Sooner or later, unless things are allowed trail off in an unsatisfactory manner that fails to resolve the central conflict, every story ends. It's the ultimate result of the protagonist's actions and should bring closure to the narrative. It's key for all writers to have a firm understanding of how they most effectively create, but even for those who just start writing and wait to see where the unfolding story takes them, my own opinion is that when it comes to writing a story, the single indispensable thing is a solid sense of how it is going to end.It's not that you necessarily need a blueprint before you start writing; in my experience that's just needlessly constricting, though I imagine that there are some writers out there who use that sort of method successfully. It's important just to know roughly where you're going to end up before you start off; that way, elements like foreshadowing can be employed throughout the story, and the ending becomes a natural result of the story as it's unfolded. Personally, I need to know the general way my stories will end before I can start writing them - I need to have that destination, even if the route I'll take to get there is unclear. When I've written stories that fell apart or were abandoned, generally they were because I didn't know how I was going to end it when I started, and as a result my notion of the plot changed substantially through the course of the writing process - producing something that bent under pressure.Whoever wrote Mass Effect 3 evidently did not follow anything remotely like this advice. Perhaps you've heard of the controversy that's been brewing since the game's release last month, the vociferous hatred of the game's endings among the fanbase that demonstrates the pitfalls inherent in a participatory narrative like the Mass Effect series. Encountering a weak ending in a book or movie is one thing; you had no role in the events as they unfolded, and in the end you only had to invest a few hours. In Mass Effect, which since its 2007 release was championed as something where your choices in one game would shape events in the next and where you could easily spend seventy-five hours guiding Commander Shepard from the opening scene to the final options, investment is vastly higher; it's more appropriate to say, I think, that players experience a participatory narrative, and as such there's a far greater necessity to provide a satisfactory conclusion.It's somewhat understandable in its way - I can't think of any other series, offhand, that has been this audacious when it comes to an overarching participatory story. So it's not that much of a surprise, in retrospect, that Mass Effect 3 thoroughly fumbled the conclusion to such an extent that I swore at the system when the credits started rolling - and it wasn't even the whole conclusion, either. Just the last ten minutes.Please note that there are SPOILERS AHEAD for the Mass Effect 3 ending, in the event that you still wish to experience it firsthand.
Also note spoilers for The Winter's Tale up there, for all those of you who are still waiting for tickets to the Globe Theatre.
All jokes aside, since coming out west I've found that it's difficult to get a bead on the city of Surrey. Depending on what I'm talking about at the time, it's easy to think of it as the Mississauga of the West or Vancouver's Scarborough or just the red-headed stepchild of the Lower Mainland, but it doesn't really fit into any convenient category; the juxtaposition of low-density suburbs, the wide-open countryside between the rivers, and its work-in-progress downtown come together to make a whole that isn't commonly encountered back east.The Central City Tower - that bluish, sharp-roofed skyscraper in the photo down there - is, for the moment, one of the most obvious signs of this juxtaposition: the tallest building in Surrey, clearly visible poking above the treeline from New West, and yet surrounded by townhouses and apartment blocks and open fields awaiting redevelopment. With the recent completion of Surrey's new central library and the new city hall under construction on the former site of a strip mall, the place will no doubt look a lot different in ten or twenty years. For now, though, it seems almost awkwardly paused between the past and the future.
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It's a bit surprising, thinking about it, the presence that Twitter has taken in the professional and personal lives of so many people only six years after being launched; I suppose it's because I'm perpetually stuck in 2000, when dialup was how you got online and ICQ was how you talked to people once you got there. Imagine coordinating something like the Iranian election protests a couple of years back, or even something as minor as the #TellVicEverything thing from a little while ago, over point-to-point instant messaging. Twitter gives a level of basic engagement that, in some respects, is vastly elevated over what came before.In some cases, perhaps too basic. On Friday the Toronto Star reported on the decision of NDP MP Charlie Angus - who I first heard of in his capacity as the NDP's digital affairs critic - to quit Twitter, which he described as "like being badgered by a drunk on a 24-hour bus ride." It's true that Twitter gives people a line to prominent figures - be they government, corporate, or celebrity - but what's also true as a result is that it gives people a line to each other, giving mute testimony that the world is not as we believe it to be.I can understand why Angus left Twitter. As a politician, and especially an NDP politician at that, I can imagine that his timeline and Direct Message box must have always contained at least a significant minority of heinous shit in the form of received messages. It's life, without filters - and it's not the sort of thing that's restricted to political figures alone.In the Star article, Susan Delacourt takes a rather optimistic view of Twitter, asking if people "are any nicer" in any given Tim Horton's than online, and that it "holds the potential to be a window into vast new worlds of politics." For the latter, I think it does, but not in the way a lot of us would hope; I would describe it more as a magnifying glass, throwing the quiet beliefs of a lot of people into unflattering sharpness. It's yet another demonstration of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or for you science majors, the online disinhibition effect - people who feel anonymous, who are at a remove from what they're saying and who they're speaking to, and who have an audience through use of a carefully-placed hashtag, will say things on Twitter that they would never say to a stranger in the real world.Are people at Tim Horton's any nicer? Perhaps not, but the difference is that they'd at least act nicer. Someone in Tim Horton's who is, say, opposed to Earth Hour would probably be more circumspect about accusing its supporters as being "lunatics" who want to return civilization to the thirteenth century - which, I stress, is something that I honestly encountered - because if you pull out those kind of insane accusations in someone's face, you're running the risk of getting someone's fist in yours. As of yet, no one has invented a device that will allow you to stab people in the face over the Internet.This is a problem that, honestly, I don't see being resolved any time soon. It's basic human nature, and from what I've seen too many humans are unwilling to climb above their basic natures. Nevertheless, in the end I think it's for the best that the internet has enabled conversations like this, and that politicians and so on should stick with it. If nothing else, it provides them with a far more honest appraisal of some of the people they are representing.
It's easy to discount what'll happen when a building with an exterior made almost entirely of glass has the sunlight shine on it at just the right angle, since you also have to be at just the right angle to really appreciate it. I'm not sure which building that is a little to the left of the Scotia Tower, and I don't know if it would have appeared quite the same way to someone on the ground - but from Cambie and 10th, where this photo was taken from, the early Thursday evening Vancouver skyline was a hell of a thing.
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After the end of the Second World War, my grandfather Les Parkinson left the Royal Navy and settled down in Manchester, where he would serve as part of its police force until 1969. Many of the issues he encountered sixty years ago are just as relevant today; I don't know if they still use television detector vans to figure out who's not paying the BBC license fee, but from what I understand the basic structure is still the same.
Additionally, as a clarifying note - the £20 fine mentioned below may not seem too onerous to us, but after sixty years of inflation it'd more properly convert to around £440 today. Hardly something to sniff at.*****The war appeared to be a forgotten happening by the mid-1950s, but one in which a lot of lessons were learned. Big changes were being made in all walks of life. The policeman's lot, in particular, had been made happier with a nice pay increase and a change in uniform style. The old type of tunic had been replaced with an open-necked type, with which we wore a collar and tie, and we were issued with gabardine raincoats. At the same time, small forces were being gobbled up by the bigger ones, just as small towns were taken over by larger ones.It appeared that everything was being modernized. Even the hitherto working class was fast becoming the middle class. Television was now available at a reasonable price, well within the range of the working man. There seemed to be an upsurge in the need to make life easier, and every house now seemed to have a refrigerator, a television set and now even a car. Though the latter was often an old banger, to me it was a good sign of the populace waking up and realizing that they too could have the things that were supposed to be the sign of the "upper class."I bought a fridge. It was called an Iced Diamond. To accommodate it in the kitchen, I had to knock out a set of drawers and then purchase a fridge that fit the resultant space. It was about three feet square and four feet tall and barely fit in the only place I could use. The luxury of it, though, was worth it. No more sour milk or runny butter in the summer months. It made me wonder just how we had managed before we got it.For years I fought off getting a television, for they were so expensive. Then rental companies started opening their doors, and I ended up renting one from a firm called Granada. At this time there were two channels, BBC and Granada. The latter was an independent station that got its revenue from the adverts it broadcasted. The BBC was a corporation and received its income from the licence fees one had to pay. Licences were issued by the General Post Office.At this time the whole licence structure was silly. One had to have separate licences for the radio in the house, the radio in the car, the black and white television and finally for the colour television. The licence fees went to the BBC, which did not use advertising. If one had a television that was only able to receive independent broadcasts, though, one still had to buy the licence for the BBC. It was so stupid.The television I got was a huge box with a nineteen-inch screen and a black and white display. I was in court one day when a fellow was up for not having a licence for his television. He was fined twenty pounds and the television was confiscated. That made me think, for I didn't have a licence.The GPO had special detecting vehicles driving around the area. They were able to pinpoint a television in use, and from their records they were able to tell whether you had a licence or not. In the court, I learned that the shopkeeper had to fill in a form each time a television was purchased, and that was how the GPO was able to maintain its records. Anyway, I decided to get a licence.As I was walking home that day the GPO van passed me. I realized that that bugger was going to go to my house, and sure enough he stopped and went to the house. As I got to the gate the GPO man was talking to Wyn."Oh, here's my husband now," I heard her say. "He can tell you what you want to know."The GPO man asked me if I had a television set in the house, so I took him to see it. Then he asked if I had a licence, so I showed him the date-stamped one I had bought that morning. He then apologized for bothering me and left. I was lucky again, thanks to that little fellow perched on my shoulder.Past Perspectives:
There's not much to this phtoo that isn't immediately obvious - it's downtown Vancouver, specifically Waterfront Station and the immediate vicinity, seen from Granville Square, on one of those rare blue sky days. I just like the look of it, and the way the lens flares managed to get in.
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No matter how well thought out something may be when it's first introduced to the world at large, and no matter how popular something might be at the moment of its rollout, the simple fact is that if something sticks around for long enough a majority of people are eventually going to sour on it. It happened to disco, it happened to the Liberal Party of Canada, and I feel like it's in the process of happening now with Earth Hour. That's not to say it's falling apart already. The City of New Westminster announced yesterday that power consumption dropped by 2.19%, above the provincial average of 1.67% - and though Toronto experienced a 6.8% drop, it was significantly less than the reductions in 2009 and 2010. People worldwide continue to mark the hour, don't get me wrong - still, it feels like the opposition - represented mostly by the Human Achievement Hour "turn everything ON" crowd - may be starting to get more traction.Sure, at its core Earth Hour is just a gesture, and depending on where you live it might not even make a difference whether you turn your stuff on; most of BC's electricity is generated by renewable sources already. I'll admit that there are problems with it - in addition to "turn off your lights for an hour" literally being the least we can do, it also provides an angle of attack for people who are predisposed to oppose these sort of initiatives anyway. I'd rather have an environmental initiative that didn't lend itself to claims that its backers want to return the world to a medieval lifestyle.So in that respect, isn't it time to reinvent Earth Hour? People who haven't been reached by it yet probably won't be - I think it's time to take a different tack, to use it to pursue environmental awareness and conservation from another direction.
One that recognizes that the Lower Mainland actually does experience subzero conditions and snowfall.
There's something about the early evening, when the sun is still in the sky but illuminating things on the ground at practically a ninety-degree angle, that can make for compelling photographs; some parts of the immediate world are lit up like it's still the middle of the day, while others are already living in shadow. This shot, looking across Burrard Inlet, was taken a little after 7 PM, and though the cranes at the port are bright as traffic cones the mountains are already dark.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
On Saturday I was watching the #EarthHour hashtag on Twitter as 8:30 ticked through Mountain Time, and I'll be blunt--I was demoralized by a lot of what I saw. Sure, there were people tweeting about how they were going to participate... but there were also people shooting from the hip about "hippies," about how if you want to find anyone marking Earth Hour, you just need to look for a pulled-over Prius with its passengers shivering in the dark, and plenty of people bragging about how they were turning everything on.I can understand someone who thinks it's a meaningless gesture on their part and just doesn't participate; my own participation, while I was off for a walk around New Westminster, means that the demand on British Columbia's grid dropped by maybe 0.1 kilowatt-hours. What I have more difficulty understanding is the the thought process of someone who luxuriates in their non-participation, or goes the whole Ezra Levant route and turns on everything in their house just because they can. Is it just spite? It's not the sort of action that makes sense to me, in that case; when I set out to spite Ezra Levant in response to his Human Achievement Hour bull, I turned my heat off - which not only made me less comfortable, but saved energy and, thus, money. When people turn on all their stuff during Earth Hour, what is it? "I'll show you to turn off all your lights! I'll turn on all the things that make me more comfortable, and in so doing jack up my hydro bill!"A lack of understanding is something that irritates me, so I tried to engage. I asked questions. I didn't swear, I didn't insult... but that didn't stop some dude, when asked why we shouldn't give a shit if George Carlin was right and it was just us that needed to be saved and not the planet, from answering that I'm "nuts" and "want us living in the 13th century."I don't know how to respond to something that's as far out there as that statement. How do you have a meaningful conversation with someone who's so rooted in their position that their answer to a question (in the interests of transparency, my question was "Oh, so if it's only us that are going to go somewhere, it... isn't our problem? Seriously?") is a personal attack? How do you engage with someone who refuses to even entertain the basic premises of your argument?
A streetlight in downtown New Westminster.
Last night I took a walk around New Westminster to see what was what. The SkyBridge, considering the size of its towers and the threat they could pose to low-flying aircraft, was lit up like it always is and SkyTrains whispered back and forth through the chilled spring air. To take this shot, I used a one-second exposure... and seeing as how I completely lack a tripod, I'm pleased that it's as stable as it is.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Also note spoilers for The Winter's Tale up there, for all those of you who are still waiting for tickets to the Globe Theatre.
