dewline | Entries tagged with perception

Just stumbled across this:

https://www.cbc.ca/artsprojects/22artists/

Want to make a note to come back to this later. I might need to revisit. Often.

Current Mood: busy

...but the Cyan and Magenta aren't showing up at all, and there's gap-lines in the Black ink, and I keep getting error messages. It's the most immediate problem I have, and there's other people dealing with far worse than me at the moment if I need reminding of the perspective.

Current Mood: annoyed

Public transit...there's a topic.

My understanding of the current state of OC Transpo and STO across the river in Gatineau goes like this: the buses and trains here are usually, at worst, ¾ empty. Everyone aboard has mostly managed to keep their distance from each other, and masks are standard good-manners practice. I can't afford to not use it if I want to leave my neighbourhood to do anything outside of it.

I keep paying for my monthly bus pass despite my lack of usage because they're a continuing target for deficit hawks, and they need the money to maintain the facilities and fleets for when Pandemic is finally over. Even if the levels of demand-for-service stay reduced afterward, the transit services have to be able to do their work safely.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Home-for-now
Current Music: The Sunday Magazine on CBC Radio

So here we are at the latest anniversary of the signing of the Confederation agreements that many of us see, with encouragement from our federal government, as the anniversary of modern Canada's founding.

Some of us, like Luanga Nuwame, see it as cause for celebration.

Others, such as Kerry Benjoe, have just cause to see it as a day for mourning if not rage. Whether they do or not is a choice that's not mine to make.

Still more are apathetic to the whole business of it, seeing it as just another day in their lives.

However you see this day, I hope that it's kind to you.

(Sidebar: I wish we had an avatar for "contemplative" that did not involve smiling. It seems improper in moments like this one.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Home
Current Music: Your choice

I went to a market information session today at one of the non-profits trying to help people like me still looking for (steady/steadier) work. One of the people making presentations in connection with that session made a remark that's sticking with me right now:

"Ottawa is a small town pretending to be a big city."

I have an objection to that, if only because I've seen too much of the place over the past 35 years.

(35 years. I've lived in one city for that long. Yes.)

The Greenbelt encompassing the old core neighbourhoods can enable an illusion like that in the minds of many. The aggravation of there being neighbourhoods on the other side of the river-border Ontario shared with Québec also distorts reality somewhat, with all the side effects that the language laws of la belle province can provide. I accept that as a given. But Ottawa's big-city-ness is still more fact now than pretense.

Current Mood: contemplative

I am somewhat slow off the mark in greeting the new calendar month, yes. Being so busy with the day-to-day and the creeping sense of an ongoing Quiet War Against Democracy As A Concept as we've now finally been seeing it in recent years and months...

Anyways, we're here in August 2017 Gregorian Calendar now...

Current Mood: Waking up

I would argue that at least two of our politicians at the federal level in Canada are among many people worthy of our attention and respect for coping with hard situations, even if/when we watch them in the midst of coping with errors strategic and/or tactical.

Ahmed Hussen is our current minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. Erin Andersson and Michelle Zilio filed a piece with the Globe and Mail that gives us a sense of his progress, from Somali refugee to federal cabinet minister.

Chrystia Freeland went from reporter to minister for Global Affairs and International Trade. Being of Ukrainian ancestry and opposed to Russian interventions in her family's old country, that has made her a target for desinformatsiya efforts centered upon her maternal grandfather's role in local media as dictacted by the Nazi regime in Germany during World War II. There are two opinion pieces, one by Paul Wells for the Toronto Star and another by Michael Harris for iPolitics, that frame some of my thinking on the matter.

The situations each of them are now facing will change - at times, dramatically, I expect - in the days and months ahead. But I do believe each of them is working to rise to the challenges of these moments.

Current Mood: contemplative

For your review and opinionation:

Oh, and the reaction to Ruth Ellen Brosseau's reaction to being jostled? At least, the ones I'm reading the most about? Ridiculous, rude, and just plain Wrong. And more than a tad on the cruel side too...which is part and parcel of what makes it Wrong.

I'm stealing time away from assorted relatives upstairs to put these things to the web, for however long that lasts.

It seems to me that while others here have been doing the work of getting the creative side of their lives into a condition where they earn part or all of their living from it, I've been increasingly pushed to the sidelines. To watch those others succeed at building their dreams to whatever degree possible, while I just focus on surviving. Yes, there are the hobbies, which could count as skill-building in their way. Glad to have that underway. I certainly have a number of friends with which to commiserate, to share in schemes with, to cheer on in their own efforts. I am grateful for that. Always.

Grateful also for the family I spoke of at the top here.

Not sure that this counts as a full-bore Resolution. It probably doesn't. More of a "keep working on it and see where the effort takes you" deal.

I want to get back to putting in that creative work.

Some will say that I haven't really stopped. The money has dried up, true, but some of you will point to various things you've seen and heard and read from me as evidence of not really having stopped. Which will make sense.

It's a matter of perception. And perception counts for much.

Current Mood: contemplative

Ummm...no. I have to disagree on at least one point in your "statement, not a discussion".

SHIELD works for the UN.

Marvel/Disney gets away with saying it flat out in the comics for reasons unclear to me, but in the movies they have to call the people that SHIELD's Director reports to the "World Security Council". Otherwise, the UN's trademark/copyright-defence lawyers get all cranky. Therefore, not a "shadowy cabal". Putting the Security Council members in shadow in Avengers was a nod to how Fury Sr.'s bosses used to be depicted in the comics, but explaining that further involves a lot of continuity stuff that people don't like to make newcomers get into.

There was a similar fuss over UNIT in Doctor Who a few years back, as Whovians will definitely recall. The UN didn't want their name to be part of the full spelling-out of that fictional organization's acronym anymore after that TV series was revived.

Also, one of the long-haul arcs of Agents of SHIELD on TV appears to be the organization's process of learning how to live and work in the open, as spearheaded by the regular cast. I wonder if Coulson's roving field team has realized that this is what they're doing, but at least one other reviewer's made an interesting case over at tor.com.

Whether or not the organization as depicted across the TV/Movie is a "secret police" regime...well, some of the characters are going to want it to be exactly that. That's part of the point of Winter Soldier next spring: having that argument play out amongst the characters. A battle for the soul of SHIELD...one that's been playing out for decades in the comics themselves.

Current Mood: irritated
Current Music: Q on CBC Radio One

If there's one thing my friendlist here, the one over on Facebook, and contacts elsewhere across the Web have confirmed in my mind, it's this: comics are for everyone what wants 'em.

Or at least, they ought to be.

That includes women, people of "other" sexual identities, people from across the ethnic spectrum, across the religious spectrum, across the age ranges, et cetera.

What bugs me is that some people whom I thought knew this at least as well as I did, if not better than I do...well, it seems they don't know it very well. Or if they did, they've forgotten the fact.

Worse, it's not even a surprise. More like a nagging bout of anger at something that should've been behind us all by now.

Fortunately, other people are already calling that first bunch out on that point.

MyDearPeabody, keep on calling them out on it.

It's going to be part of how we keep growing the industry pie back to where it ought to be.

More on other stuff later.

Dwight Williams, a photo by pesbo on Flickr.

Portrait by Pearl "Pesbo" Pirie.

Current Mood: pleased

So there's this children's book that was nominated for a Governor-General's literary award. And the author asked that the nomination be withdrawn.

He doesn't consider himself "a subject of Her Majesty", being a Québecois nationalist.

Details at this CBC article.

One thing I don't think Biz - the musician now doubling as a children's author here - understands here is that a lot of us in the Rest Of Canada see ourselves as Canadian citizens, and therefore just as much not "subjects of Her Majesty". The Monarchist League's local membership keeps begging the rest of us to reconsider our self-perception, of course. But...really. We dropped the "British subject" thing a couple of generations back. Some of us even did that in our hearts long before the Constitution got repatriated in 1982. Some, even before the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

(National Geographic atlas editors, I'm looking at you in particular here. I saw that Concise Atlas of the World of yours at World of Maps last night before Pen and Paper Workshop. The one giving our "independence" date as 1931. Really?)

A lot of les vieux gardes among the separatistes don't get that, probably. And wouldn't want to believe it even now.

Can't be helped. This is Canada, now.

Someone at 24 Sussex could probably use a reminder of this, too...

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: "The Holy Egoism of Genius" by the Art of Noise

Something in this morning's Spacing Ottawa feed:

http://spacingottawa.ca/2012/08/20/urban-planets-kids-cars-and-cognitive-mapping/

To the parents of children currently of a certain age range, I ask this: might this "windshield perspective" be a real thing? Is this something you've noticed?