Smiles, Sailing and Steam Sales

The word of the week is superb.

June 8 – Freer 

My Mondays have freed up again, thanks to Starbucks, oddly.

Last week's writing group meeting at the Chapters location downtown was a success, meaning that the group will be switching our meetings to Thursday nights from this point on. It’s a great relief to know that we’ve been welcome with open arms by the management at Chapters and Starbucks( especially after the Tectoria fiasco from earlier this year )and we’re looking forward to many more meetings set in the comforting locale of Chapter’s book-lined upper mezzanine.

On a personal note, I’m spending more and more time now with my date, who from this point on I’m going to refer to as ‘my lady’ for lack of a more accurate term, at least that I’m aware of. I’m far from being an expert when it comes to dating, as these things go, but we’re seeing enough of each other on a regular basis that the term ‘dating’ seems to pale a little. Calling her my 'date' seems too… casual? I don’t know; like I said, I’m no expert.

What I do know is that I’m happier( and thus far less stressed )than I’ve been in many, many years. Possibly decades. All this from being who I am now, without compromising who I was before… it boggles the mind, in a way, but it shouldn’t: I made it here, to today.

I’m just me, and someone I like also likes me for that. A lot. Cue happy.

June 9 – It’s Time!

Guess what arrived in the mail today?

My new colour smartwatch: the Pebble Time!

It’s the upgrade from the monochrome Pebble watch I purchased from a friend last year, one of the most versatile and useful tech gadgets I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. From checking notifications to playing music to keeping tabs on the weather, the Pebble watch does it all.

The new Pebble Time does all that plus much more – all in colour, no less!

It’s no mean feat, either: colour e-ink displays aren’t common right now and the Pebble Time’s use of this low-power display means its battery can last an incredible 7 days on average. That’s seven times longer than the Apple Smartwatch or the Moto 360, both of which also cost significantly more.

I’ll skip ahead to my first impressions from using the watch all this week. In fact, I haven’t taken it off since I got it, as Pebble watches are completely waterproof! It’s been a revelation to have the device strapped to my wrist 24/7 and apart from the occasional removal for cleaning or such, having instant access to info without needing to use my phone or PC has been quite freeing.

The Pebble Time is much more powerful than the first Pebble( naturally )so there’s far more flexibility in terms of how many Pebble Apps can be loaded on the phone, not to mention the speed of selecting items and the sheer ease of use in getting to the info you want. Plus, it just looks good, with customizable watchfaces like TreK V3 which gives me weather and battery info both.

Really, the only thing that's not quite up to my expectations is the visibility of the display indoors. As other Pebble Time users have noted, the display is hard to read in dim lighting as it uses trans-reflective technology which performs brilliantly outside in the sunlight but isn't so great when local ambient light is lacking. This can be easily remedied with a few software tweaks, which hopefully will happen in the next month or two to allow better control of the backlight.

Overall I'm incredibly pleased with my Pebble Time: it's everything I need in a smart watch without any excessively bloated features that I won't use.

Plus: Night Sailing!

My lady and I went out for a few hours at dusk to sail the Haulin’ Trawler on the yacht pond, mosquitoes be damned. We’d rigged up the boat with a couple more lights than it came with: one to illuminate the deck and the other to light the way across the water. I think it turned out great:

That's a 1.5-ft model, isn't she a beauty?

June 10 – Choose the Nerdiest!

Which is nerdier: Star Wars or Star Trek?

While I’ve never really wondered about it myself, other people obviously have… and in numbers enough that there’s now a hilarious animated video about it:

I love this kind of thing, if only because it takes a lot of dedicated work and skill to create an animate video like this one. I also appreciate the small touches in the video, like Riker’s antics in the background which serve to lighten up the debate… and are also quite in character, too.

G33ks and nerds: strange bedfellows, but we’re all passionate about similar things.

June 11 – ReBoot!

I can’t believe that it’s happening, at last!

One of my all-time favorite shows, ReBoot, is returning to the small screen in 2016. For those of you not familiar with the show, it was the first computer animated television show ever made and was created right here in Canada in Vancouver by MainFrame( now Rainmaker )Studios.

ReBoot posited the question: What would life be like inside a computer system?

The result was a gorgeous CGI-animated show that for the first two seasons was fairly mainstream kids fare: fun to watch, with lively characters and bright colours made of sharp-looking pixels.

The third season however was something entirely new and far, far more interesting. The Hero’s Journey was prominent in the show's plot as it followed a ragtag group of comrades trying to get themselves home to save their friends and possibly the entire global computer network in the process. It was a stunning achievement and it's still fantastic to watch to this day.

The new series( Called ReBoot: The Guardian Code )will focus on four teenage friends and their adventures in battling evil. You can read more about the premise HERE, which although doesn't appeal to me is much as the first show, will still be something I will gladly watch, as it’s been promised to be firmly set in the roots of the original show with some of the same characters making appearances at various points. Seeing as the new series will be produced by RainMaker Studios, I have every confidence that they will stay is true to the original vision as possible while giving us something new and exciting.

“I come from the Net…” *cheers!*

June 12 – Feeding is Fantastic!

My writing group keeps getting better and better.

No, seriously: every presentation I've done for the last few months has been better than the last and tonight's was perhaps the best I've ever done.

The topic: Feeding The Muse or, in other words: staying inspired.

Now, I’m not one for needing validation in everything I do; I learned that way back in university, which to me seems a little late, but I’m glad I did. I’m co-running the writing group to assist other writers, so that we can all learn about our craft and spread the good word, so to speak.

Thankfully, the word is excellent nowadays when it comes to my presentations. The fact makes me most cheerful, in knowing that the research I’m doing is helping people become better writers. Tonight’s comments certainly made that evident, the greatest number of positive postings that any of our group’s meetings have had to date:

It’s wonderful to know that I’m on the right track with my presentations, that the work I’m doing is having positive results with my peers. It really helps me with my own work, too, as I can look at the advice I’m creating and compiling with the perspective of other writers weighing in as well.

Write on!

June 13 – Smashing!

Another great weekend started today!

I spent the first part of the day with my lady, which was great! We’re really hitting it off and both of us are looking to spend our upcoming weekends together, as much as possible, with a break here and there to actually get things done, since we both work during the week.

I have to say, weekends have quickly become my favorite thing about this summer.

Fortunately, there's a ton of things to do in and around Victoria. Plans to visit Butchart Gardens, attend concerts and many other things will certainly keep us busy throughout the warm summer months. As neither of us are heavily outdoor oriented, we'll be sure to pack the sunscreen.

In the evening, I had a few friends over along with my lady and the five of us played SmashUp! We added an expansion pack( The SciFi Double Feature! )which brought even more unusual combinations to the game. As we had five players, it took longer then we first thought it might and after a few hours read only managed to fit in one game, however my lovely lady won with some shrewd moves – extremely impressive as it was her first time playing!

Having a local group of friends who are all interested in boardgaming makes me smile; I thought I’d left all that behind years ago in high school. The resurgence in recent years of the hobby, with multiple stores here in Victoria and a thriving boardgame-loving community, gives me hope that game nights might become a fixture of my future, once I get my time needs sorted out between dating and writing and the myriad other demands on my non-day-job, non-sleeping schedules.

I’ll get it figured out. In the meantime, I’m eager for the next game night!

June 14 – I have the Nostalgia!

I swear, I’ve been smiling all this week, but for good reason.

From spending time with my lovely lady-date, to good news about shows I loved coming back, it’s been just win-win all over the place. As a bonus, I’m on my first actual paid VACATION for the first time in years( since summer 2011 )and as I mentioned a few months ago I’ll be doing a staycation here in Victoria – I have a second novel to complete and this is as good an opportunity to make significant headway as any I’ll get this year.

One area I'm not making any headway in is with my videogame collection and this weekend isn't helping: the Steam Summer Sale has started and I’m trying so hard to be strong…

Actually, so far it hasn’t been all that bad, as I've only picked up two games( Gauntlet and Toy Soldiers: Complete )for about $10.00 in total costs. While I hope to play Gauntlet with some friends in the future( it’s a quick, simple and fun co-op online game )it’s Toy Soldiers that I’m really interested in… not because of what's in the game now, but what's coming later this summer.

There’s an expansion pack( downloadable content )that's going to include several toy licenses that I've never heard of being directly added to any videogame until now. In Toy Soldiers, you can play as any one of many different ‘armies’ such as the standard Allies or Axis from WWI, or one of several other unique armies with different units and abilities for each.

Toy Soldiers: War Chest will add four more armies utilizing toys from my childhood: Masters Of The Universe and G.I. Joe will be licensed for use in the videogame. Players will be able to utilize units from these franchises in the game, allowing one's inner child to live again by letting the toys fight on the screen just as they did in your imagination on your living room floor when we were young.

Glorious. I can hardly wait… and in the meantime, I’ll have to figure out how to repair my main gaming PC so that they can actually play games again instead of just letting me use it for web surfing and e-mail.

It’s been another wonderful week. Between spending time with my lady, nostalgic news and going on vacation, I’m practically a puddle of peaceful smiles. Diving into some serious writing time this week on my second novel will be icing on the cake, so to speak. See you next week!

Ponds, Performances and Perfection

The word of the week is forelsket.

June 1 – Terrible Treats

Cookies aren't on my menu anymore, sadly.

I've been weaning myself off sugar over the last six months. These days, even one cookie is enough to set my metabolism racing enough so that it's noticeable.

I hadn't quite realized how much of an effect sugar has on me nowadays until I started using a heartrate monitoring app on my phone. There's quite a few different ones out there and most follow the same design aesthetic: you place your finger over the smartphone’s camera and it reads your pulse - surprisingly accurately, as I've found.

My sugar experiments over the last few months with various treats have all shown consistent results. The most sugary treats, including chocolate cookies and donuts, raise my resting heart rate by at least 20 beats per minute( bpm ) – from the low 80’s to well over 100 in less than 10 minutes.

Given that the average male my age in my physical condition should have a resting heart rate of around 75 bpm, that's a BIG increase for doing nothing except metabolizing sugar while sitting down on the couch.

Ideally, I'd like to be exercising regularly and eating well enough so that my resting heart rate is almost always within the 70’s range. Right now, I am averaging in the mid-80s and that's a little worrying to me as I think about long-term health effects accumulating over the next couple of decades.

If I can achieve my health goals in the next few years, I think I'll treat myself to a cookie - a healthy one, of course!

June 2 – Smokin’ Angry

Victoria’s a wonderful place for fresh air.

Situated by the sea, there’s a constant breeze from the south, running from the Olympic mountains in WA State that cools the city and picks up the crisp snap of the ocean year-round. Wherever you walk in the city, you can always expect lovely fresh air to greet you.

This dovetails nicely with another fun phenomenon I’ve come to call ‘driftage.’

Driftage is when someone on a nearby balcony, not necessarily even a neighbor, lights up a cigarette( or other combustible of choice )and the smoke flows with the wind.

In the case of my apartment, the prevailing wind always carries the smoke straight into my place through the windows – every time. Ironically, this is exactly what happened with my old apartment on Moss St: people would smoke out the front of the building and I’d be forced to leap over to the window to slam it shut before my entire apartment fills with the stench. As that window was the only source of fresh air I had, I’d then bake for 5-10 minutes at a time – or longer, depending on if the considerate people down below decided to prolong their vaporous leisure.

Long story short: we have several folks upwind( and by several I mean too many )who enjoy stepping onto their balconies to light up, too often several times, every single evening. Sometimes more than once and, depending on the weather, late at night and early in the morning too. The byproducts of their enjoyment immediately find their way through the open windows in my apartment, forcing my sister or myself to close up fast and air out the place. It’s especially irksome when it’s 2am and my sister chokes awake to her room smelling like an ashtray instead of summer breezes.

We’re pursuing changes through channels, but its slow going. I fully understand that people have the right to enjoy smoking in the privacy of their own homes… but at the same time, THEIR smoke is invading MY home on a regular basis – and I don’t smoke. I also understand the old saw of ‘If you don’t like it, move’ and I’m drawing the line there: I’m not doing anything to them, so why should I have to be the one to smile and move somewhere else… and hope that the exact same thing doesn’t happen again? For me, this is the third time unlucky.

There’s no easy answer, save to do what I’m doing right now: paperwork.

June 3 – Jazz!!!

What a phenomenal night!

My date and I went to see a jazz show this evening at Herman's, a little club downtown that I have often walk by but never really paid much attention to. Tonight's performer was Danny Michel, a talented modern jazz artist who, unknown to me until the show started, has a g33ky streak a mile wide. I mean, he’s traveling the country doing a musical video series in this van:

Fantasy, Star Trek and airbrushes collide...

The show began at 8pm and was off to a running start: Danny had already warned of the audience with his easy g33ky banter and most everyone in the audience was quite focused, with only around 100 people in total as it was a small venue. Apart from an inattentive waitress and a table of strangely inattentive people in one corner who kept talking long after the music had started, the show was an hour and a half of excellent musical variety in the key of jazz.

I think we'll be going again soon and I'll most certainly be keeping an eye out for more from Danny Michel; his video show is debuting this month and looks to be full of surprises - I’m jazzed!

June 4 – Starbucks Success!

My writing group’s shifting gears this summer.

We've been meeting on Mondays for a few years now, in the atrium downtown which is a public space and therefore free to use. However, as I've mentioned before, often times it's a noisy venue and difficult for our members to hear presentations or even speak to each other in normal tones. Not to mention the extraordinarily uncomfortable seating arrangements to be had.

That changed tonight, as we met at the Chapters, just a block away. Inside's like this:

A few weeks ago, I made an arrangement with the store manager to allow us to hold our meetings in the Starbucks upstairs on the second floor in the downtown Chapters store. They were more than happy to accommodate us, with the group size of around 15 people or so, for as I see it the management sees we writers as a source of double revenue: caffeine from the coffee shop and books from the handily-nearby shelves. It works for us too: we get access to refreshments and a free meeting space that isn't too noisy.

As it turns out, my gamble paid off and the evening was a success!

We had about a dozen people show up, completely filling the tables that have been reserved for us and among them were several new members as well as a few faces we haven't seen in a while. The discussion was lively and varied, with topics ranging around the craft of writing itself which is very much my bailiwick for the last few years. Everyone seemed enthusiastic and engaged and the inaugural meeting in Starbucks wrapped up with the closing of the store around 9 PM.

It looks to be a great start to the summer for the group! And, I daresay... a new chapter?

June 5 – Untranslatable Words

What’s in a word?

The question gains even greater meaning when you consider that there are many words that cannot be translated into English from other languages, at least not in a singular form.

As there are so many languages on Earth, the list of ‘untranslatable’ words is rather large. I often like to tell people that there are many words in Russian that don't translate as easily into English, at least as related to me by my grandfather many years ago - that story of his has always stuck with me.

To illustrate my point, here's one of a selection of images that talented artist Marija Tiurina has created to show us that some things just can't cross the language barrier easily – or at all:

Personally, I find this subject fascinating. To know that there are concepts in other languages that cannot be translated into English without a lot of fiddling or cajoling and still part of the original meaning is lost in the effort. For myself, having a decent vocabulary combined with no notable skill in any language other than English, it's a fascinating topic.

Makes me wonder if there's any single word in English that doesn't translate well?

June 6 – A Perfect Day(te)

Today was a perfect day. Absolutely, magnificently perfect.

My date and I met for breakfast, sitting outside on a patio in the warm breezes in Cook Street Village. We’d met last night to view some episodes of Babylon 5’s first season, which I myself haven’t seen in about 4 years – sacrilege! Once we'd finished our delicious repast, we strolled downtown to pick up our new boat.

Yes, we bought a boat together this week! Here’s a few images of us sailing it:

 We spent an hour or so assembling the boat( which for now is called the Haulin’ Trawler )and then we took our new shared prize down to the Harrison Yacht Pond, located next to the seashore on Dallas Rd at the southernmost edge of Victoria. The picnic lunch we brought along was delicious, having stopped at the Beacon Hill Drive In for sandwiches and milkshakes.

Built in 1953, the pond was specifically designed for model boats to be raced on it and to our delight today, we were the only ones there. We happily sailed our boat to and fro across the surface, joined after a while by another model boater who tested his homemade airboat. We all had fun until it's time to go in the early afternoon and we returned to shore.

As it was a perfect summer stay outside, not a cloud in the sunny sky and warm breezes blowing, we took a long walk through the park, stopping at the Beacon Hill Children’s Farm( an odd name )to visit the residents. One in particular seemed to be really enjoying his day too:

A bucktoothed goat? Now I've seen it all...

Heading back to Cook Street Village, we decided to frequent the same patio we’d started our day on: the weather was simply too good not to enjoy it over some cool drinks in the dappled shade. It was quite magical: our conversation simply flowed and the hours passed by in mere eyeblinks.

Our evening was( surprise! )filled with more episodes of the first season of Babylon 5. I can't overstate how wonderful it is to watch the show with someone who loves it as much as I do. The rest of the date went wonderfully well and it was close to midnight before we could bring ourselves to say goodbye to each other. It seems incredible to us both that a breakfast date of a few hours with the possibility of lunch as well had so easily and naturally turned into nearly 14 hours spent continually in one another's company… and that at the day's end, it felt like we’d only just started.

I can't wait for the next time we get together.

June 7 – The Journey, Animated

In searching, we become.

Nowhere is that more evident in the Hero’s Journey, which was the centerpiece of J.W. Campbell’s theories about the heroic mythos that has permeated human storytelling for millennia.

I posted about this same mythic journey some months back, with a stylized animation that nicely explained how it all worked - have a look here if you missed it, or want to see it again.

But what of the journey itself? What does it represent, and how does it affect those who walk it?

I discovered today a lovely short animated film titled The Reward that examines these two questions in the context of the unlikely hero( or in this case a pair of heroes ) who have no idea what they're getting into. While I don't completely agree with all the lessons that are taught or all the choices the heroes make during the course of this film, it’s still a good story beautifully told.

Mild NSFW warning, by the way:

The Reward from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

It was an incredible week that on one hand crawled by as my workplace was frustratingly busy and yet flew by as I was able to spend time with my lady date on no less than four separate occasions. I can't recall any other week in my life that I've been so roundly happy and what really boggles my mind is that it seems the best is yet to come.

It’s truly a new beginning and I can’t wait to see how the next step in the journey turns out!