when told that we would leave soon. Some participants told me excellent stories of their exploits, hearing such things is one of my favourite parts of event planning. It’s traditional for me to feel a bit deflated after it’s all done, and I do.

The rendezvousssss featured an exchange of beverages as a small ice-breaker. I made glögg, it was well-reviewed.

The climax of the event was a dance party in an under-construction office on the second-to-top floor of a downtown building. It was a delight. The self-identified project manager (presumably of the construction) made an appearance with a hard-to-read facial expression that might have been “bemused”.

I have two photos of the dance party but it feels improper to post them, sorry. Ask me and I’ll show you in person some time.

I’m wearing jeans for the first time in probably over ten years. They disrupt my pocketing system!

It feels good to be back into planning an event. I haven’t worked on anything in so long, a combination of being busy and perhaps trepidation considering the technical failure that ruined the first attempt at Clandestine Rendezvous.

Today I hid out in the warm basement of a university building and worked on the back end into the night, briefly interrupted by a massive congregation of debaters? I slipped in alongside them for some pizza, SCANDAL. I got a lot done and have ensured the bug won’t be repeated, though who knows about the other dangers. Certainly it’s a lot easier to execute without working full time.

As is common, I’m unable to sleep, mind wandering all about what I still have to do. Also unsurprising is that I’m thinking a lot about the event after this; I need to focus on what’s immediately ahead but I’m always mentally jumping around.

A quick teaser for an event likely to happen in March, with the tentative title Surréal 3000, after a book I enjoyed in junior high that I will hopefully not hate when I can finally read it after this event is over. (Note: I do stereograms in the “cross-eyed” rather than “wall-eyed” way, but I will learn to make them work either way.)

I’m excited to get back to Winnipeg with new ideas.

I’m working on an event but I’ll pause to note one of those minute details that makes things just a bit easier. MacOS X 10.5, not sure when this was introduced. I decided I was going to use French word order for Métro stations, so I went back to edit what I’d entered as “McGill Métro”. I double-clicked “Métro”, cut, noticed that it had also grabbed the space, moved to the end of the field, and pasted and it added the space at the end. Maybe there’s a situation where this wouldn’t make sense? But I love it.

I have misplaced the notes I took during season two, so this’ll have to tide you over. It was a particularly memorable scene, so I don’t need the notes.

During the direct testimony of one of the accused, crown attorney John Barr interrupted, working himself into a sputtering rage. He had become convinced that someone in the gallery was making a drawring of him and demanded that the artist be ejected from the room and the sketch be confiscated.

He expressed his fear that he didn’t want any pictures of him “on any webs”, presumably referring to the web from which you read these words? Barr had shown in season one that junior crown Piché was comparatively the technical wizard of the team (despite managing to cumulatively waste an hour repeatedly failing to operate a DVD player) and this bizarre expression only served to further his appearance of having fallen behind the times. (Not that I blame him, I consider falling behind the times a lot, lately.)

The artist immediately put the drawring away, not wishing to be ejected from the courtroom. This did not satisfy Barr, who was determined to get his way. He fairly pleaded with the judge to have the drawring taken from the artist. The judge was respectful but explained that such a thing was beyond the purview of the court. He asked for the opinion of the prime defense lawyer, who stood briefly and said “’s a free country” to barely-suppressed laughter.

It was pleasing to have the sketch free for future nefarious uses, but I was disappointed that the incident took place at all. Isn’t there a precedent for allowing in-court sketches? Why was it stopped? Barr claimed to be unnerved by it, does it mean a witness being sketched can put a stop to a representation of them being used as an OTS on the evening news?

The “victory” of keeping the drawring masks the greater loss of the freedoms traditionally afforded observers, something akin to the Overton window, though I’m sure there’s a better term out there. And yes, this is certainly a first-world problem.

One of the defense lawyers cautioned me outside the courtroom, I guess there have been some flare-ups regarding these posts? It’s unfortunate I didn’t hear more, as I don’t know what if any rules I’m violating.


Humourous references to “the Internets” have since fallen sharply in favour of the newly-discovered webs.

Even more mysterious than the boot benefactors is the origin of this felt beard I got in the mail today. Anyone want to step forward?

Our building is in terrible shape. Last weekend a temperature peak in the freeze/thaw cycle resulted in water pouring from a roommate’s ceiling! I took a video.



I’ve seen it rain indoors once before, but it’s a new experience to have it at home.

Perhaps we can stimulate the economy at the same time!