For the last 22 years of my life, I've been following the broad strokes of the same plan. And now I'm here, at the end of the tour and the edge of the map, and now I need to step out into the real world.

When you take a leap, you want to have faith that you'll land somewhere safe, and that usually means looking down, and taking stock of your surroundings. But this is the most uncertain time in my own short life so far, both on the micro level (where will I be living and working in 2027?) and the macro level (Will AI kill my career? Will I ever be able to live in a nice place or start a family? Will world war three start before that matters?).

In times like this, people turn to fundamental truths. And as I graduate this month, I find myself reflecting on the things I learned during my time at the University of Waterloo.

University is supposed to be the bridge between childhood and adulthood. You practice independence. You make mistakes, make friends, fall in love, and learn what makes you feel the most yourself.

I learned that I feel the most like myself when I'm doing something I'm proud of.

It feels a little weird to say that, because it's somehow totally obvious, but also a bit counter-intuitive. When does a Waterloo CS student need to be told they should work more? Isn't the stereotypical lesson to learn here that I need to slow down and enjoy life more? I think that's what I'm supposed to say right now.

But I remember my worst moments. It was when I was alone, isolated, spending all my time in my dorm. I felt like a ghost, passing from place to place. I couldn't see myself reflected through anyone else. If no one's lives would be different if I wasn't here, was I really there?

Then, in the summer of my first co-op, two things happened. I went to my first meeting of the Game Dev Club, and I met Nicole. I was gently pulled out of my shell. I finally felt like what I was doing was interesting to someone.

Through that, I found something precious and special that's hard to put into words. The closest I've come is craft-based community, but I feel like I can do better than that. Open to suggestions.

Whatever I found, I don't see it in the CS stereotypical Linkedin-maxxing Leetcode maniac. I don't aspire to that at all. I think the critical difference is that work alone isn't enough on it's own. It has to be craft, and it needs to be communal.

What's the difference between work and craft? To me, craft is defined not just by doing something, but by caring enough to do it well, to savour the process, to understand why it works. The process itself brings you pride in and of itself, regardless of the final result.

Neither slop nor sloppiness is tolerated. When you care about craft, you aren't just interested in finishing a project to fill a hole on a resume. You want to do something well for it's own sake—because it really bothers you to do a crappy job. It's spiritually offensive.

Not to be a boomer, but I worry that fewer members of the next generation are going to develop a taste for what it feels like to toil over a craft. The wonders of modern technology have encouraged a mindset of speed, optimization, and overachieving among young people, lest they fall irreversably behind. The results are valued more than the process of getting the result. AI is an accelerant to this trend, of course, but it's a symptom, not the cause.

I don't know what to do about this. Academia is theoretically supposed to give people an appreciation for the value of craft and the fundamentals of any particular field, but our current schooling structure was never designed to deal with the availability of something like ChatGPT, let alone the internet at large. It'll take a fundamental rethink of the way schooling works to build a new system that still encourages lazy youngsters to develop their minds and not just take shortcuts. Someone smarter than me should get on that.

An important part is finding a community who values your particular craft as much as you do. You need to find people to learn from, to teach, and who can encourage you to keep going when motivation flags and things get tough. And from experience, some of my best friendships have been made when we can bond over our passion for each other's work.

If you have more time left at school than I do, please don't make my mistake. Get out of your dorm as soon as you can. Start now, before you feel ready. Waterloo is one of the best places in the world to find communities like these. You're already here—that's the hard part. Reach out. Find something or someone that encourages you to keep going, whatever that means to you.

The real reason to go to university is to be surrounded by smart, ambitious, encouraging peers your own age who want to see you succeed. Don't waste this chance. We're so spoiled for those kinds of opportunities at school, it's hard to remember how rare they are in the adult world.

Wherever you go in your life, try to find a craft you care about, and a community like this to share it with. It doesn't need to be your career. It doesn't even need to be a 'project' in the traditional way. You could get really good at the craft of being someone's romantic partner, or a good parent, or a good child, or a good manager, or a good community member, or or or. As long you have something that pushes your limits and makes you grow, you'll be fine.

But it has to be something. Don't just go through life coasting. Take on a bit more responsibility than you think you can handle. Fall in love, or at least host a party or two. Try and find the limit of what you're capable of. I promise you that you'll impress yourself.

Despite all the uncertainty and fear, I'm still really interested to meet my future self. I want to know how his story ends. And the only way to meet him is to jump.

But the final day of Marineland, the stubborn red stain on the Niagara Region, has yet to pass. The gates are shut, but the tanks are full. The animals spent years in there, languishing. The Skyscreamer—their enormous drop tower—stands still, defiant, looming like a sinister scarecrow over the Niagara Falls skyline. You can't look at the actual Falls without the tower peeking over, into the photos and memories of tourists and locals alike.

Look at me, still tall and proud, the tower says. It was never going to be that easy.

In August 2024, I was there for what I thought was the closing chapter of Marineland. In retrospect, I was naive. Marineland has survived too much for mere bankruptcy to finish it off.

When the park closed, and inheritor Marie Holer died shortly after, the park passed to an ownership trust who began seriously looking to sell. As we've discussed in previous installments, this land is ludicrously valuable. It's three times the size of Disney World's Magic Kingdom, located less than a 10 minute drive from the main tourist area of Niagara Falls. You can practically hear the housing development vultures swirl.

You'd imagine this land would sell quickly, but there's a catch—the same catch that led to the park's downfall in the first place. The animals. No one wants to buy the park until the remaining marine life, including as many as 30 beluga whales, are removed, presumably because by owning the park, they become responsible for doing it.

Okay, so management needs to get rid of some whales. How hard could that be? Well...

In 2019, the federal government passed the Ending the Captivity of Whales and Dolphins Act. You get three guesses what the bill made illegal. Predictably, Marineland opposed the bill's passing, claiming it would make it impossible to operate the park. (Yeah, man, that was the point!)

Marineland's lobbying efforts managed to secure them a grandfather clause, meaning that they could legally keep the whales and dolphins they already had, but any import or export of these creatures would need to be specifically reviewed and approved by the Minister of Fisheries.

That's the problem: not only did Marineland need to find a buyer for thirty belugas, it needed to be one that the feds approved of.

In September 2025, they proposed sending the belugas to Chimelong Ocean Kingdom, an extremely popular sea life amusement park in China—sort of like a parallel universe successful Marineland. But the Fisheries Minister was squeamish about sending the animals to another amusement park, and said no, sending this process all the way back to square one.¹

This is when Marineland management tried an interesting new negotiation tactic: blackmail.

You'll be surprised to hear that "Give Me Millions Of Dollars Or I'll Kill These Whales" did not make Marineland popular, and it certainly didn't help them shake their reputation for animal abuse. The government seemed to call their bluff, and negotiation continued in private.

But inside this absurd turn of events was something that kind of resembled a good point—there isn't that many places in the world that these animals can be sent. You can't reintroduce these animals into the wild after they had spent their whole lives in captivity. A proposed whale sanctuary off the coast of Nova Scotia would be perfect—if it had ever been built.

As a whole year came and went since the park's closure, and with no visible progress being made on getting the animals out of the park, frustration grew within Niagara Falls. The space existed in a sort of limbo. We knew that something was going to happen, but everything seemed so static—with the park, the province, and the federal government all more interested in pointing fingers at each other than moving forwards. The old age was over, but we had no idea what could possibly emerge from the vacuum Marineland left behind.²

Eventually, mercifully, Marineland and the government agreed in late January of 2026 to send their remaining whales and dolphins to accredited aquariums across North America. A few weeks later, it really happened, and the first sea lions arrived at the Vancouver Aquarium.³

The animals are finally getting out of Marineland and into better homes. Soon, in theory, the park can be sold, and Marineland can finally start fading into memory.

But that day has not yet come. The sign in the empty parking lot still proudly reads Marineland. Some people think it will never come down.

When we talk about the indomitable nature of the human spirit, it's usually about something we're proud of. We think of the determination, vision, and hard work it must have taken to build impossible ancient wonders of the world, or modern marvels like the Internet or Wikipedia.

But there's no rule that says we only achieve the impossible when our dreams are noble.

Marineland was the vision of a singular, determined, ruthless man, John Holer, who moved heaven and earth to make this horrible, horrible place. He defied public opinion and countless protestors. He defied the laws of the nation, the laws of economics, and the laws of common sense.

He was wholly, painfully wrong to do so, but he was so convinced he was right.

Not a single person alive in the world today wants Marineland to still be there. Not the city, not the province, not the owners. But it remains, and no power has yet proven able to fully dislodge it. It's a monument to the misery we can nurture through stubbornness.

When you set your mind to changing the world, make sure it's for the better.

Many people think the Eglinton LRT's story begins with the official groundbreaking in 2011. But this story really begins all the way in 1985, the first time that the City of Toronto began seriously considering a plan to build some sort of transit line on Eglinton Ave., a major street running east-west in the suburbs north of Toronto's downtown core.

Debate over whether this line should be a busway or a subway only ended in 1994 when everyone finally agreed on how to fund this brand-new subway line. Unfortunately, in 1995 there was a change in provincial government, and the newly-elected Mike Harris abruptly cancelled the project—after they had already started construction.

In 2007, Toronto Mayor David Miller proposed Transit City, an extremely ambitious roadmap to reshape public transportation in Toronto, which included the revival of the Eglinton subway as a light rail transit (LRT) initiative.

So, of course, the next mayor—the notorious Rob Ford—immediately cancelled all of Transit City on his first day in office in 2010. Instead, he proposed bringing back the old Eglinton subway idea from the 90s, as part of his campaign to “end the war on cars”. It's this version of the project that finally broke ground in 2011, with an expected opening date of 2020.

But don't worry, the drama isn't over yet! In 2012, City Council voted to undo the changes that Mayor Ford had made to the plan, which then reverted back to Miller's LRT idea—even after construction had already begun.

If you're thinking that these constant changes in direction probably damaged the Eglinton Line's momentum, you would be right! Unfortunately, shifting requirements and indecisive leadership wouldn't stop once the political jockeying ended.

Let’s introduce the three main characters of this story.

First is the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). The TTC is old. It was technically founded in 1921, but their history really goes back further, since it was created as an amalgamation of a few different Toronto transit agencies. It can trace its lineage all the way back to when “public transit” meant stagecoaches running down dirt roads. It’s wholly run by the Toronto municipal government, and by 2007, was responsible for the four subway lines, as well as all buses and streetcars, within Toronto city boundaries—all of which they had planned and designed from scratch.

Next up is Metrolinx, a much younger agency created by the Ontario government in 2006 to manage transit across the entire Greater Toronto-Hamilton Area (GTHA). Given this area’s increasing importance to the province—and especially considering how many people who live in one municipality work in another—managing their transit as one connected network could enable planning across jurisdictions and create a better, more comprehensive system. The Eglinton Crosstown was one of Metrolinx's first new projects they would manage, so some growing pains were inevitable.

Finally, there's Crosslinx, the consortium of engineering firms that Metrolinx hired to not just build the line, but to design and even fund construction for the project in exchange for more control and financial interest in the end project. This financial structure is called a Public-Private Partnership (P3).

In theory, the point of a P3 is to shift the risk for cost overruns away from the government and onto the private corporations, which would then incentivize the companies to finish on time and under budget. Please put a big emphasis on “in theory”. P3s have a, generously, spotty track record in Canada, with successes like Montreal’s REM and failures like the sale of Ontario’s Highway 407.

(Not to editorialize, but I don’t like the P3 structure. Even if the alleged cost savings are real—and given how the rest of this story unfolds, I’m extremely skeptical of that idea—I think we lose more in the long term if the state loses the institutional muscle memory to build things on its own. It helps normalize a new neoliberal normal where the government’s only way of influencing the development of the country is by shifting money around, an approach which seems to have left us in a bad spot so far this century.)

These three entities, on paper, had a clear division of responsibilities. Metrolinx would design the line, Crosslinx would build it, and the TTC would operate it. But in practice, each agency was at each other's throat from the very beginning to the very end.

It's important to understand that the TTC had, for literally over a hundred years, been used to designing and building new transit lines from scratch. Metrolinx suddenly butting in to take control of the design and building felt, to the TTC, like the province was trying to step on their toes. The feeling of mistrust and antipathy would widen over the course of the project, as the TTC felt increasingly sidelined in the city it had total jurisdiction over just a few years before.

It wouldn’t take long for this bad blood to bubble over in public. The TTC publicly declared as early as 2012 that they believed the project would probably be late. It took them 18 months to give Metrolinx permission to start work in existing subway stations, insisting on adding protections for increasingly improbable risk scenarios.

At the same time, Metrolinx had a very hands-off attitude to Crosslinx—an attitude they would live to regret. Crosslinx would sue Metrolinx twice during construction, claiming that they had not received the support or resources they needed from the province and therefore they needed to delay the opening of the line.

Crosslinx's deliberate and intentional public embarrassment of Metrolinx damaged that relationship beyond repair. Metrolinx began to take a very hardline approach during any negotiation with Crosslinx, and later all their partners, trying to squeeze concessions out of them and using ambiguous contract language to weasel their way out of paying the promised amount. Of course, this led to many firms not working with Metrolinx, or jacking up their prices out of the reasonable suspicion that the province would try to screw them over somehow.

The end result is that each of the three agencies kept trying to shove blame for emerging issues onto each other, instead of taking any responsibility for them, let alone trying to fix them. These "partners" acted more like rivals, each one trying to set the other two up for failure so they would take less blame for a transit project which had already become a reputation-destroying debacle.

These issues would include, among other things:

• Bombardier being late delivering the first trains
• Bombardier’s trains, once finally delivered, not working
• The COVID-19 pandemic, suddenly introducing supply chain issues and workflow changes at construction sites
• One of the cranes just fell over apparently
• 800 metres of track got installed wrong and need to be redone
• The discovery of severe software bugs in the signalling system
• Groundwater issues at some of the underground stations meaning they would need to redo old work, including relaying most of the concrete in Sloane station
• Those “late” Bombardier vehicles sitting in storage for so long while the line got delayed endlessly that some of them had worn down to the point of needing maintenance before they had ever been used once

Even in the best of times, Line 5 was going to be a difficult project. But the measure of success was never going to be an absence of problems, it was going to be a smooth and effective cross-agency system of handling the problems that inevitably reared their heads.

All problems are fixable if you’re trying to solve them instead of just trying to deflect issues onto someone, anyone else. The TTC, Metrolinx, and Crosslinx all had good reason to feel slighted by the other. But, frankly, grow up. All their bickering ever managed to do was slow the project down and make it a bigger stain on everyone’s reputation.

The immaturity of each party means they all share some responsibility for this fiasco. But one party, in my opinion, bears more responsibility than others.

Remember what I said earlier about the raison d’etre of Metrolinx? Well, there's another, more cynical reason they exist—so the Ontario government can direct the development of transit projects while having a convenient shield that distances the elected politicians from problems on the projects they oversee.

The Government of Ontario directly runs Metrolinx. They pretend they don't, but they do. The board of directors are all appointed directly by the Minister of Transportation with no outside influence from anyone else, including the governments of the municipalities that Metrolinx directly impacts. Any supposed separation is merely semantic.

The real reason Metrolinx let Crosslinx have such a long leash was that they wanted, as much as possible, to not appear to the public like they were responsible for any delays. Of course, it's this attitude which ended up creating delays in the first place.

In 2022, a public inquiry was released on Ottawa's LRT project, the O-Train, which went through a similar construction hell. This report was extremely humiliating for everyone involved. While this wasn't a Metrolinx project, they seemed to be watching the public inquiry closely—not to avoid similar construction problems, but to avoid similar public embarrassment.

Metrolinx went completely silent on any possible opening date updates, which (according to leaked documents) was at the direction of the province, presumably because the electorate is more sensitive to blown deadlines than no deadlines. The median voter doesn’t really understand how long building an LRT should take—but they do understand “six years late and five billion dollars over budget”. The best solution, if all you care about is your reputation, is to leave the public in the dark and hope they just get used to absurdly long build times on projects being built in their streets with their tax money.

This is still happening, by the way. Almost none of Metrolinx's currently under construction projects have public opening dates. They're building new LRTs in Mississauga and Hamilton right now and the public has no idea when they might be done. We only got an opening date for the Eglinton Line five days before it happened.

And, wouldn't you know it, despite the province initiating the review into the O-Train, Premier Ford now seems to think a public inquiry into the Eglinton fiasco is unnecessary. We may never know the full story of what the hell happened here because Ford wants to avoid accountability when it's his government being held accountable.

As long as the main priority of Metrolinx is to shield Doug Ford from embarrassment, we're not going to build transit like we need to in Ontario.

I think people have a bad habit of treating the Eglinton LRT more like a metaphor than a real construction project.

It’s a rich metaphor, to be sure. A swath was cut through earth directly through one of the busiest arteries in the busiest city in the country, leaving a wound on the psyche of Torontonians that would be very slow to heal.

It’s a flexible metaphor, too. You could use it as a representation of any number of issues, big or small. Is it a representation of Canada’s urban decline? Does it represent our inability to build the things we need in our society? Is it a symbol of the dangers of neoliberal privatization, or is it yet another big government boondoggle that spiralled out of control?

I want to push back on this a little. The Eglinton LRT is a lot of things, but we shouldn’t treat it as an inevitable consequence of some kind of moral failing or deficiency in modern Canadian society. This project was a real construction project which fell apart for specific, knowable reasons, which have been deliberately obscured by the province for the sake of reputational protection.

What I fear most is that people will simply think that this is just how big construction projects work in Canada. They’ll see big, ambitious projects being developed elsewhere around the world, and just assume it can’t work here because of some issue with the nature of the Canadian spirit.

Many powerful people in this country would love it if you believed this, because it means you would demand less of them. I urge you to demand more.

There is no reason why we should settle for anything less than the best. Toronto is one of the great cities of the world, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be considered among the most pleasant, rideable cities in the world too. But it’ll never happen if the power brokers of our society think they can get away with mediocrity, secrecy, and ripping you off.

I think the first step is to understand, in detail, what exactly happened here, and to demand enough transparency from Metrolinx and the province that the public can spot when a project is going off the rails for the same petty, personal reasons as the Eglinton LRT.

We can’t afford to let things like this keep happening. There’s just too much left to do.

Take Wii Sports out of the sleeve, put it back in the console, and let the music wash over you. Now, what to play? You remember enjoying baseball. Wouldn't that be fun?

The character select screen will prompt you to pick a Mii. Find yourself. It's definitely you. You'll recognize it. But would your friends? You don't have that haircut anymore. You dyed your hair years ago. Was that really the shape of your smile? Try your best to remember. You don't have many photos from back then.

Watch the sun rise over Wii Sports Stadium. Feel the warmth of the TV on your skin. See the empty stands, colored to look to the distant eye like a crowd, and marvel at how the illusion falls apart before your cynical adult eyes.

Every position on both teams will be staffed by Mii players from your system's save data. As you step up to the plate for the first time, notice who's facing for you on each base. Siblings, cousins, teachers, friends.

You used to play real baseball with these people. Well, it was soccer baseball—the school would never let you swing a real baseball bat—but it was still your favourite part of gym class. Even when you got picked last, it was still a thrill to watch your athletic friend kick a ball over the fence and into the high school next door.

Watch as that friend steps up to the plate as if stepping directly out of that memory. Figure out what happened to that friend. Open Instagram or LinkedIn to find out they're working in Toronto now, or maybe they're engaged.

When you feel compelled to leave the game, feel free to follow that urge. Watch as your eyes move to the Mii Channel. Those friends on your baseball team are people you hadn't thought about in years. Who else might you find inside?

Notice how placid the Mii Plaza is. See how the horizon stretches into a white haze on the horizon. Look from the top down on all your Miis, like a child looking over an anthill. Count each one.

Every single one of them was made of a real person, by a real person. Each of them reflect how that person looked, yes, but also how they looked to you. They're your brother before you moved away and you stopped knowing everything about them. They're your parents before you realized you couldn't always count on them. They're the friends who moved away when you were eight who you promised to stay in touch with.

(Well, except for the one you made ugly on purpose—but that one's a reflection of your sense of humor at age six when you sat around the TV trying to make each other laugh, so I think it's earned a place.)

These Miis can play sports, party, and go racing together. They live together in peace and play. Nothing changes them, and nothing ever will. No one leaves the group, and no one joins.

Remember how, when you were a kid, this is what you thought the future would be. Hanging out with your friends forever.

Perhaps, you could add new characters to your Mii Plaza. Maybe you want to make this a living garden of the people who have shaped you. Maybe it matters to you that those you love can meet and mingle with those you loved.

Or you could leave the Mii Plaza alone. Maybe it's important to you to preserve this relic from this stage of your life. Moments in time are rarely preserved so purely. Isn't this a gift?

A common optimization technique in computer science is to take advantage of Spatial Locality, which is the idea that it's faster for a computer to read memory that's closer to the memory it's currently using, as opposed to having to find and load bits of memory from disparate parts of storage. I find that my brain works in a similar way. There's a lot of mental energy required to context-switch between multiple different tasks, so it's a better use of your focus to try to do one thing for longer, deeper stretches of time, rather than attempting to multitask.

This is kind of an extension of the point above, but I find that even if I'm focused on a single task, having a bunch of in-progress tasks I'm leaving half-done takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. I liken it to having a bunch of old browser tabs open in my brain, clogging up RAM I desperately need for other things. Once I start something, part of my brain is dedicated to thinking about it and rolling it over in my head until I actually finish it and can "close the tab". Handling a bunch of small, quick tasks before my big ones kind of feels like cheating (aren't I just putting off my harder work?) but the benefits to only worrying about one thing at once seems to really make a difference for me.

You've probably heard the advice to block distracting apps before. Most of you have probably tried it at one point or another, only to need to disable the block for some reason and then never turning it back on. I've realized that it's a big ask to try and get people to NEVER use those distracting apps (big tech has done a really good job making itself indispensable). Instead, try blocking it only at specific times which you know are particularly problematic. I have a big problem getting off my phone when I'm about to go to bed or I'm just waking up. I think this is because when I'm tired, my self-control is weakest, and the easiest thing to do is just keep scrolling. So I set my phone to deactivate basically all apps from 12<30am> to 10am, and it's made a huge difference for me.

One of the most powerful, primal human emotions is shame. If you're smart about it, you can use this force as a natural counterweight against your brain's other primal urges, such as the desire for novelty and distraction. Try to set up a situation where it would be embarrassing to get distracted by something. One easy way to do it is to work with a friend near you who promises to bug you if you spend too much time doomscrolling. If you can't find a friend on short notice, I find a substitute is to work in a public space with your screen facing people behind you, so they can kinda see what you're doing if you close your work tab and start watching brainrot YouTube videos.

Sometimes, your body is telling you that you just need a break, and no amount of trying to work will accomplish anything. Don't deny this feeling. I can't tell you how many hours I've wasted trying to work because I had things to do, but my body wasn't going to budge. It's the worst kind of situation because you're not getting any work done, but you also aren't really resting so you won't be in a position to get any work done anytime soon. If your body is telling you that it's really not having it, don't waste time trying to force something that isn't going to happen. Let yourself actually rest for 30-60 minutes, and you'll save 4 hours of pretending to work.

Finally, make sure you keep your eye on the ball. Remember, you're not just fighting your own impulses here—there are thousands of very smart people at some of the richest corporations in the history of the world who spend all day thinking of more effective ways to distract you. Keep your eye out, stay self-aware, and you may realize you've started to spend more time than you want on a particular website or app. Maybe you tried to spend an hour studying but you just started doomscrolling Reddit and couldn't stop. Maybe it was Instagram. Maybe it was Wikipedia. Whatever it is, you should accept that you'll probably need to keep "plugging the holes" in your focus strategy, and be self-aware enough to notice the things taking more of your time than you want them to. Most importantly, don't take it personally. Getting distracted is just part of the human psyche. It's not your fault unless you choose to not try and do something about it.

High Roller never looked at his cards. He didn't need to.

After all, a game of poker isn't played on a table, between shuffled hands of cards. Poker is played in the mind; a match of wits and shrewdness. Can you notice the twitch of an eye, a particular fidget, the pattern in the clouds in the windows behind him?

High Roller could. It's why he was still here, playing with the best in a tower high above the frozen pavement below, leaning back and smiling as his opponents told him everything he ever needed to know.

The real trick, he knew, was to keep every other player off their guard. It meant unpredictability, and it often meant being crass, but damn if it didn't work. Earlier in this evening’s game, he had intercepted a waiter carrying one of his opponents drinks, and simply took the drink for himself, maintaining steely eye contact with her throughout.

He scanned across the table. Confusion and pity had settled like a thick fog over the entire floor. The whole casino, it seemed, was looking at him. Of course, that was the plan. If they were looking at him, they weren't looking at their cards. Just like him. He'd leveled the playing field.

He had seen enough. He slid his entire stack forwards, leaning in, daring anyone else to try and match him. He was all in.

High Roller knew he was in control, and he was just on the cusp of winning big.

High Roller didn't look at the crowd around him. He didn't need to.

He didn't need to turn his head to perfectly picture the looks of fear on their faces. Did he regret that this intimidation was necessary? Maybe, but there were worse things to happen to someone than getting startled by a man with a gun.

His focus needed to be on the woman in green across the table from him. Watching people, seeking opportunities, exploiting a tell. It's what he was best at. To be honest, it's the thing that made him feel most like himself.

The real art of it was in balancing how much of a threat he seemed to be. All he needed was a few hundred dollars from the register. He needed to make the threat of violence seem real, but not so real that the cashier’s fight or flight instincts kicked in.

The push and pull was a delicate dance, and required the utmost attention to his own body, not to mention hers. Never taking his eyes off hers, he slipped his hand lower down his thigh towards the pistol he had already made sure she could see.

She immediately stiffened, choking back a sob. Alright, that was pushing it. High Roller pulled his hand back up, and listened as she sharply exhaled. He felt for her, of course--this must have been quite frightening--but on the other hand, isn't this just how one plays the game? You need to know when to hold and when to fold, so to speak.

He heard noises outside. No one in the building had left, he thought... had they? Wouldn’t he have heard the door chime?

High Roller didn't dare look away from the woman in front of him, but he saw her looking past him, to something that made her eyes widen.

Not a problem, he thought. The balance of what counted as threatening had changed, that's all. He just needed to tilt it back.

High Roller knew he was in control, and he was just on the cusp of winning.

High Roller didn't look at the churning waters below. He didn't need to.

Really, if he focused on anything, there was a chance he'd start to vomit. He was quite susceptible to seasickness, which is why he insisted he not get in the barrel, particularly since it was too big, and he kept getting thrown from side to side as it hurtled down the Niagara River.

But the man who seemed in charge insisted that he get in, his goons seemed willing to back him up, and in the interest of picking his battles, High Roller ultimately agreed. He had to begrudgingly admit that yes, since they had paid for the clothes on his back and the gun in his pocket, they had the right to take it back if they so chose. Given all his outstanding debt, he was lucky he even got the barrel.

Anyways, it was all in the past, and it seemed far more urgent to keep his mind focused on the oncoming edge, the Maid of the Mist surely below. It was hard to pay attention, given the noise, but he had to make sure he never broke eye contact with the churning waters ahead.

Gravity was a powerful force, sure, but it was nothing he couldn't outwit if he put his mind to it. He would just need to figure out how to convince the rocks below to get smaller, to pull the sky towards him when it least expected it. Maybe he could confuse time into moving backwards long enough for him to make his escape.

High Roller knew he was in control, and he was just on the cusp of making it out of this alive. He just had to think of something.

At exactly 8:35:03 AM on October 3rd, 2031, the sun above Toronto disappeared.

The city plunged into sudden darkness. Screams filled the streets, ringing like church bells. Pedestrians on the sidewalk ducked inside of buildings, hiding under tables in preparation for a storm or a bomb. One vehicle on the freeway slammed on the brakes out of fear, causing a pileup during rush hour.

The people of Toronto, so terrified and preoccupied with what was happening, never had time to wonder whether this was happening to anyone else. They would learn only in the following hours and days that this same darkness had swallowed New York City, Tokyo, Beijing, and the rest of the top hundred—exactly one hundred—metropolitan centers on Earth.

What happened next, the whole world would share. Exactly seventeen seconds after the sun left the sky, a quiet ringing became audible in the ear of every human being. Then the ringing became louder, and louder, until it overwhelmed every other noise that anyone had ever known.

Then, suddenly, a voice, confident and cold, cut through the static.

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INTERRUPTION, BUT WE HAVE A BRIEF MESSAGE WE WISH TO SHARE. IT IS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO EVERY MEMBER OF YOUR SPECIES, AND THUS EACH MEMBER IS NOW RECEIVING IT IN THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE.

WE ARE PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE INITIAL PHASE OF OUR EXPERIMENT HAS COME TO A CONCLUSION, AND THE RESULTS ARE READY TO BE SHARED.

Parents found their children, screaming silently, and tried to soothe them with words that neither could hear. Strangers on a streetcar found each other’s eyes and hands, as if to say yes, this is happening to me, is it happening to you, is this real?

The voice continued, uninterrupted.

IN SHORT, THIS EXPERIMENT INVOLVED THE DELIBERATE CREATION, GUIDANCE AND MONITORING OF THE HUMAN RACE AND YOUR PLANET AS A SOCIOLOGICAL CONTROLLED TEST. THE FULL DETAILS ARE CURRENTLY BEING DELIVERED TO THE TOP TEN THOUSAND HUMAN LEADERS, THINKERS, AND ARTISTS, BUT WE SHALL PROVIDE A SUMMARY OF SEVERAL RELEVANT DETAILS NOW.

A woman sitting on a park bench—frozen in fear, boba tea still in hand—felt a breeze in front of her. Her eyes adjusted, and could just barely make out a black cube, the size of a clenched fist, hovering in front of her. As she made eye contact with the machine, it gave a pleasant chirp, materialized a stack of papers on the ground in front of her, and drifted like a balloon back up to the sunless sky.

THE OBJECTIVE OF THIS EXPERIMENT WAS TO DISCOVER HOW A SOCIETY DEVELOPS FROM NOTHING, IN TOTAL ISOLATION FROM THE INFLUENCES OF THE GALACTIC COMMUNITY. TO THAT EFFECT, IT WAS NECESSARY THAT YOU BE SHIELDED FROM ALL EXTERNAL CONTACT WITH OTHER PLANETS.

THIS RESTRICTION IS NO LONGER REQUIRED FOR OUR RESEARCH, AND THE SENSORY VEIL AROUND YOUR PLANET HAS THEREFORE BEEN LIFTED. WE EXPECT OTHER INTERSTELLAR CIVILIZATIONS TO PROMPTLY MAKE CONTACT WITH AIMS OF MUTUAL DIALOGUE AND COMMERCE.

Those still brave enough to be outside, whose curiosity had overcome their fear, realized their eyes had adjusted just enough to look up and see… something overhead. It was not the familiar moonless midnight sky which was causing the sudden darkness. Lines, contours, and blinking pink lights could be made out on a shape which seemed to stretch across the entire city, as far as a human eye could see.

Something above them was blotting out the sky.

AN EXTRASOLAR SOCIETY YOU MAY WISH TO PRIORITIZE ARE THE ADDITIONAL HUMAN RACES, AND ADDITIONAL EARTHS, CREATED FOR THIS EXPERIMENT.

FOR BEST RESULTS, WE NEEDED TO CREATE ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR TOTAL ISOLATED HUMAN ENVIRONMENTS, EACH WITH SLIGHTLY TWEAKED GENETIC MAKEUP, PLANETARY GEOGRAPHY, AND INTRODUCED PHILOSOPHIES.

WE EXPECT YOU TO HAVE PRODUCTIVE DIALOGUE WITH YOUR PARALLEL SOCIETIES. DESPITE THEIR INDEPENDENT EVOLUTIONARY PATHS, THEIR HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT MATCHES YOURS IN MANY KEY WAYS. IN FACT, MANY INSTANCES INDEPENDENTLY DEVELOPED SIMILAR MYTHS AND RELIGIONS TO YOURS, WHICH IS JUST ONE OF THE FASCINATING RESULTS WE ARE SHARING WITH YOU TODAY.

Across the planet, militaries of every nation scrambled to launch fighter jets and communicate targets for their surface-to-air missile batteries. Pilots sprinted across their tarmac, sure that the world was ending. But they needn’t have put in the effort.

THE REASON WE ARE INFORMING YOU OF THIS IS BECAUSE THE PARAMETERS OF OUR EXPERIMENT HAVE NOW CHANGED.

A deep, seismic rumble suddenly rolled through Toronto like a wave. Car alarms started, and windows shattered, not that anyone could hear them. But every resident could feel the terrible tremble deep in their guts.

Those still outside, despite all of their self-preservation instincts, noticed the patterns in the sky start to move. They could see the object move further and further away, getting smaller and smaller, until they could see the object’s edge—a massive disk, floating in the sky, shrinking rapidly each second.

THE WHOLE OF YOUR HISTORY UNTIL THIS POINT WAS OUR ATTEMPT TO STUDY HOW A SOCIETY EVOLVES WHEN THEY BELIEVE THEY WERE CREATED WITHOUT PURPOSE, ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE.

WE NOW INTEND TO STUDY WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A SOCIETY REALIZES THEY WERE WRONG.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION, AND YOUR CONTINUED PARTICIPATION IN OUR RESEARCH.

Then there was noise, and sunlight.

Imagine living in a city that can’t build public transit. Could not be me.

The REM, Montreal’s new urban metro system, has officially opened! This miraculous line connects downtown Montreal to the northern island and the suburbs in Deux-Montagnes and Laval. It’s a really ambitious public transit project in Canada which got built to spec, basically on time, and basically on budget. Exploring how this happened—and if we can do it again—is critical for the success of future Canadian transit projects.

But I don’t just want to lore-dump on you. I thought I’d spice up this municipal infrastructure analysis with my very own REM opening weekend trip report! I rode up and down the entire new branch and stopped at every single new station to celebrate the big day. I don’t just want this to be a history lesson, I want to make you really feel like you’re riding the REM with me.

Allons-y!

My journey began with the long trek out of my warm bed into the shower at 8 in the morning. Why so early? Well, for the special inauguration celebrations, they were only running trains from 9am-6pm, and I wanted to complete my journey in time to start writing about it at the Montreal Socratica, which runs from noon to 3-ish. I worried if I left after 3, I could have gotten trapped forever in Laval, never to be seen again.

I began my journey at the newly opened McGill stop, conveniently located inside the existing McGill Metro. This is an important stop because it connects directly to the Metro’s Green Line. In fact, with the new branch open, the REM now has direct connections with the three major Montreal subway lines (Orange at Gare Central, Green at McGill, and Blue at Édouard-Montpetit).

This kind of coordination is not only convenient for riders, but also probably a necessity to avoid turning whichever station does have the connection into a giant choke-point. Consider how GO’s busiest line, Lakeshore West, only has one direct connection to the TTC at Union Station.¹ No matter where you’re going, you need to get off at Union and then find a transfer.

Of course, this isn’t a coincidence. The REM is under the purview of the ARTM,² which is essentially the Montreal-area Metrolinx—an amalgamation of regional transit groups that can now plan for the long-term future of the entire region into account, as well as do helpful things like integrate fares between networks and build shared station infrastructure. The upside, in theory, is a smoother experience for the rider, no matter how many systems you need to hop, and thankfully the ARTM has been able to broadly deliver on this.³

But I’m getting off track (exactly the opposite of what you want from your transit)! The first thing that happened when I arrived at the station was I noticed all the staff, dressed sharply in REM-branded toques and crewnecks, waiting to greet me with a friendly bonjour. They passed me an opening-day passport which had empty pages for staff at each station to stamp, a really cute concept. They also offered me some piece of cardboard which looked almost like a big ticket, but I thought it would be too annoying to carry around so I passed and entered the main metro waiting area.

A lot of the REM’s best modern touches are comfort features in the platform itself. The most immediately obvious ones are the Platform Screen Doors, sliding doors which separate the waiting riders from the track, only opening when the train actually arrives. These are mainly a feature for rider safety, but an underrated benefit is that the non-underground stations later down the line can be in buildings which are completely climate-controlled with no exposure to the frigid Montreal winters. And besides keeping people safe from falling on the tracks, it also keeps the automated system moving quickly without needing to account for people or objects in the way of the train.

Oh yeah, the REM is fully automated, meaning there’s no drivers in the train itself. This is a cool technological advancement rolling out to more and more systems around the world—although it takes a bit of a sinister undertone in the wake of various STM labour strikes earlier this winter. Despite this, there are clear upsides for the operator and user: more space in the train, reduced risk of accidents, and the ability to keep trains moving faster and more flexibly.

Speaking of moving fast, it was only a few minutes before my first train arrived. These things were really quiet, even compared to the relatively quiet regular Metro service we have here (although that probably had something to do with the screen doors). I loaded in near the front and took stock of my surroundings, including glancing up at the front windows.

An aesthetic benefit of automation is that the front and back of the train can be full glass windows, giving you an excellent view of the city you’re speeding towards. Every time I saw a train pull in, there were at least a half-dozen kids crowded at the front windows with their face against the glass, watching the world speed by. I can imagine what a great first impression this could make to first-time visitors to the city, especially when the extension to YUL Montreal-Trudeau Airport is finished.⁴

While I was watching the kids on the train, I noticed them holding something interesting. It was a long cardboard model of the REM train itself! It was so adorable, and I instantly realized ohh, THAT’S what they were trying to give me when I got my passport, and I started kicking myself when I realized I had turned it down. Fortunately for me, every station I stopped at had literally hundreds more to give out, so I got my own little REM-chan soon enough.

The actual ride itself was uniformly smooth and fast. It feels a lot like being on the regular subway—it even has a similar sounding announcer voice who politely informs you about the prochaine station.⁵ A full trip from McGill to the line’s terminus in Deux-Montagnes will take you about half an hour (unless you’re stopping at every station to look around like I was).

The non-underground, non-metro connection stations all have a similar look. They’re all large, fully enclosed buildings. They’re clean, sleek, and modern-looking. The platform itself is usually elevated a storey above the ground, with large staircases and elevators to take you up. The only roof in the building is the one up on the higher platform level, which alongside the full-body glass walls helps make the stations feel very spacious and not claustrophobic, which is something I appreciate about most of the metro stations in the city.

There is one disappointment I have about the stations, though, and that’s that they all look extremely similar. Each Metro station in Montreal kind of has its own thing going on, with different styles of tiling, big murals visible from the platform, different shapes and layouts, etc. It helps make each station feel like it has a unique identity, and it’s a shame the REM didn’t follow this trend of unique architecture.

A related problem I may have had is the lack of art in the stations, another key element of the Montreal Metro I was very impressed by during my first visit to the city. I say may have had because despite me only seeing art in one station I visited (Édouard-Montpetit, the final one on my way back to McGill), apparently there actually was more art on the route that I either missed or wasn’t built yet, so it may just be a skill issue on my part.⁶

The stations are in interesting spots, often EXTREMELY close to suburban housing developments—to the point where I could probably read the lips of the people living in some of the houses nearby. They must have really squeezed these stations into any gap they could. I don’t know the bus situation in this area very well, but as I understand the ARTM has done some rejigging to make getting to the REM stations by bus pretty easy, which should help get cars out of the road in the suburbs.

The inauguration festivities at each station were relatively humble, but I still had a fun time getting the stamps in my little passport for each station I visited. I was initially unsure if I was going to get them all or not, but I decided eventually that I was having enough fun exploring the stations and their surroundings that I did see them all.

After getting some free hot chocolate and REM-green muffins at the end of the line, I took it all the way back. I’m glad I went early because it really started filling up around noon—by the time I got back to McGill around 12:45 there was a massive line to enter the Deux-Montagnes direction, even with trains every 10 minutes.

Oh yeah, did I mention that trains run every 10 minutes, and as quickly as every 5 minutes during rush hour? Man, the REM is cool.

So what will the long-term future and impact of the REM be? Much of that depends on how the system evolves and shapes up in the future, but there are already some lessons we can learn. Despite some delays and teething issues, it’s hard to say the REM hasn’t been a success.

From a purely cost perspective, the REM in its totality is currently projected to cost about C$8 billion, or ~$140 million per kilometre for 67 kilometres of rail. This sounds like a lot of money—and it is—but it’s also orders of magnitude cheaper than similar projects across North America.

For example, Silicon Valley’s Berryessa BART extension cost C$3.23 billion for 16km (C$201M/km). New York’s Second Avenue Subway Extension is expected to cost C$8.41 billion for 2.4km (C$3.5B/km). And not to kick a dead horse, but the long-suffering Eglinton Line has cost $12 billion for 19km of rail—$631 million per kilometre for a plain-old above-ground light rail!⁷

Some of this has to do with the specific type of project: much of it is in suburban Montreal where they don’t need to dig underground, and they got to use an existing tunnel under Mont Royal for the metro-adjacent parts. It was built along freeways and land the city already owned and didn’t need to spend money for. These cost-cutting measures aren't always an option.

But some of it is also to do with the unique funding structure. It was developed as a Private Public Partnership (P3), where a corporation helps fund a public infrastructure project in exchange for partial ownership. P3s are attractive to governments not only because they require less taxpayer money be spent, but also because of a neoliberal belief that private entities are inherently more efficient than government, and that public services would be therefore better when outsourced to corporations under competitive pressure from the free market. This belief has a… let’s say, mixed track record when it encounters reality.

The most notorious example for Ontarians is the 407 toll highway, built by the provincial government and then sold to a private consortium under the belief that they could use the sale to pay down Ontario’s debts, and that market forces would keep tolls low. It did not, and toll prices have risen almost every year since, with all that money going to private investors.

Given how badly that went, it’s justified to be a little suspicious of the fact that the REM is fully owned by the CDPQ, Quebec’s biggest pension plan. But the devil is always in the details, and while we need to wait and see how it turns out, there’s reason to be optimistic this could go better than the 407.

The biggest difference is that the CDPQ is getting paid a flat, pre-defined rate per customer per kilometre by the ARTM, who actually collects the fares. This means that if the CDPQ wants to get more money from their asset, the best way to do it is to increase ridership, not start gouging existing customers who have no other options.

Another reason is that, while the governments of Quebec and Canada did put in money into the REM, all overrun costs are paid by the CDPQ. Public funders like Metrolinx are often motivated more by fear of embarrassment rather than fear of waste, so they’ll often allocate huge amounts of time and money upfront to avoid the PR hit of needing to ask for more of either.

But what seems to happen (at least in Ontario) is that the work simply fills the budget allocated for it, and they need to extend anyways, so they end up paying more than necessary twice. It’s better to have a project budgeted for $6 billion that doubles to $12 billion, than a $15 billion project delivered as expected.

It’s not all sacrifices from the CDPQ, though. The government played a major role in clearing the way for the REM, passing all sorts of special exceptions to speed along development, but also by not taking any participation in the design phase, giving the CDPQ maximum options and full autonomy to get into the weeds.

A counterexample to this style is, sadly, GO Expansion, the ambitious plan to give GO trains REM-like service and frequency which collapsed recently because of disagreements between Metrolinx and Deutsche Bahn, the private operator that Metrolinx hired and then seemingly micromanaged into quitting the project entirely.⁸

The REM certainly isn’t flawless, and the cancellation of REM de l’Est is a discouraging sign for this model being replicated in the future. But we have a lot of public infrastructure we need to build in Canada, and right now the REM is our biggest success story in at least a decade. For the sake of future generations—and more importantly, the Toronto-Montreal high speed rail project that God help me I WILL live to ride—we need to take every lesson we can from what went so right here.

In conclusion: c’est bon.

Sources:

• https://transitcenter.org/on-track-for-success-decoding-montreals-rem-model-for-efficient-transit-projects-in-the-u-s/
• https://www.lexpert.ca/news/legal-faq/public-private-partnerships-in-canada/390366
• https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-30/how-montreal-s-new-rapid-transit-line-saved-millions-per-mile

Also, all photos in this article were taken by me!

This article is specifically for all the first years out there.

Hi! How are you all feeling? First midterm season is always a huge gut punch. I remember feeling like I was going to fail out of all my courses. If it helps, I can tell you from experience as a fourth year that this is probably the hardest it's ever going to be. Sure, the classes are going to get more complex and advanced, but you'll know how to study better, what not to do, and you'll just generally know what you're in for more. You'll get better at this.

But this article isn't really about that. It's a bit of small advice, bundled up as a math lesson. This counts as studying, so feel free to read it guilt free.

If you ever take an algorithms course, you'll learn about something called a 'greedy algorithm'. The basic idea is that at each step of the algorithm, it takes whatever choice immediately maximizes a certain metric, without thinking about past or future steps. It's a pretty simple idea, but remarkably robust, and surprisingly optimal in a lot of use cases.

At least, it's worked out well for me.

You might get to a point in your undergraduate career when you start being drawn to something outside the realm of your major. That's a really precious feeling. Don't run away from it.

It can be a scary feeling, because it can draw you away from a path you had worked very hard to place yourself on. I know that for many of you, getting into your university was a really big deal—the culmination of countless long days and nights of studying and preparation.

I'm also not recommending throwing away your entire life plan in the face of, say, a difficult midterm. Knowing how to handle take tough hits like that is another important skill you'll hone over the next few years here.

But, and I'm truly sorry for the cliche here, now is the time to discover yourself. University life is going to change you a lot. You'll be exposed to new people and new ideas. This is the next step of your life, and if you decide now that something is more interesting to you than following the path you had planned... I can't promise it'll always be the optimal solution, but it'll usually be close.

I've tried to live my life by following the most interesting opportunity available to me at any given time, and I think I'm a lot happier for it.

If you can let an old man (22) give some sage advice, you should give yourself permission to chase the things that interest you. Don't be afraid of that voice in your head telling you what you'd really rather be doing. Some people spend their whole lives waiting to hear it—don't let it fade away, unanswered.

“If they arrest us, well, there’s nothing you can do.”
Mohammad Rasoulof, Vanity Fair, 2024

I saw The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (2024) on February 2nd, 2025, and I’m still thinking about it. If you’re looking for a review, that’s as glowing as it gets from me.

The movie is the latest by Iranian filmmaker, anti-regime activist, and current political exile Mohammad Rasoulof. Rasoulof has been making various anti-regime films since 2002, which have always skirted on the edge of legality within Iran’s heavily-censored media environment, and he’s even been arrested and jailed a few times for agitating against the regime, in film and otherwise.

Some people, when faced with this kind of risk to their lives and livelihood, would back off. Rasoulof, reflecting on his persecution while serving his latest stint in prison, seemed to take it as a challenge.

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, a wave of civil unrest sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was severely beaten by Iran’s morality police for “improperly” wearing her hijab. The protests quickly broadened into an expression of general anger against the Iranian theocracy, which responded in turn with swift brutality—over five hundred protesters are said to have been killed by police.

The movie isn’t a documentary, though. It’s a work of historical fiction (albeit about history which was less than a year old when they were filming). The heart of the story is the growing internal tension within a single family in Tehran. The father is a prominent and devout member of the Iranian legal system, about to be accepted onto the Revolutionary Court. The two daughters are increasingly politically aware and growing more radical, following the protests closely on social media. The mother is caught in the middle, trying in vain to hold her family together.

One of the first things that happens in the movie is the father making the slow realization that his job isn’t to independently determine the facts and deliver justice—it’s to sign death warrants for protesters who haven’t been conclusively proven to have done anything illegal, let alone anything immoral. In a less interesting movie, this would be the start of a slow radicalization against the regime as he learns the truth of what it really means to have a part of your government called the morality police.

Instead, the father seems to have the opposite reaction—the crisis of faith not met with reflection, but deflection. The emptiness and doubt in his heart needs to be filled by firmness and conviction at home, to prove to himself that he’s still in control over his own life.

Of course, this increases tensions with his daughters, and the paranoia that comes from the realization that they suddenly don’t trust each other is the main narrative driver of the film. The father really starts spiraling when the handgun he was issued for his own protection goes missing, and he believes a member of his family took it, leading to interrogations and accusations that eventually culminate in… well, I won’t spoil the whole thing for you.

You can really feel the production in this movie, if that makes sense. The film can feel a little claustrophobic at times. Not only do the characters only feel safe to truly express themselves inside their own apartment, the crew could only ever film something like this indoors—and in secret. Filming an actress in private without a hijab is illegal and so must be done in secret, but beyond even that, filming someone with these quietly radical sentiments wouldn’t be allowed. The actors are playing characters who are hiding anti-regime sentiments, while being human beings who need to hide anti-regime sentiments.

There are brief sections set outside and in public, but since the production couldn’t draw any attention to themselves, they needed to look like they were filming something entirely proper and legal. The characters, in turn, are trying to look innocent in public while they subtly ask around for information about a friend of the girls who went missing after a protest.

The acting feels authentic because it’s true to what the actors were experiencing as they made the film, if for different reasons. Everyone in the film feels like they know things could all fall apart at any moment.

Eventually, of course, it did.

Rasoulof was informed that he had been charged for his previous defiance against the regime and sentenced to be jailed for eight years—and likely more, once they learned about The Seed Of The Sacred Fig. As he waited for his appeal to be processed, he spent as much energy as he could on the film, waiting for his time to run out. When his lawyer informed him that the appeal had failed and his sentence was to be started immediately, Rasoulof had a choice to make.

But the movie wasn’t done, so the choice was clear. Not easy, just obvious.

Rasoulof fled Tehran on foot, following a secret path, aiming to claim asylum in Germany. It took him 28 days of travel by trail and truck and plane until he arrived safely in Hamburg. The first place he went was to meet his film’s editor. After all, there was only six days until The Seed Of The Sacred Fig would premiere at Cannes—there was no time to lose.

Of course, the movie is flawed. The last act in particular feels like it drags, and some of the commentary is aggressively unsubtle.

But somehow, all of that feels rather beside the point.

There’s one more trick the movie pulls that really stuck with me.

The movie is set during mass anti-government protests, and the violent government crackdown plays a key role in the ratcheting up of the tension. Obviously, these protests need to be seen on screen. Also obvious: the filmmakers can’t film it the traditional way, either by going into the real crowds and filming with their professional camera equipment or by recreating it using extras.

But these were protests in the 2020s, which meant they were extensively documented—on vertical mobile phone cameras by everyday people from their apartment windows, or by passing cars.

Anytime in the movie when it would make sense to show the protests—the mother is driving through a crowd, the girls are doomscrolling on their phones—we cut to real footage filmed during the protests by real people.

This has a fascinating effect*.* On one hand, there’s a level of emotional distance this creates from the events shown. When the rest of the film is shot so intimately and delicately, cutting to shaky, blurry footage means we only get a passing, cursory knowledge of the people in this video. It’s on the screen for only seconds before we swipe to the next one.

It really puts us in the perspective of the girls, more than anyone. They never actually go to a protest themselves, they just watch it along the sidelines, helplessly captivated and deeply furious at the injustice in their society, but never engaging in the real danger themselves.

I’m sure many of us have had that feeling too. The discombobulating effect of social media is to place videos of tragedy and chaos and death in between texts from our friends and reviews of local pizza places and cat videos. There’s a form of surrealness to it that separates us—or at least me—from these events emotionally. There’s a form of distance and.. bluntness (?) that makes it difficult to process the scale of the injustice you witness. By using only thisese third-party video footage shot from far away, the film captures this emotional distance very well.

On the other hand, holy shit, that’s a REAL video of someone ACTUALLY getting beat up by the cops.

When you watch a movie—any fictional movie, ever—you always know in the back of your head that these are actors. This is a fictional scenario. No one on screen is in any real danger of getting actually hurt in a way that doesn’t end when the camera stops. You can feel safe in that specific way, because there’s a barrier between the events of the film and reality.

That barrier is shattered by this choice. You’re reminded, frequently, that the events shown in this film really did happen. Hundreds of people died, and likely many thousands more were injured, for trying to exercise their basic human rights to dignity. The story may be fictional, but this struggle is very real, and it isn’t over.

How can a single filmmaking choice be simultaneously way more and way less intimate than any movie I’ve seen in years?

I’m still thinking about it today. What a fantastic film.

Further reading:

• https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/how-to-make-a-movie-in-iran-and-not-get-caught-inside-the-seed-of-the-sacred-fig
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/magazine/mohammad-rasoulof-iran-sacred-fig.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/may/17/exhausting-and-extremely-dangerous-mohammad-rasoulof-on-his-hazardous-escape-from-eight-year-sentence

Q: What do military battleships, speed dating, brainrot, kittens, and the ION all have in common?

A: You can turn all of them into great video games in 72 hours or less!

Last weekend, the UW Game Jam brought together over a hundred student developers in Waterloo (and beyond) for a marathon weekend of rapid-fire game development. Teams received a theme on Thursday and had a playable game on Sunday—that’s only 72 hours to make an entire video game from scratch!

The Fall 2025 iteration of the jam managed to break the records for number of participants and number of games submitted—a record set just last term. I’m absurdly proud to see more and more people each term coming to the jam to step out of their comfort zone, make their first game, and see how rewarding it can be to work on interactive art you care about, surrounded by a supportive and talented community (and an extra huge shoutout to the UW Game Dev Club exec team for how well-organized everything was)!

I’ve been traveling for the last few days and so I couldn’t find time to actually make anything myself, but I was so excited to play them all so that I could recommend to you the ones I liked the best. I was so excited, in fact, that I forgot the publication deadline for this article was the day after the jam. Whoops!

All that to say that there’s still plenty of games I haven’t gotten a chance to try. I’m sure they’re all worth your time to check out, but here are some of the ones I can personally recommend.

Dreadnought: A great example of how strong theming and art can make a simple game idea feel dramatic and epic. At its core, this is a game that could be played on pen and paper, but the layer of narrative theming around it—with letters from the front, messages received over the comms, UI you need to physically navigate, and a delicious moment of anticipation when you fire your gun—elevate it to something I got really invested in.

Cat vs. Bot: Games made for game jams are kind of the equivalent of flash fiction—it’s a chance to explore a short, punchy idea that only needs to sustain 5-10 minutes of gameplay, not several hours. Cat vs. Bot is a great example of this. It’s a short platformer game where, at each checkpoint, your controls are jumbled and rearranged in a new way. I love games that play around with the physical way you control them, and having to contort your hands to control your character in weirder ways each time is very funny.

Operator! Operator!: A simple game about connecting different nodes on a telephone switchboard to each other to connect the appropriate signals. In the later stages, it does feel really frantic, and you feel like a real multitasking telephone operator. Shoutout to the actual rope, which is a lot of physical fun to fiddle around with. I almost lost a few times because I just got distracted jiggling it around.

Mission: Seducible: A speed-dating game with incredibly high production values (full voice acting is CRAZY for a jam game) where you need to determine who of your three speed-dating partners is your true love, and who is an enemy spy trying to kill you. Not to flex, but I got the spy AND got a date on my first try, boosting my ego to dangerous levels.

I Heart Ion: A really fun idea for a visual novel where you only kinda understand what your romantic interest is actually saying. I got rejected by Ion-chan, which brought my ego back down to earth. Maybe a light rail girl and a human boy can’t fall in love after all...

Nostos: A really relaxing “press the button to the rhythm” game which is almost more of an interactive music video than a game. Play as a child on a boat in the ocean trying to signal a lighthouse for help and enjoy the original (!!!) music.

Jack Gordon’s Home Defense Simulator (2007) (5G Capable): On the exact opposite end of the relaxation spectrum is this brainrot-themed shoot-em-up game. As someone who doesn’t use TikTok, this is what I imagine it feels like to be on TikTok.

Rising Edge: A really creative tower defense game where not only do you need to construct the towers, but also the circuitry and wiring that links those towers together. You need to construct your own ad-hoc control system and manage your increasingly complex wiring to keep your defenses intact. This could easily be fleshed out into a full priced game.

Waterloo Is Not Love Island: A short and sweet narrative game with an excellent title about an oblivious new student searching for love in the wake of a murder. Great character names, too.

If you’re interested in playing some of these games (or any of the 20-ish I didn’t get a chance to try), head over to the itch.io page to try them all. Make sure to leave a nice comment and make someone’s day!

And if you’re feeling inspired and want to make your own game soon, you should join the Waterloo Game Development Club! Besides events like the termly Game Jam, they run weekly meetings on Thursdays where people give talks on game development and share what they’re working on, and Game Potlucks on Saturdays, where people bring a game they’ve been playing and show off why they like it.

Most importantly, though, it’s a great community of passionate people who love making games, and can encourage you to keep working at it when you get demotivated. If you’re at all interested, you should go to a meeting. To join, check out the Instagram and Discord links at the Linktree.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. Indeed, at length, and with nutty flavour, I would be avenged. I would not only punish but punish with sweet delight, a delight drawn close to oblivion. I must not let this wrong become unredressed, as if it were a delicious almond placed in plain view, never to be claimed, crushed, devoured.

Understand that by neither word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good taste in appetizers or snacks. He had a weak point, this Fortunato. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in almonds. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit, but in the matter of almonds, Fortunato was sincere.

The sky was the color of hazelnut, one evening during the supreme madness of the season when almonds are at the apex of ripeness and power. He accosted me with the warmth of the almond tree under the blazing Tuscan sun; he had been indulging in almonds far beyond his own limits. In fact, having observed the man from afar for the whole evening prior, I was pleased to see him thoughtlessly devour one-hundred thirty-seven almonds while the moon had yet to set in place, like a gleaming cashew in the sky.

I said to him— “My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. I have received a handful of what passes for Sonora, and I have my doubts.”

“How?” said he. “Sonora? Impossible! And in the middle of almond season, no less!”

“I have my doubts.”

“Sonara!”

“And I must satisfy them—or perhaps satisfy my stomach, or my heart. I am on my way to Luchesi. Some fools have it his taste for Mamra and Marcona may surpass your own—”

“Luchesi could not tell Sonora from mere California!”

I watched his hand closely as he spoke. He was perhaps too flush with almond, or preoccupied with eating, to pay me any mind. If he noticed me staring, he did not say. Each new almond, slipping through his lips, I counted. One, two… then seventy-eight. It was as if he was being guided by fate to slip onto my sword.

“Come, let us go,” he muttered through yet more mouthfuls of almonds. One-hundred and nine more, I took care to note.

“Whither?”

“To your vaults. I have no engagement.”

“My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe influence of the almonds with which I perceive you are afflicted,” I said with scarcely restrained glee.

“Let us go, nevertheless. These almonds are nothing. Sonora! You have been imposed upon…”

Thus speaking, Fortunato clenched my arm like he was digging his claws into a bowl of assorted nuts. I suffered him to hurry me to my almazzo, feeding him almonds along the way, counting seventy-three.

Once home, I took from my attendants’ quarters two chalices, filling each with exactly one-hundred eighty-three Ferragnes almonds apiece, and passing one to Fortunato, guided him through several suites of rooms and arched staircases, down a winding staircase into the vaults.

The gait of my friend was uneasy. I chanced a look at his chalice and saw that it was wholly empty upon our arrival in the damp Montresor catacombs. I passed him my own chalice, which he accepted without a conscious thought.

“The Sonara,” said he.

“It is farther on,” said I. “How long have you had that cough?”

“Ugh! ugh! ugh! —”

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for several minutes. I feared he was choking on his almonds. That fate would be too good for him; too painless.

“It is nothing,” he said, at last, slipping twenty-three almonds into his mouth for comfort.

“Come,” I said, with decision, “we will go back; your health is precious; the world has far more almonds left for you to revel in. You are a man to be missed. Besides, there is Luchesi—”

“Enough,” he said, “the cough is a mere chestnut; it shall not kill me.”

“True, true,” I replied, “but like almonds in their shell, you should use all proper caution. A handful of Monterey will defend you from the damp.”

I knocked the lid off a box and poured more almonds into his hands. Exactly three-hundred twenty-two, I watched, reverently, as they dropped into his stomach like ripe Tuono off the almond tree.

He stumbled to his feet. "Let us proceed to the Sonara."

The most remote end of the crypt was lined with spoiled almonds, piled overhead and around, as if we were at the foot of a sickly almond tree. Three sides of the crypt were ornated in this manner, with the fourth being adorned with a single Sonara almond.

"Sonara!" Fortunato proclaimed.

"Yes, herein is the Sonara. As for Luchesi—"

"He is peanut-brained," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, clumsily grasping the almond. With eyes like Molar, he brought it to his nose, then threw it into his throat.

The effect, as anticipated, was instantaneous. He fell to the ground, astounded. I took to busying myself among the mass of almond and rot. I uncovered a quantity of large, brick-style almonds and mortar. I began to vigorously wall up the entrance of the cavern.

I heard a low and moaning cry, muffled by a mouthful of almonds. I hearkened to it with satisfaction, and even dared enjoy the sound with a delicious almond snack.

"The Sonara..."

Then a succession of loud and shrill screams burst forth, shocking me.

"For the love of almonds, Montresor!"

Then a long and desperate silence. My heart grew sick as I knew his choral agony had ceased.

For I knew that his single Sonara was, in fact, his one thousand and eighty-sixth almond of the night—an amount which would ensure a lethal dose of cyanide would coagulate in poor Fortunato.

The Montresor vaults are rich in almonds and blood. For half a century no mortal has disturbed either bounty.

In almond requiescat!

The Self-Driving Car Principle

In 2013, Tesla CEO and notable buffoon Elon Musk publicly predicted that the cars his company produced would be “90% autonomous”—ie, self-driving—by 2016. In 2016, Musk publicly predicted that “you'll be able to summon your car from across the country” by 2018. In 2018, the deadline shifted again to “next year”. In 2019, he was saying “this year.” In 2020, he was also saying “this year”. In 2021, he was still saying “this year”.

Yes, okay, I know it’s easy (and fun!) to pick on Elon. But the interesting thing to me isn’t that he kept saying things like this, it’s that—for a while, at least—people believed him. Why did it seem so plausible that this once-impossible seeming technological fantasy was just out of reach?

Self-driving cars have been a hallmark of science fiction for decades. As such, they’ve been a consistent dream of techbros who aim to be the ones to “bring the world the future”. Research on self-driving cars has spanned decades, but it was only in the 2010s that the dream suddenly came into clear focus. It shifted from the realm of academic papers into Silicon Valley hype. It was seemingly just on the cusp of turning into a real product.

But it’s 2025, and I still need to get a driver’s license. What gives?

Well, it’s not that the technology stalled, per se. Driver assistance systems in cars today have progressed enormously and have undoubtedly stopped many accidents and saved many lives. Waymo runs 250,000 rides a week. But driver assistance tech still requires a driver to assist. Waymo only operates in a small handful of very specific, very controlled geographic locations.

The problem is the nigh-infinite, ever-increasing, ever more specific list of edge cases which a self-driving system would need to handle safely in order to be “road-ready” in any arbitrary condition. Real life is infinitely more complex than any rehearsal or pre-training can properly account for, so there will always be dramatic, heavily publicized situations where the system fails to act correctly.

I also think there’s something else going on here. We focus on (and occasionally point and laugh at) the times a self-driving Tesla fucks up a lane change or swerves into a ditch. But these are all things human drivers do all the time, and it’s never headline news because it’s not shocking.

We expect human beings to be flawed, but we expect our technology to be perfect.

No system will make the correct decision 100% of the time. The goal of engineers and programmers is to get the correctness rate of any system asymptotically close to 100%. But you always need to build in safeguards for if and when things don’t work. We still need humans in the car.

Perhaps more to the point, we don’t trust a system which has no humans in the car. There’s something inherent about us where we don’t trust something which could make mistakes for reasons we don’t understand, or in ways we can’t intervene in.

This is why I’m skeptical of the claims—from AI boosters and doomers alike—that AI is on the cusp of taking all our jobs. I’m skeptical because I don’t see many people saying that AI today is ready to take all our jobs. They just point to the current system and say “Look how much it improves, it only needs to be a little bit better and then it’ll be better than us at everything!”

Self-driving cars have taught me to be skeptical of this idea. Even if we get to a point where an AI can do 90% of someone’s job, what about that last 10%? 1%? 0.1%? How much do you think people will trust their “AI coworker” if they know in the back of their head that it could be wrong and the AI wouldn’t be able to even tell, since they don’t understand the difference between wrong and right, only the difference between looks wrong and looks right?

And which manager or producer would want the risk of giving AI some core function and then it fucking something up because it hallucinated a file or read malicious instructions online? Who’d be responsible for that if not the person who deployed the system? How many high-profile cases of “AI chatbot leaks SSNs of all employees” will make the news before executives get anxious about bad press?

Well, what if a human employee fucks something up? That happens all the time. True, but like with a human car accident, it’s not something that sticks in our head. We remember each time the system messes up because we blame the system overall, but the blame for human error is isolated to that particular human. It’s going to be incredibly hard to build trust like that.

Of course, the people at the head of this wave don’t see it that way. The money they’ve put into it—billions and billions of dollars—will only ever remotely be worth it if they can credibly replace all intellectual and physical labour in the near future. You simply cannot pay off this outrageous amount of investment through amateur programmers vibe-coding to-do apps or high school students cheating on their English assignments.

Could it happen? Maybe. But maybe not. The Self-Driving Car Principle proves to us that some capability which seems close but requires total perfection—not just asymptotic perfection—could be much further away than rapid progress might make it appear.

Oh, by the way, Elon is still out there in 2025 saying that full self-driving capability is “coming this year”. We’ll see how that one ages, I guess.

Gulf Of Usefulness

I think one of the big reasons people have so radically different opinions on AI right now is that the gulf of usefulness right now is enormous between software developers and literally anyone else.

I think this is part of what creates the “techbro bubble”, where people within tech get more and more sure that AI is going to be a big deal, while people outside of tech get more and more convinced it’s just a useless gimmick that’s being shoved down their throat.

The thing that convinced me that AI tools weren’t just some kind of NFT-style fad was when I saw just how many people were actively using it at my co-ops, on the co-ops of people I know, on personal side projects of people I know…

Action is the strongest signal, and the message is clear: people in tech find AI legitimately useful and use it without being forced to.

(This isn’t a value judgement: people use cars because they find them useful, and I think people know my opinions about car-centric infrastructure. But I’d never call cars a gimmick.)

But for the life of me, I can’t possibly picture how I would be using AI right now in a non-destructive way if I was a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer, etc. AI is great for things which require low precision, immediately testable results which can be verified and iterated on yourself (and anything it does can’t be something that’s more fun to do yourself: ie writing).

(Perhaps I just lack imagination, but I also think there’s evidence for this in how few successful AI-based products there are outside of the startups/products which promise to make you better at programming somehow.)

Being Intentional

I don’t think AI is an ontologically evil technology. Maybe I’m an optimist, or naive, but I don’t think it has to be inherently harmful. I think it can be used in bad ways and have bad effects on society at large, but I think there is a real place for it. The fact that so many people use it today proves that there’s something useful there, and it isn’t going away. Again, this is not NFTs.

Maybe it’s that optimism talking again, but I think technology in general can make people’s lives better in tangible ways. No matter what bad things the internet or the smartphone has done to the world, I think we’re net better off for being able to have easy access to information, or for my grandmother to be able to text her grandchildren and get an instantaneous response from hundreds of kilometres away. I wouldn’t have gotten a Computer Science degree if I didn’t believe that, at least in the aggregate, my work would be good for the world.

There’s still something that makes me nervous, though.

The point of a new technology is to make something easier—to remove friction. The shovel made it easier to dig holes, the printing press made it easier to create a book. The internet made it easier to find and share information with people around the world at an extremely low cost.

Existing technologies will evolve over time to have less and less friction, and almost always, the most frictionless technology will win. The problem is, your mind only really considers friction at the exact moment of interaction, and doesn’t have a good way of thinking about pain added long-term—and we’re even worse at considering potential opportunities lost by taking the easy way out.

Social media is a good example of this. We went from disconnected internet blogs, to aggregated feed social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, to algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok. Each step reduces friction by reducing the agency of the human beings involved. You go from intentionally visiting people on blogs, to having users link to each other on a shared feed, to a system which recommends things solely algorithmically, trying to optimize your time spent on the system.

From the perspective of removing friction, TikTok and its ilk is about as good as it gets: you can easily slip into spending hours scrolling through videos just long enough to keep your attention so you don’t realize what else you’ve lost: time you could have spent enjoying culture which wasn’t total throwaway junk garbage.

By letting the machines make decisions for you, you’re missing a chance to be intentional about your own life. You’re letting it be determined by something other than yourself. I don’t understand why this doesn’t drive everyone in the world crazy.

This is when tech is at its worst: when it encourages you, subtly, to give up agency in your life for the sake of convenience, rather than giving you more agency.

If this—tech leading to the narrowing of the spirit—seems inevitable to you, I disagree. It’s only the way it is because society has been constructed today to permit this to happen. It’s a human-engineered problem, and one that we can engineer our way out of.

Where will AI take us, then? Will it increase our agency or reduce it? Initial results seem very discouraging.

AI allows people to frictionlessly abstract away the process of learning skills. It’s most obvious in the flood of AI slop images we see on the internet—bad art made by people who may otherwise have gone out and learned how to make art.

I’m under no illusion that everyone who ever generated an image on ChatGPT would have been an artist given time. But I imagine the young person who wants to make a comic, and instead of being “forced” to learn to draw and developing a love of the craft, they just plug their request into a chatbot and call it a day, not knowing enough to know what they could have had with just a little more work.

Now imagine this same effect—reducing the need for anyone to ever learn skills—and multiply it across all disciplines, and across the whole population. Imagine the people who will never appreciate The Great Gatsby because they just plugged their high school essay questions into ChatGPT. Imagine the people who won’t learn an instrument because AI can generate a song for them. Imagine the people who won’t ever learn to code because AI can vibe-code them anything they ever want.

(This last one is the one which, personally, bothers me the most. I have a grudge against sloppy, thoughtless design, which is exactly what AI encourages: slapping bits and pieces together that look right and barely work. On a fundamental level in my soul, this drives me nuts.)

I should be careful not to use passive voice here. “AI” didn’t just pop into existence from space, it was built by companies, creating products, chasing certain goals. It was totally within their power to make tools that merely reduce the friction of engaging in good work by giving context or support, without totally supplanting the work being done.

But in a capitalist marketplace, the option with the least friction wins, no matter the long term harm. Every company knows this, and the last thing any of them will willingly do is lose.

The thing that gives me the most hope is that we now, as a society, should know better than this. I know I’m not the only one to be thinking this. Everyone, on some level, whether they act on it or not, understands that TikTok isn’t an empowering, fulfilling use of their time.

There are things that, even in a free market, we don’t let companies do because they’d be socially destructive. Otherwise they’d start putting nicotine in my coffee at Tim’s.

Now may be the last, best chance to, as a society, set the rules for what AI should be doing, and how the companies developing it need to act to avoid the social harms we know it could cause if left unchecked. We saw what unrestrained, engagement-maximizing social media did to our brains, and it’s now in our power to make sure it isn’t allowed to happen again.

I don’t know what this future should look like, but I do know what it absolutely cannot look like.

Why’d You Kill My Friend, Sam?

GPT-5 is the latest and, allegedly, greatest AI model produced by OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT. It was rolled out worldwide to much fanfare on August 7th, 2025.

To put it mildly, this launch did not go well.

The biggest uproar came from people who had become emotionally attached to the specific quirks of the previous model, GPT-4o. They’d grown accustomed to its specific phrasing, its tone, and especially the way it flattered them with endless praise, companionship, and words of affection on-demand.

The launch of GPT-5 involved the abrupt disabling of GPT-4o, which shocked users when they discovered that their “close friend” had suddenly vanished and been replaced by a new system—colder, more clinical, more distant.

Much has been written about what this means about our scary new age of ever-more intimate human-machine relationships, and what it means for society at large that so many people have fallen into parasocial relationships with next-word predictors on their computer.

But there’s something else I don’t see people talking about: just how caught off guard OpenAI was when all of this happened.

The optimistic outlook (which OpenAI would like you to believe) is that the scientists there have thoughtfully considered all aspects of the new world we’re stepping into and are working to maximize benefits for everyone. The cynical outlook is that OpenAI are leading us deliberately into a dark future of dependency on their systems for everything.

The truth seems to be something much more frightening: they’re just winging it.

They’re making changes based on whatever seems best at the moment. That’s it. They don’t know what impact their technology will have on their users or society at large. The people at the center of the movement, who are theoretically the most able to predict these kinds of things, seem utterly clueless.

No one knows where all this is going to lead. Anyone who claims to know is either lying to themselves or lying to you.

True story: I was just in class and was trying to copy and paste an image into my notes on a new line, using the handy-dandy CTRL-V shortcut. But since life doesn't always work out how you planned it, I pressed CTRL-C instead. (A common mistake, as C is directly next to V on many keyboards.)

No problem, I thought to myself, I will simply correct my mistake and press CRTL-V properly this time. But I was a fool. I didn't realize I had made the classic beginner's folly.

You see, CTRL-C is also the copy shortcut. And my computer, assuming I actually wanted to press that button, dutifully copied the thing which my cursor was on—namely, nothing. So when I went to press CTRL-V, instead of pasting the thing I copied, it just pasted nothing.

Hey, all software companies? This is stupid. Why would I ever want to copy nothing? Pasting nothing has no effect, so why would I want to do it? I'd kinda get it if I was pasting the newline, but I wasn't—it was literally nothing at all.

Here's a free suggestion for anyone working in tech right now. In the case that the following are all true:

1. I have just pressed CTRL-C
2. I am on a line in my doc where pressing CTRL-C would copy nothing to my clipboard
3. I have intentionally copied something else less than five seconds ago

... then you don't need to copy anything to my keyboard. I'm good, thanks. This deeply serious problem has cost me whole seconds, perhaps even minutes, of my life, which I will never get back. Indeed, it's too late for me. But by acting now, future generations will not have to know this pain.

I do consulting work for $900 an hour, by the way.

ROBERT JOHNSON DEAD AT 27

Robert Johnson, whose blues could be heard at street corners all across the Delta, was found dead in Itta Bena, Mississippi this morning, according to police. Johnson’s mastery of the guitar was clear to most everyone who had the fortune of hearing him play. He had only last year released his first singles, and was preparing for a major appearance at Carnegie Hall.

His cause of death remains unknown.

Jackson Chronicle
August 16, 1938

Today, Robert Johnson stood at the top of the world—or, more specifically, at the top floor of a juke joint in Itta Bena.

He felt the familiar deflation of an exciting evening slowly winding down. As Robert packed his guitar, he could feel the tempo of the house band get slower and slower. The pent-up energy of a night of dancing, drinking, and blues trickled out the doors as the patrons who had finally had enough any more went home to their beds.

He didn’t have a home to head back to, but he certainly didn’t have any trouble finding beds.

A slender, blonde woman stepped onto the seat next to him, sliding a glass of whiskey across the table. Robert knew the look in her eye—in fact, he had seen it when he locked eyes with her during his set. He saw the question she was about to ask before she said it.

“Say, Mister Johnson, just where did you learn to play that guitar?”

He smiled softly, and took a sip of the whiskey, hoping it would impart his answer with more gravitas. Robert Johnson got a lot of interesting questions from curious women over drinks, but this one was his favourite. He had rehearsed this performance hundreds of times before, and he knew it was a crowdpleaser.

He leaned in close enough that he could feel her breath on his cheek. “Can I trust you with a secret?” he asked. She nodded, leaning forwards too, eyes bright and eager.

Robert watched her reaction carefully. An artist should always be aware of their audience.

“It was a deal…”

“...deal with the devil!” Robert’s mother exclaimed, throwing a book at his head. He ducked just in time to feel the leather-bound spine brush over his hair as it dented the old wooden wall behind him.

“You’ve turned your back on the Lord, boy. Turned your back on your wife. She’d be alive if you didn’t forsake Him with your godless music.”

Everything in Robert’s body screamed at him to run, but he slowly stood up, looked in his mother’s eyes, and saw tears. They both paused to catch their breath, and…

…and then the woman broke into a giggle. Robert leaned back, satisfied with his performance, taking another sip of the whiskey. She wouldn’t like the real answer, anyways.

“Well, it clearly worked. You’re gonna be a legend someday, Mister.”

The woman kept talking, but her voice got dimmer as Robert kept rolling that word around in his head. Legend, legend, legend. It’s what the old man from the record company said after his first session. It’s what the promoter who organized his imminent tour exclaimed upon meeting him. It’s what every eager listener and bar patron across the Delta had been telling him for years.

It’s why he had worked himself to the damn bone for years, cultivating his talent to become the best blues guitarist the South had ever seen. People bought the idea that his talent was miraculous—that it could have been a blessing from Satan—because it seemed so effortless to him.

But it takes a lot of effort to make something look effortless.

The thankless years of practice were wearing on him tonight. As he tried to refocus his attention on the woman across the table from him, he found that he couldn’t. Was it just an unusually strong whiskey? How much had he drank that night? Why couldn’t he remember how much he drank?

He could tell that the woman was ready to leave. Automatically, he rose from his seat, but his foot couldn’t quite find the ground and he tumbled onto the floor. It was only now that he was aware of a splitting, piercing headache, drowning out any thoughts he feebly tried to form.

Lying on the floor, he looked up at the unbearably bright lights overhead. He could vaguely sense that the woman was next to him—and a crowd of people, now—panicked, frantically yelling. It was only when he tried to listen to their words that he noticed the ringing in his ears.

Using the last of his strength, he rolled over to steady himself on his hands and knees, just in time to begin vomiting on the ground. He could feel the energy being drained from his limbs as the ground in front of him filled with bile, then blood—

Robert Johnson snapped open his eyes. Feeling intense vertigo, he reached out and grabbed the first thing he could find to keep him stable on his feet.

I’m alive, I’m alive, he thought, trying to steady his breath.

Robert looked up to get his bearings. The first thing he saw was the whiskey in his hand. The next thing he saw was the beautiful brunette in the bar seat next to him looked very, very confused.

“Mister Johnson? Are you… okay? Was it something I said?” she questioned.

Robert didn’t remember her, didn’t remember how he got here, didn’t remember what this place was. Fortunately, he was a good improviser.

“Just the kick of the whiskey and the view of you, my darling,” Johnson replied. To seal the deal, he took another sip of the drink and threw his head back in mock awe of the whiskey’s sheer power. The woman laughed, but Robert could still see the unanswered questions in her just-barely-narrowed eyes.

Not his best performance by a country mile, but it would have to do. He hoped the only thing which would physically betray the deep terror rooted inside his gut was the bead of sweat rolling down his back.

Robert looked around the bar some more, still trying to piece together where he was. Was this a dream? Was the bar before a dream? He recognized the familiar wood-paneled floor and silver hanging chandelier. There was a man on the piano softly playing an old blues standard—maybe even one he had covered before—but for the life of him, he…

…he didn’t know where he was. Eventually, the different beds, nights, women, all became a blur—particularly when he had been indulging in whiskey, which he did after almost every show.

Everything just seemed uncomfortable. The bed was too hot, the pillow too small, the crickets too loud in the windows. He’d been sleeping worse lately—too much time on the road, even for Robert.

He shifted up in bed to try and make sense of his surroundings. A damp apron hanging up on the wall, dishes still in the sink. A gramophone and a handful of 45s—blues, he hoped. All clues to the kind of person whose bed Robert was in.

He felt something shift below him as the woman turned over in her sleep to face him, the outline of her hair faintly visible from the cracks of moonlight let in through the blinds. He studied her closely. It's critical for a performer to be aware of their audience, no matter…

…no matter what happens on stage, no matter the ruckus going on in the crowd, no matter how rattled or scared the artist was.

But Robert was rattled, so he didn’t hear the angry man approaching from behind. He didn’t figure out the yelling he heard was someone yelling at him until two calloused hands ripped him from the chair and threw him to the ground. His head slammed against the wood-panelled floors, his vision blurred, and the voice suddenly pierced its way straight to the front of his mind.

“You know whose wife you’re talking to?”

Robert would have replied no, actually, I don’t think I know anything right now, but at that moment the man’s boot slammed into his gut and the words slipped from his mind as the air fled from his lungs. Robert writhed on the ground, his stomach taking kick after kick after kick, and then the man’s boot came for his head—

Robert was suddenly in a back alley, as a man slowly approached him with a switchblade. Robert stepped back, begging in a ragged voice, “Stop, stop, wait-” but the man rushed at him and sank the knife into his gut, tearing his best black suit. As Robert fell to the ground, he could feel the man rummage through his pockets. The last thing he saw as his vision faded was the man fleeing the scene with fistfuls of cash—

Robert jolted awake as a fist collided with his face. His vision suddenly doubled, but he could tell he was in a crowd of men, with his arms clasped so tightly he couldn’t move. The men were yelling something, screaming vicious poison. Robert was forced to his knees, as he felt blood dripping out of his nose and forehead. As the man in front of him, suddenly coming into focus, wound up for another punch, he realized that all the men around him were white, then another fist connected with his jaw—

Robert was rattling around in the backseat of an airplane, surrounded by other terrified musicians as a voice ringing in his ears repeated “Mayday! Mayday! We’re going down! Uncontrolled descent!” I’ve never been on an airplane before, Robert thought—

Robert gasped, and water filled his lungs and stung his eyes. Face down, he tried to move his body but found it sluggish and insubordinate. He knew how to swim—didn’t he? —but his limbs wouldn’t move together, and he only succeeded in pushing himself further underwater. It was only as his vision blurred and the panic gave way to a light-headed bliss that he saw the bottles in both hands—

Robert found his hands clutching satin sheets so tightly it felt like he would rip them in half if he moved—but again, he couldn’t move. A sudden wave of exhaustion hit, and it took all his willpower to stay awake. He wasn’t drowning, but he couldn’t breathe. As he coughed, vomit leaked from the side of his mouth. He tried to get up, to clear his mouth, to scream, but then another wave of exhaustion swept over him—

“Mister Johnson?”

A new woman, a new bar, a new crowd. Robert Johnson screamed.

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!”

The house band went quiet, and the juke joint went still. Robert was painfully aware of all the eyes on him. He tried to look back at every single one. He watches for the threat—he doesn’t know what the threat is, yet, but he can feel it. It was lurking behind the eyes of someone, anyone in the crowd.

He could feel it. He could feel it like a hand on his back.

In a single motion, Robert whipped around and landed a punch square in the nose of the drunk who had been unwise enough to try and offer support. The man fell like a rock. Robert can’t tell if he was breathing or not.

Robert, ever the showman, turned automatically to see what the crowd thought of his performance. He met the eyes of one patron after another. Fear. Pity. Hate. Hate. Hate.

The threat had moved. It was all around him now.

No. Not now. Not again.

Robert bolted through the crowd, elbowing and shoving his way through the stunned masses, eyes on the door. He hit the door at a run with his shoulder, nearly knocking it off its hinges. He spilled onto the empty street, into an all-encompassing silence.

He only took a second to catch his breath before he began to run. He didn’t know where he was going other than away.

He threw off his jacket, letting his instincts guide him as he sprinted through the streets. It felt like somewhere from his old Delta stomping grounds, but it was quiet as a whisper. Not a soul was on the street besides him. Not a single cricket dared to sing, as the pale moonlight…

…moonlight bathed Robert Johnson as he sat alone, in the old graveyard—the last place he could get away from everything—flooding the cemetery with sound. He didn’t know what time it was, he didn’t know when he’d last slept, and he didn’t care.

The only thing he wanted to think about was the music, beautiful and surgical. His focus was on the sensation of his hands on the guitar, of the precise twitches of his fingers he needed to make the exact right chord at the exact right time, on the timbre of his strong voice, ringing out into the night.

Robert was singing for no one but himself and the ghosts in the graveyard. He sang and sang and sang and…

…and ran and ran, tears blowing off his face.

But despite the fire inside him, Robert Johnson was only a man, and his legs gave way faster than his heart as he crumpled to the ground. His breathing slowed as the mud and dust of the old dirt crossroad collected on his slacks and undershirt. He grabbed a fistful of earth.

I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m alive now.

And he did really feel safe, hands anchored in the ground, until he heard the gentleman whistling behind him.

Robert snapped his head back, trying to keep his staggered breathing under control. He scrambled to his feet to face the man. He was primed to run or to fight. But the gentleman never moved towards him. He just stood and whistled.

The first thing Robert noticed about the stranger was just how impeccably dressed he was. He was wearing a sharp, three-piece suit, as black as the night sky above, along with a thick-brimmed hat tipped down to cover his eyes. But still, he did not speak.

“Are you here to kill me, too?” Robert finally asked. His voice, the only sound he could hear for miles, seemed to echo through the whole world.

At first, the gentleman was still. Then, slowly, a gleaming white smile became visible from beneath the rim of the hat. “No need for me to do that”, he replied.

The world was silent and still. Even the blades of grass seemed to be frozen in fear. Robert took a few steps back, then tripped and fell over his own feet, landing on the ground. He snapped his head back to where the gentleman was, only to find that he was gone. For a brief moment, Robert wondered if the man was even real at all.

“Aren’t you savouring this, Mister Johnson?”

Robert whipped his head around to see the gentleman behind him, hands held behind his back, still bearing that gleaming, sinister grin.

“After all, this is what you wanted.”

“What? No, I…” Robert attempted to get up onto his feet, but the gentleman leaned down and placed his hand on Robert’s shoulder. The stranger’s hand was scalding to the touch. The smell of burning fabric and singing flesh filled the air. The gentleman forced Robert down back onto his knees with a firm strength.

“I don’t… I just… I don’t understand,” Robert pleaded. “What is this place? I was an honest man. I did hard, honest work to entertain people. All my debts are paid, sir.”

“Oh, of course you were honest, my friend. Debts all paid. And an honest man respects another honest man. I’m paying back what I promised you.”

“What—” Robert started, and then stopped himself. He remembered where he was. The crossroads, under the moonlight.

“That—that’s just a story!” Robert cried, desperately, barely believing it himself. “I tell people at bars to impress them. It’s all showmanship!”

The gentleman laughed, and leaned closer. “There’s gotta be a touch of truth in every story,” the gentleman said. “Otherwise, what’s the point? You knew that better than anyone, my friend. It’s what I liked so much about you.”

Robert could feel the heat of the gentleman’s breath now. “Every ounce of strength you put in that guitar is a drop of blood given to our pact. Give your soul to the craft, slowly, day by day, and you’d be a legend. It’s what we agreed to.”

At last, Robert could finally make out the face underneath the brimmed hat, the face with the grinning, white smile, the face whose eyes shone bright and deadly in the moonlight.

It was Robert’s.

“You’re a legend now, Mister Johnson.”

The last of his strength, Robert Johnson lunged at the devil, and the devil smiled—

• A woman who, after two years away, is finally going back to grad school. Standing with her feet in the sand, only steps from the lake, she tells you that she wants to become a family counsellor in Toronto someday. Rubbing her finger absent-mindedly, she explains that she got engaged a month ago, and is still too worried about losing her ring to bring it out of the house.
• A man holding on for dear life on a crowded city bus, explaining to the little girl in the seats above him how he teaches other kids how to tie string the traditional way, as the bus lurches back and forth, trying to climb up thin dirt roads.
• A man with lots of necklaces and a thick beard who excitedly tells you about his near-decade being a DJ for his local campus radio. Long after his graduation, he kept returning to his undergrad campus, which he calls his "second home". He pauses as he adjusts his hat, swatting away the mosquitoes, and explains that he hasn't done a show since he moved into his own place for the first time a few months back.
• A little girl running across your path in a blue and white Dipper hat. It looks clean enough to be brand-new. She's about the age that you were when you first got really into Gravity Falls, and you wonder if she got into it from an older relative, or if the show is still finding its way to curious kids on its own.
• An incoming high school senior, surrounded by music, who is buzzing with excitement about the kids he tutors in piano. He says he's going to miss them terribly when he goes to university, which is still a distant aspiration for him. You resist the urge to make a Waterloo-flavoured comment when he says his dream is to get into the University of Toronto.
• An artist under the lights, tuning his guitar as he tells the crowd about how he timed the production of his new album to record all the high parts before he started taking testosterone, and all the low parts after, taking the leap of faith that his voice would change in the way which would make the song finally sound complete.
• A toddler sitting with his face pressed up to a speaker at a rock show. You can't hear what he's saying to his mother because of your snug orange earplugs, but it looks like he's having fun.
• A man with thin arms and a thinner white beard, hovering over his custom instrument, smiling as a gaggle of onlookers sit in front of him, enthralled. It's the largest crowd ever seen for improvised music, he jokes.
• Young couples, lying in the same grass as old couples, sharing the same slice of the constellations for a night.
• A few thousand people who are coming from somewhere wholly unique, and soon to be heading on their way somewhere totally new, each of whom share one thing in common. They're all on this little man-made island in Southern Ontario for the same reason you are. They're all just trying to take a minute to breathe—to share the kind of kinship you get when you throw away all outside sensations and responsibilities to lose yourself, just for a little while, in some damn good music.
• A little boy on the beach who throws a rock just barely above your head as you're trying in vain to capture a memory.

Alright, I’m busy this week so I gotta make this quick.

Pet Name is a song by the band They Might Be Giants. For a group famous for oblique lyrics and songs with unclear meanings (I dare you to try and figure out what Nothing’s Gonna Change My Clothes is about), Pet Name is actually remarkably straightforward. There’s only two distinct ways to interpret it.

It describes a burgeoning relationship between two less-than-honest people who are each manipulating and playing games with each other, or it describes a burgeoning relationship between two less-than-honest people who slowly let their guard down to trust each other.

What could lead to this difference in interpretation? Whichever way you read a single word in a single line.

Waiting at the bus stop
For just about an hour
Strategies/Strategy’s for hangman
Cat’s cradle, origami

This is the only line that evokes any kind of sacrifice made for another person in this relationship, or hints at any sort of internal non-game motivation for the people involved. Someone is waiting for or with the other at a bus stop for an hour. Why are they doing this?

It depends on how you read the word Strategies/Strategy’s. If it’s Strategies, it means this tactic is being associated with tactical strategies in a game to get more information for a win. It means the person is making this sacrifice out of selfishness.

Strategy’s is a dismissal of the above idea. Strategy is for hangman. You make those kinds of moves when you’re playing a game, and even for this slightly sleazy person, the relationship he’s in has ceased to be a game. The rest of the world might be worth pulling a fast one on, but this person is purer than that.

I love it. I have no idea if this was even intentional. What other song has a load-bearing apostrophe?

I still remember the first time I ever heard of Arc Browser. It really was love at first sight.

Arc is (was?) a web browser created by a startup called The Browser Company, with a really novel and compelling hypothesis about what a browser should be in the 2020s. The basic gist of it was that the basic web browser was designed twenty years ago as merely a way to retrieve and display HTML from servers. But as the web became more and more complicated and dynamic, browsers never really evolved to keep up.

Arc was a radical redesign, meant to be an operating system for the internet. Tabs either acted like permanent app launchers, or if they weren’t important, they were cleared out every 24 hours. Things you’d otherwise need a new window for—split screen, multi-account management—could all be done in seamless, cleaner ways. You could even open a link in a mini-window over your previous tab you could click out of to close (like the new WaterlooWorks if it worked correctly).

I heard about it from an article on The Verge from November 2022¹, which hit me like a revelation. I had, truth be told, never thought much about the browser I spent almost all of my computer time on. I had done the thing I always try to avoid and internalized the problems with the systems I interact with. If it doesn’t work, it’s probably your fault. Just figure it out. Arc was a promise that someone out there was seriously thinking about pushing the design of this critical piece of technology forwards.

The only problem was that the browser was exclusive to MacOS, with a Windows version promised nebulously at some point in the future. Like any good love story, this plotline contains plenty of yearning.

I signed up for the Windows waitlist, but always kept my eye on Arc. The more I saw Arc evolve, the more frustrating and clunky Chrome felt. Once I made it in, Arc and I hit it off immediately. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but every relationship has its ups and downs in the early stages as you slowly figure out each other’s quirks and rough edges.

Arc for Windows launched in Beta, and boy, could you tell. It was missing plenty of features from the Mac version, yes, but it was also quite buggy and glitchy on its own. More than once, Arc would just refuse to open, requiring me to delete all stored data, removing all my search history and saved logins.

Still, I fell into a nice routine. My workflow reshaped itself around Arc’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the things that excited me most were consistent, weekly updates which almost always added some new feature from Mac. With each new feature, it felt like the capabilities of Arc were compounding. Each new tool in the toolbox felt like getting a new superpower to use in my everyday browsing. This feels weird to say for software, but the pacing was great: every time I had gotten used to a new feature, another one would drop.

Of course, the real test of any relationship is what happens when the honeymoon period ends. Can you settle into a routine and keep that spark alive? Are those things inherently contradictory, or can you find the mythical middle ground?

In retrospect, the red flags started showing up before Arc for Windows even left Beta. Slowly, the rate of new features being added slowed, then stopped. Okay, I thought, this makes sense for now. They’re preparing for open availability and want to squash as many bugs as they can.

But one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the Beta label was dropped and Arc for Windows officially launched. Frankly, they were not ready for this. The Windows version was still really buggy and hitched often, not to mention still missing plenty of features from the Mac version.

I kept waiting for that feeling of constant novelty I had at the start of our relationship, during those heady early days when everything was new and exciting and constantly changing. Instead, Arc began to stagnate. No new features were dropping, even on Mac, and the ever-present bugs seemed to be being ignored.

It was in these times of uncertainty that I began, well, reading too much into things (which is a habit I’m trying to break when I face uncertainty in any relationship). YouTube updates from the company, tweets from the CEO would be broken down for clues on the attitude of the people working on Arc. They kept teasing an ‘Arc 2.0’, a secret project to totally revamp Arc with new features ready for the age of AI. I was (and remain) highly skeptical of AI integration into my tech products, but I was holding onto this hope—that Arc and I might find our way back to those exciting days when everything about the browser should be questioned, and no change was too radical to be considered.

Maybe the reason they haven’t updated Arc in so long is because they’re waiting to drop a bunch of new features at once. Maybe it’s such a big change that they just need more time to prepare for it. Maybe my investment of time and energy into this browser will pay off.

But, like most times I read too much into things, the simplest explanation was the correct one. In a YouTube video released in October,² they came clean. They stopped updating Arc because they had, simply, lost interest. They’re a tech startup, which means they caught the AI bug. Their next product would be an AI-centric browser.

Their initial claim was that Arc was just… complete, and they didn’t want to add more features to it which might muddy its purpose. Given the state of Arc for Windows, I seriously doubted this explanation. In a Substack post from May 2025,³ they got a little more honest.

Basically, Arc was too niche to ever break into the mainstream market the way they had hoped. They had made something that was so out there, so opinionated, that it just bounced off most people. The users who stuck around loved it, but it was never going to scale to a billion users like they apparently wanted.

Here’s the thing, though: I always thought that was the point.

I assumed (naively?) that they understood what the project they were building was: namely, a browser for people like me. Technology enthusiasts, people who love to tinker with their workflow, to see what happens when you remove everything but the essentials from your setup just to see what happens.

Like many relationships, my time with Arc ended after a slow, heartbreaking realization that we weren’t on the same page about what we wanted. It wasn’t even that we drifted apart—we were never aligned, and I just didn’t know it.

They wanted the mass market, but I wanted something just for me.

For a while after the October announcement, I tried to hang on. No other browser quite fit the Arc-shaped hole in my heart. But I also couldn’t lie to myself: Arc was falling apart. It was getting dramatically slower, the search bar had several seconds of input delay, UI icons started disappearing, and fullscreening video stopped working right. These bugs never got fixed, they just built and built.

By the time of that May Substack post, it was clear there was no going back. I downloaded Firefox that day.

The tragic truth is that the most efficient way to understand what you want in a good relationship is to have bad ones. The most direct line to personal growth involves getting hurt, and hurting others.

What have I learned from this failed relationship? Well, in the future I’m going to be more wary of relying so much on flaky, closed-source tech startups who could just abandon their products at the drop of a hat. I’m also going to be more skeptical about a VC-backed company who pinky-promises to faithfully serve a market that is far too niche to ever pay the bills for dozens of employees over five years.

Firefox isn’t the same, of course. There are things I still miss about Arc (why does no one else let me rename tabs?), but through extensions and setting tweaks, I’ve actually gotten it much closer to the idealized idea of a web browser I have in my heart. There’s even a few things I like better—it’s way faster, for one, and not being based on Chromium lets the original, better UBlock Origin work fine. I don’t miss Arc nearly as much as I thought I would.

I think I just need to accept that Arc was a moment in time, and that moment has passed. It does no good to dwell in what could have been, when there’s so much I can do to make my life better now.

So long, Arc. It really was a pleasure.

I saw this when I was home from Montreal for Easter with my high school friends, who seem to have all wanted to see this out of some combination of deep irony and morbid curiosity. I came in with rock-bottom expectations, and it was so much worse than I possibly could have imagined.

They’ve been talking about making a Minecraft movie for about as long as I can remember, and I think you can see it in the final product. There’s no interesting idea to play with the setting, no twist on what it means to play Minecraft, and the plot plays out entirely linearly and obviously from start to finish. Someone told the writers to make a Minecraft movie, and this was the best they could do. Simple as that.

This movie was directed by Jared Hess, the director of Napoleon Dynamite, and you can almost, kinda feel that influence, especially in the segments set in the real world. It’s a set of extremely idiosyncratic characters who don’t know how weird they are, portrayed by actors who play it entirely straight. The real world scenes are still bad, to be clear, but they feel the closest to being a real movie. You could, theoretically, imagine this working really well for the parts of the movie set in the Minecraft world: after all, the rules of the Minecraft game world are somewhat arbitrary and strange, but the game plays it completely straight and asks you to take it seriously. The tone could have worked.

Unfortunately, this tone stops immediately once we enter the Minecraft world, and the film is instantly drained of any lingering energy and creativity. This is the fault of two things: the visual design, and Jack Black.

I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but Jack Black is awful in this movie. He totally kills the tone. Every other actor plays their bizarre characters super straight, but Black is constantly mugging to the camera when telling jokes, or delivering ridiculous lines that are dripping in sarcasm. It feels like he’s making fun of me for bothering to come see the movie in the first place.

The much-maligned visuals never, ever work. It’s actually kind of shocking: you’d think I’d be desensitized to it after 45 minutes, but I never was able to get into it and feel like any of the actors were in any place, just hovering around in front of green screens. There’s no sense of location or weight to anything at all.

The only reason to see this is if you’re a rowdy teenager looking to release a live chicken into the audience as a prank. Even then, the Cineplex I went to had security guards walk up near the screen for 30 seconds during the “Chicken Jockey” scene, so make sure you’re willing to get arrested for it.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire (2024)

A Minecraft Movie was trash in the way that eating expired food is trash. It’s bad for you, but you derive no pleasure from it. Godzilla X Kong is trash in the way that a Buffalo Chicken Poutine from Mel’s is trash. It’s horrible for you, but it goes down so easily.

I think I may be slowly becoming a Godzilla fan, primarily due to watching the absolutely excellent Godzilla Minus One in theatres in 2023. It became one of my favorite movies of the year, I recommend it to everyone I meet, and I’ve watched it several times since.

Ever since then, I’ve become sort of fascinated by the ways Godzilla, as a pop culture institution, shifts and changes to reflect the film standards and societal anxieties of his time. Godzilla Minus One is about the shame, regret, and fear felt by the people of Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War. It’s about how we forgive ourselves for the sin of surviving when so many around us do not.

Godzilla X Kong is about how cool it would be if Godzilla and King Kong (who has a new robot arm btw) had to team up in an anti-gravity fight against an army of evil monkeys.

This film is the fifth in what has now been dubbed the “Monsterverse”, and I think average cinema fans don’t realize how totally off the rails this franchise has gone. What started as a modern, realistic take Godzilla that played on the fears of climate change in the United States has now become a world where the Hollow Earth conspiracy is real, and an ancient uncontacted tribe of telepaths live at the center of the earth, manipulating large crystal towers to control gravity in an eternal battle against a tribe of giant monkeys waging an ancient war against Godzilla.

If you’re looking for a genuinely good movie, that’s not what this is, but unlike Minecraft, I think Godzilla X Kong knows exactly what it could be good at and exactly how it can deliver: big, expensive, ridiculous monster spectacle.

As is seemingly tradition with most kaiju movies, the human plotline is extremely boring. By this point in the franchise, the producers seem to understand that the draw of the movies is the big monsters, and the storyline which surrounds a secret government agency of kaiju trackers feels almost obligatory at this point, and the film clearly moves through it as fast as possible to get to the good stuff.

Kong is basically the main character of this movie. (Godzilla still gets lead billing, though. He must have a really good agent…) In fact, we can go 10+ minutes at a time without seeing any humans at all, at which point the film becomes an extremely expensive silent action movie. This part of the movie is actually remarkably fun and creative, and can express the intents and emotions of each monster shockingly well.

Highlights of the action include:

• Godzilla curled up in the Roman Colosseum sleeping like a cat
• King Kong using a baby chimpanzee as a club to hit larger adult chimpanzees
• The evil monkey leader having a magical crystal that he uses to control a pet ice dragon
• The aforementioned anti-gravity fight at the center of the Earth between Godzilla, Kong, and the evil monkey army

Look, this isn’t a great film. It’s a great movie. If you have a craving for junk food, it’s hard to go wrong with this.

Thunderbolts* (2025)

I think the reaction to Thunderbolts* has been somewhat backhanded. People say it’s good, but mostly in the context of how utterly dogshit the Marvel movies have gotten recently. McDonalds won’t blow you away unless you’ve been eating out of the compost bin for years.

Still, as someone who has been dragged to almost all of the new, terrible MCU films against his will, it’s honestly really refreshing to watch one of these where the visual effects don’t look horrible and the actors don’t visibly look like they long for death in every shot. It reminds me of what these movies felt like when they used to be consistently fine.

The strength of the Marvel movies used to be seeing extremely likeable actors develop charming characters you want to see bounce off each other and grow between movies, with serviceable plots and okay action. Recently, however, the characters have gotten much drearier, the plots have become more nonsensical, and the visual effects have gotten notably and dramatically worse (stretched by Marvel’s reliance on late-in-the-game reshoots and a lack of willingness to give VFX artists sufficient time).

Thunderbolts* doesn’t do anything revolutionary, it just reverses all of these. The movie is led by Florence Pugh and a cast of mostly new-ish actors who clearly aren’t burnt out on Marvel, and that difference alone makes it much easier to root for this cast of characters as they handle an interesting-enough villain with fine enough effects. This sounds like a veiled insult, but it’s legitimately refreshing to see from Marvel again.

I think I’ve grown out of Marvel. It was fun when I was a kid, but I’ve tapped out now. I’m ready for grown-up movie franchises, like Godzilla. But at the very least, this movie has given me hope that the kids of today who are growing up with this generation of movies will at least be getting decent films, if not amazing ones.

Max Payne (2008)

There’s nothing that me and my high school friends love more than a really, really bad movie, and my friend came to our recent hangout with a promise of trash and a single name: Max Payne. It did not disappoint. It feels too easy to call this movie bad, it’s closer to “improperly constructed”. Max Payne is a live action video game movie adaptation released in 2008, with all the horrible, horrible baggage that entails. It’s the worst movie on this list by a mile—MUCH worse than A Minecraft Movie.

It doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a collection of tropes awkwardly stapled together. Our main character, Max Payne himself (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a bad boy cop who doesn’t play by the rules, has best friends who tell him not to cause trouble, a beleaguered mentor figure who ends up betraying him, and even a fridged wife, murdered by the villains, whose death haunts him at all times in sepia-toned flashbacks to her holding their baby in bed. We’re playing the hits, folks!

The other characters are tropey, too, but none of them get much time to shine. This film seems to have about triple the characters that it needs to, and no one ever gets any time to make an impression. Characters are introduced and discarded so rapidly, I had no idea where we even were in the movie until the ending.

One of the things that ends up making this movie so jarring is that, while the movie plays things remarkably straight, it’s based on a game which is meant to be a satire of the neo-noir genre, which is why characters are named things like “Max Payne”. It’s hilarious to get to a dramatic scene which is supposed to be taken seriously, only for a police officer to ask if anyone has seen a “Mona Sax”.

Of course, there’s still normal incompetence to enjoy here. None of the actors here are good (Mark Wahlberg is particularly bad, but you can also enjoy poor performances from Mila Kunis and, inexplicably, Ludacris), the visuals are aggressively dark and blue to the point of it being impossible to see anything, which makes the action impossible to enjoy. The editing is consistently abysmal. Not a single scene starts or ends in the right place: each scene ends a second too late and starts a second too early.

What’s most hilarious is how the movie just… ends. Max Payne has fought through an entire office building of people to get to the top floor to shoot the man who murdered his wife and child. The villain tries to monologue, but Max shoots him, and the movie instantly ends. No resolution to the conspiracy the movie was building up, no moment where he comes to terms with his wife’s death or is forgiven for going rogue by the NYPD. It’s honestly comically unsatisfying.

Hitman (2007)

After finishing Max Payne, we realized we still had a few hours left to hang out. The next recommended movie on the streaming service we were using was Hitman, which is also a late 2000s film adaptation of an early 2000s video game series which got extremely poor reviews when it came out. We decided to keep the good times rolling and put it on too.

I think it was just because our standards were set so low after Max Payne, but we actually were pleasantly surprised by this movie. It was still bad, obviously, but there were good things about it, and I think it actually captured the spirit of the Hitman games quite well in some parts.

Hitman is a puzzle game disguised as a global assasination simulator where you need to figure out how you break into secure locations, take out a target, and escape without being caught. Hitman the movie is several scenes of the main character doing this, tied together by a nonsensical conspiracy plot and a truly terrible “romantic” arc meant to humanize our main character, assassin Agent 47.

First, the compliments: the action is good in a way that really does feel like the Hitman games. While we’re getting our exposition, we see Agent 47 setting up a series of seemingly disconnected devices or traps, and then during the action we can finally connect those dots in ways which are often cool and unexpected. The action is also really well shot most of the time, helped by good lighting and a brutal, sharp violence enabled by the film’s R-rating. I fully recommend watching a 5-minute clip of the fight scenes online.

Alright, compliments are over now. That was quick.

While our action scenes are genuinely fantastic, the overarching plot connecting the action scenes is really dumb. It relates to a global conspiracy to kill the Russian president and replace him with a body double, which is so poorly explained that I had to check the Wikipedia article for this movie to be totally clear on what the conspiracy actually was. It feels obligatory, like the movie is rushing through the exposition to get back to the action.

The “romance” which is meant to make Agent 47 go rogue also feels, honestly, really gross. The woman he “falls” for is a Russian sex worker who was traumatized by being abused by one of the villains, who Agent 47 needs to protect as evidence. The problem is that Agent 47, an assassin conditioned from birth to be ruthless, does this by kidnapping her, throwing her in the back of trunks, and drugging her over the course of the whole movie. When the movie decides they’ve fallen head over heels for each other, it caught me extremely off-guard because I never felt any connection between them. I never root for them to find comfort in each other—I root for her to get as far away from him as possible.

Like I said, this movie isn’t good, just better than Max Payne.

It’s gotten me thinking about some other honorary Canadian Heritage Moments in our political history, which inevitably got me thinking about Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female Prime Minister for all of 153 days, who was the catalyst for the most staggering electoral defeat in all of Western political history.

~

Picture this: you’re a Canadian Prime Minister who’s been in power for nearly a decade. While you were once swept into power in a popular electoral landslide, in the last several years your reputation has taken hit after hit with controversies and scandals. Some of these come from global crises you need to respond to, but many more of them are entirely self-inflicted wounds. 

Attempts to change core elements of Canadian society to be more inclusive of certain groups are met with uproar. Western Canada, in particular, is upset about deficit spending and higher taxes. Over a long enough time, enough people hate you for enough reasons that it’s clear that if you attempt to run in the imminent election, you’ll be defeated in a landslide as decisive as the one that brought you into power.

I’m sure you know exactly who this describes: Brian Mulroney, Prime Minister of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1984 to 1993.

The comedic pratfalls of the Mulroney administration are too varied to get into here, but they involved several elaborate, failed attempts to give Quebec a higher constitutional status, as well as managing to both raise taxes and increase the deficit, successfully pissing off everyone.

The upshot is that by 1993, it was clear the Progressive Conservative Party (PCs) were totally cooked. By most measures, he was the least popular Canadian Prime Minister ever up to that point. And what can you expect a politician to do when things get difficult?

That’s right, run away from the situation and pass the baton to literally anyone else!

~

Kim Campbell was an up-and-coming star of the PC party, serving several roles in the Mulroney cabinet. When Mulroney announced he was stepping aside and that the PCs would elect a new leader to run in the next election, she became the leading contender very quickly. 

The challenges facing Campbell were immense. Anger at the Mulroney government had fermented and formed two new regional political parties which threatened to upset the balance of the existing parties and squeeze the PCs out all together. Quebec had the Bloc Quebecois, a new, explicitly Quebec nationalist party for people who felt like Mulroney’s constitutional failures meant that staying in Canada was a lost cause. If you were a Western Canadian upset that Mulroney had even tried to do this, there was the all-new right wing Reform Party.

Of course, it’s not like Campbell had nothing going for her at all. In a time when the PCs were viewed as old and stale, just the fact that she was a relatively young woman brought some immediate energy and novelty back into the party (much like how the Liberal Party changed its image when Justin Trudeau became leader in 2013). There was also, of course, much excitement around the fact that she would be Canada’s first female Prime Minister, a genuinely huge historical moment which was unfortunately undercut by… everything that came after.

~

It became clear pretty quickly that Campbell was not necessarily prepared for what running a national campaign would be like. While she enjoyed a brief surge in excitement in the polls when she officially assumed the job of party leader and Prime Minister, a consensus soon formed that she was somewhat out of her depth.

The party seemed unprepared for just how intense the competition with the Liberals, Bloq, and Reform would be[1], and they never had any serious plan to win back their previous coalition, or failing that, convince Liberals to back a failed government they hated.

Emblematic of Campbell’s failures to create or control the narrative was the notorious Face Ad, in which the PCs appeared to be mocking Liberal leader Jean Cretien’s facial deformity and implying it meant he was intellectually incapable of being Prime Minister. This is and was a horrifically shitty thing to even imply, and it says a lot about the Campbell campaign (and her PR sensibilities) that she thought this was acceptable.

~

The PCs were always going to lose the 1993 election. Between Mulroney’s failures and the emergence of the new parties, it was probably inevitable, even if Campbell ran a perfect campaign.

But, oh man, did she not run a perfect campaign.

In 1988, the PCs under Mulroney won 43% of the vote and 169 seats in Parliament. In 1993, the PCs under Campbell won 16% of the vote, and… two seats. Exactly two seats.[2]

It’s hard to overstate how seismic the results of this were. The PCs, a party that had existed since Confederation, functionally ceased to exist overnight. Reform became the default right-of-center party in Canada, totally supplanting the PCs.[3] Thanks to vote-splitting[4] between the PCs and Reform, the Liberals swept to a massive landslide victory, and would govern the country for the next 13 years uninterrupted in the face of newly scattered opposition. The ascension of the Bloc led directly to the 1995 Quebec independence referendum, which only resulted in a vote against secession by less than one percent of the population. In many ways, the modern Canadian political landscape was forged in 1993, as Campbell killed the PCs and the political order shuffled around to fill that power gap.

The moral of the story? No matter how badly Trudeau might have done if he had run in the election, it could always have been worse.

~ ~ ~

1. People always seem to forget that the Liberal Party are extremely good at winning elections, just because they’re so bad at everything else.
2. If you’re wondering, Campbell didn’t even win her own seat in Vancouver, which basically never happens to a party leader.
3. Eventually, after years of anemic results and sick of cannibalising their own vote, Reform agreed to absorb the PCs and merge into the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada. This party would be led by Stephen Harper, who you can learn more about on the cover of mathNEWS 129.6.
4. Vote-splitting is a phenomenon in First-Past-The-Post systems where having two ideologically similar parties makes it less likely any of them will gain power. Imagine that you have two right-wing parties with 30% of the vote each, and one left-wing party with 40% of the vote. Even though 60% of voters prefer right-wing ideology, the seat is awarded to the single party with the highest number of votes, so the left-wing party would get it. This is what was happening in Western Canada.

My plan is to make it to Toronto for Friday night and spend Saturday with Not A N*rd, then spend Family Day weekend in Niagara celebrating my brother's birthday, before returning to Montreal on Monday night.

Friday, 6<00pm>. My train leaves Gare Central. Good timing, I think. This trip is five hours long. I’ll make it to Toronto by 11, and I’ll be able to meet Not A N*rd today, if only with a few minutes to spare.

Friday, 8<00pm>. The birthday party is officially called off. My family doesn't want to be out on the roads Saturday or Sunday, which means I need a second Airbnb in Toronto. I book it on the train.

Saturday, 12<30am>. My train pulls into Union Station, delayed by an hour and a half. I check the address of our Airbnb, looking for the quickest route by subway. There must be a quick subway route, right?

Saturday, 12:40am. I step outside to begin walking to the Airbnb. It is -15, and feels colder.

Saturday, 12:45am. I am almost hit by a car.

Saturday, 12:50am. I am yelled at by a stranger I try to pass on the street.

Saturday, 12:55am. I catch a young woman in a dress and heels who nearly wipes out trying to climb a snow mound while crossing the street.

Saturday, 1<05am>. I am almost hit by another car.

Saturday, 1<10am>. I reach the Airbnb. Not A N*rd greets me, grateful I didn’t show up at the wrong hotel this time. (It wasn’t my fault. Long story.)

~

Saturday, 5<25pm>. We anxiously check the time. The AGO closes in 15 minutes, and the storm seems to be picking up. We’re hesitant to wait too long to leave, lest they cancel our train and we’re stuck in Toronto. We realize we should pick up food, in case we can’t leave our Airbnb on Sunday at all.

Saturday, 5<40pm>. We’re at the grocery store. We accidentally cut the checkout line. The cashier is very passive-aggressive about it. We purchase a premade chicken dinner for lunch tomorrow while the whole store glares at us.

Saturday, 6<15pm>. We miss our GO train to Mississauga and go get lunch at the Union food court.

Saturday, 6<45pm>. We spend so much time interrogating my taste in perogies that we miss a second GO train to Mississauga.

Saturday, 7<05pm>. We arrive at Long Branch GO. I confidently claim that the buses can take us to Airbnb number two in ten minutes. I pull out my phone to verify. The bus ride is actually 45 minutes. I zoom out on Google Maps. We actually got off at Mimico.

We order an Uber.

Saturday, 7<15pm>. Our Uber driver misses a lane change on the highway. Undeterred, he makes an illegal merge through a snow bank during a blizzard. I see my life flash before my eyes.

Saturday, 7<25pm>. We step out of the Uber in front of Airbnb number two. It pulls further into the street to try and turn around. Not A N*rd pats her jacket and asks if I can call her phone. I remember that her phone case holds her debit card and ID. I see her life flash before my eyes. 

We frantically wave down the Uber driver to stop as he comes back around. We search the backseat and find nothing. We’re about to tell him to keep going when we spot it on the ground, in the middle of the road. If the car had driven on, it would have run over the phone.

Saturday, 7<30pm>. We take a nap.

Saturday, 11<00pm>. Waking from the nap, Not A N*rd asks if we remembered to put the chicken in the fridge.

Sunday, 11<30am>. We share a gourmet lunch of one apple each and a bag of baby carrots to split.

~

Monday, 10:00am. I leave the Airbnb. Not A N*rd left the day earlier, and now I need to get to Union for a 3<15pm> train to Montreal.

Monday, 1<00pm>. My train to Montreal is cancelled without replacement. Fuck.

Monday, 2<30pm>. With the roads mostly clear, I am finally picked up by my aunt in Burlington. 

Monday, 4<00pm>. Before I showed up, they were planning to see the new Captain America movie. I come along with them. The ticket cost $20. The movie was bad.

~

Tuesday, 8<30am>. I arrive at Aldershot GO. My VIA to Montreal is only at 3<15>, but I don't entirely trust I'll be able to get a non-delayed train to Union. I miss the 8<25> train, and resolve to wait until 8<55>.

Tuesday, 8<35am>. I get on the 7<55> train, which was delayed until just now.

Tuesday, 2<25pm>. I arrive back in Union Station, after spending some hours downtown killing time. I make my way to the VIA concourse. After all, we could start boarding any minute.

Tuesday, 2<30pm>. A freight train derails in Dorval, along the Windsor-Quebec corridor.

Tuesday, 7<00pm>. I board a train to Montreal, four hours late. Well, really, it's 28 hours late,  but who's counting?

Wednesday, 1<30am>. I arrive in Dorval, one stop away from downtown Montreal. The woman on the intercom says that the train ahead of us is stuck because of a frozen switch. She gives us the chance to get off the train and arrange our own rides home. Everyone around me takes this offer immediately.

Wednesday, 1<40am>. My Uber driver arrives. I step into the backseat. I see he has taped a tablet to the back of his seat, on which he is playing The Godfather (1973) for me to watch. I decide I’m too tired to ask any questions.

Wednesday, 2<00am>. I finally unlock my front door and collapse on my bed.

~

Wednesday, 7<45am>. My alarm goes off. I groan, then slowly get up to go to work.

An idea has been rattling around my head for a while now. Like most great ideas, this one came to me while mildly drunk at a Halloween party with fellow writer Not a N*rd. The topic of the upcoming cyberpunk dystopian future came up, and we discussed which robotic augmentations we’d be willing to get. We were totally down for the robot sword arms and eye augmentations, but there was a hard line we drew: no chips in our brains.

But why draw the line there?

There’s a quick answer. The one that my gut comes up with before my mind. It’s that a chip in your brain would change something too fundamental about who you are: the way you think. Your consciousness. The technological alteration becomes too close for comfort. But too close to what, exactly?

I think we’ve all heard the joke about every human simply being “a brain piloting a meat suit”, and while it assuredly got the whole squad laughing in grade five, I think there’s a lot of people who really do view themselves from that lens. Who are they? They are their brain, everything else is controlled by the brain. I control my body, versus I am my body.

There’s a sense that the brain has an exalted role amongst the organs; that it’s the source of one’s true self, everything else just plays support functions. I sometimes wonder if there’s a sense of brain-ego involved: it assumes it must be the most important job because it’s the one doing all the thinking, and so the only one who gets a say in the matter. Is that rational? Is the brain more essential to the intact preservation of “us” than the lungs, or the heart, equally functionally vital organs?

We’ve all been told at one point or another to imagine the CPU as the brain of the computer. Let’s break new ground and imagine the brain as the CPU of the body. All sensory input needs to be passed through it, it’s processed and sent to short/long term storage, and then that information is used to determine the next action to take.

But let’s not forget, this computer is totally useless without software. It’s a collection of silicon and gold connected together in a very elaborate formation. The software is what gives the computer the ability to compute, to think. But where is the software? Which part of the computer is the “software” part you can point out on a motherboard? Software has this cyclic nature where it is both the enabler of, and enabled by, all the physical hardware components, and as such is arguably everywhere, a final phantom component in a PC.

Can you point to a computer and say that because the CPU is doing the calculation, the software “lives” in the CPU and the computer therefore is the CPU?

Can you point to a human and say that because consciousness is computed in the brain, consciousness totally lives in the brain, and therefore the human is just the brain?

I don’t know.

~

To be honest with you, I have no idea if this makes any sense at all.[^1] The only other person I’ve had a chance to chat about this idea with since Halloween is Not a N*rd, who politely yet vehemently disagrees with me.

She tells me that a computer can’t be compared to a human. Were a computer to lose its storage or RAM, it would become totally non-functional. With a person, even if they were to lose a limb (or gain a new one!) they would remain totally the same person, so the critical functions of personhood cannot be contained within those elements. If you lost the brain, however, you wouldn’t be doing much of anything.

All of this is plainly true, and I of course agree with it. I nevertheless have excellent counterpoints to these arguments, but I’m about to hit the word limit, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

There’s an interesting coda I have to this point, though. Around the time I started thinking about my brain like this, it took some authority away from my brain in the mental model of my overall self. I began to think of my mind as a part of myself, not the whole self entirely.

I occasionally have random waves of anxiety. One of the things I thought I was doing was thinking about real problems I had—school, family, safety—and then having an objective emotional reaction to those circumstances. I thought because it was coming from my brain, and therefore an objective, “pure” sense of my own reality, it was therefore reasonable and objective to dwell on this worry.

What I realized was that the brain is a part of my body, like my stomach or my knee, that can just… hurt randomly for no external reason. I wasn’t reacting to a situation, I was feeling anxious and then coming up with an excuse to justify the thing I was already feeling, no matter how flimsy. If I waited for the worst to pass and then thought about the “problem” again, it was almost always less bad than it felt in the heat of the moment.

This is definitely not universal mental health advice (PLEASE do not dissociate because of a mathNEWS article) but I definitely noticed a change in how I approach stress once I started thinking about myself like this.

My gut really does come up with things before my mind sometimes. Who’s the one thinking in there?

Anyway, if anyone manages to figure out this whole “consciousness” thing, please let me know via an article in a forthcoming issue of mathNEWS. It’s the only thing I read these days.

~

1.: I wrote most of this at 2am. Does it show?

Ani’s journey takes her through a lot of places—from the top of a Vegas hotel to a frenetic road trip through New York City—but so much of it happens to her rather than because of her. A screenwriting 101 book would tell you that this is a bad idea. After all, shouldn’t the protagonist be driving the story? Yet, it works perfectly here. I think this is because that particular tip isn’t actually about the protagonist driving events, it’s a warning about making a passive, boring lead—and Ani is anything but passive.

An excellent performance by Mikey Madison emphasizes that Ani is completely aware of how, for the bulk of the movie, she is being pulled from place to place by others, not of her own free will. If she can’t wrest control of her agency, then she can at least hang on to her dignity, kicking and screaming (sometimes literally) as she’s moved around to solve other people’s problems. She uses an excessive-even-for-New-York amount of profanity to make sure everyone is crystal clear on how she feels about what’s happening to her. The camera assists in building this atmosphere, often settling on Ani, visibly uncomfortable, as the characters argue about the situation offscreen, ignoring her.

The inciting incident of the movie—her decision to accept Vanya’s blunt marriage proposal—is, in many respects, an attempt to claim the agency that Ivan’s money represents. During their brief courtship (where he hires her for a week to pretend to be his girlfriend), she’s taken on a whirlwind hedonistic journey of money, drugs, sex, and pleasure that she thinks might be the rest of her life if she could make this work. This sequence is edited together into a quick montage that feels like how it feels to be really drunk at a really good party. The rest of the movie is the next morning’s hangover.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Vanya, too. On one level, he’s the prototypical flaky rich kid bad boyfriend type, not interested in much of anything other than partying, gaming, and sex. He literally flees from responsibility and accountability the first chance he gets, turning the second act of the movie into a hilariously awkward road trip where Ani and Vanya’s Russian handlers/babysitters travel around New York City trying to track him down so he can sign the annulment papers. But when I think about him, I find myself imagining him like the subject of a nature documentary. Do we blame the lion for grazing on the gazelle, or do we accept it is simply it's nature?

Vanya is a spoiled kid whose every relationship is mediated by money. Why would this transactional relationship with Ani be any different? Every relationship he has is transactional. Of course he would mistake this for true love. He’s too shallow to know any better. And of course he’d run away from Ani and the Russian goons at the first sign of trouble. From Ani’s POV (and thus the POV of the audience), he seems like a selfish brat who isn’t willing to stand up for his wife, but it makes total sense from his perspective. He’s facing something that is, to him, the most serious consequence he has ever faced in his life: getting a real job. Of course he reacts like his life is threatened: to him, it basically is. He treats Ani terribly, but his actions make sense. He’s not cruel, he’s just a shithead.

What Ani slowly learns about Vanya is that his money doesn't actually get him agency, it's just that he's bound in less visible ways. He can party as much as he wants, but only under the eye of his Russian security detail. He can spend and go anywhere, until his parents decide to step back into his life.

I think the movie, in general, does a good job of humanizing characters who could otherwise easily fall into tropes. Take the Russians who enlist Ani to track Vanya down once he’s fled. They could so easily slide into the “Eastern European mobster” trope we know so well, but their lives are more complicated than that. They aren’t out to make Ani’s life miserable for no reason. They’re nervous about what this situation represents for their jobs. They don’t want to be hunting down Vanya and coercing Ani into coming along, but (like almost every other character in the film) they don’t think they have a choice.

The net effect of the realistic characters is that everyone’s choices feel not just natural, but inevitable. They’re just acting in their own self-interest. Once Ani enters that chapel, everything that follows is like watching a ball roll down a hill. The path down is unpredictable, sure, but everyone knows where that ball will, in the end, come to a rest.

I think the movie succeeds because it holds two ideas about its characters at once: first, every character has empathetic, understandable reasons for acting the way they do, and second, almost none respect Ani enough to give her any agency in this story. Almost everyone uses her as a tool to be wielded for their own benefit, or to save their own skin, or just to feel something. They’re too preoccupied with their own problems to look down and see the pain of the woman they think is below them.

The movie puts you in Ani’s shoes and makes you deeply feel her frustration, longing for control, embarrassment and hurt.

Uh, I don’t know if that sells you on the movie or not, but I liked it.

~

Even the name of the film is an attack on Ani’s agency—imagine if she knew that the movie about her life was called Anora?

Life was not easy in the village of all things. The harvesters bickered and quarreled, and it was common to succumb to the wild beasts which lurked in the woods beyond. No matter how hard they tried, the harvesters never had enough goldenweed to fill every stomach and feed every hope. It was not for lack of abundance, of course; goldenweed was in the soil and the earth and the sky. They simply could not harvest it with the haste which would satisfy their ambitions. Thus, they turned to the shamans.

At first, the shamans were as a hammer, leading crass rituals that bluntly evoked fealty to distant, vague ideals. Blind as they were, though, they were channeling something true and majestic. The results were, therefore, undeniable. The old gods were born, they smiled on the village of all things, and the village multiplied three-hundred fold.

Thus, the shamans would divide themselves into clans and guilds. There were the water-menders, whose gods turned dreams into life and life into swords which could slay the wild beasts that surrounded the village of all things. There were the mythic-navigators, whose gods turned songs into maps which could navigate dreams. There were the stone-dancers, whose gods guided the tender sculpting of monuments, dedicated to the ties which bound the village of all things to itself forever.

The harvesters found themselves suddenly surrounded by ritual objects and artifacts, each a way to call upon an old god for protection or health or prosperity. Goldenweed was bountiful, and could now be pulled from the stone within the deepest crevices of the earth. Then, in the quiet of a misty sunrise, a new clan of shamans was forged.

Their craft was subtle, at first; firm in vision and righteous in belief, they strode forth into discovery. Soon they could bend lightning into steel, make fire itself dance spectacularly, and link a person’s mind to the bounty and majesty of the universe. The other shamans were so entranced, they never noticed—or perhaps merely ignored—the lightning-weavers absorbing other clans, one by one. They were as world-eaters, and thus, they fed.

Their spread was rapid, their scale was immense, and their reach was ubiquitous. Not a single harvester was without an artifact or curio crafted by the lightning-weavers. Still, the lighting-weavers were not satisfied, for their most defining aspect was not their disruptive abilities or even the sheer scale of their power. It was their ambition.

None of the lightning-weavers were content with the mere invocation of the old gods. Nay, for these shamans had been enlightened. They knew the terrible truth: the old gods were fallible. The other clans had the best of intentions, of course—but did harvesters not still die? Were there not still children who starved for lack of goldenweed? If the old gods were abiding, would not the village of all things yet be paradise?

Thus, the lightning-weavers stood on the mountaintop at sunset and made a proclamation to the harvesters below: it was time to reveal progress. They proclaimed to the gathered masses their truth, and announced they would build the solution. A new god.

Not a god that was distant and untamable, but a god that was visible, comprehensible, and terrifyingly real. They would harness every trick from all the clans of the old gods, amalgamated into a network of their own creation; a grand linking of not just minds, but ideas and imagination and raw, glorious power.

The wisest of the lightning-weavers stepped forth and showed the village of all things how this new god would be made. He held out his arm, and with an obsidian blade that reflected the rising moon, severed it, and let it tumble down the mountain’s slope to the sacrificial pit below.

First, the other lightning-weavers threw themselves, piece by piece, into the pit. Some cast their arms, some cast their legs, but all cast their minds into the growing miasma of blood and ambition. Next went the clans they had absorbed or infiltrated, tumbling into the depths out of a genuine desire for their children to meet a new, magnificent future. Finally, the skeptics, who tempered their sacrifices, as they felt more fear than fervor. They would each contribute a mere finger to the unholy synthesis.

All at once, in a singular moment of immense light and sound and triumph, the new god arose. It was terrible and majestic, composed of endless beauty, bound by power wrenched in mockery from the old gods themselves.

It opened its hundred million mouths and sang: I AM ALL YOUR FAILURES. I AM EVERY TRIUMPH. YOU MADE ME, AND ALAS, I KNOW YOU. I SHALL BE EVERYTHING YOUR FOREFATHERS CRAVED AND FEARED.

The harvesters below looked on in awe and terror. But the sun set and rose, and the work remained: their children needed to be fed, and so they harvested the goldenweed.

The new god promises unimaginable prosperity. But it has yet to deliver on the promises of the lightning-weavers. The miracles it grants have been undeniable, but infrequent. Those shamans of the ancient clans, who had made the harvesters prosper in the time before, have become ever rarer. Who will train the next generation to revere the old gods? They are dead and dismembered at the bottom of a mountain.

Some think the solution is turning away from the new god, and back to the old ones. Some think the new god simply needs more power; to be fed with yet more bodies and blood.

And here, in the village of all things, the days are getting colder, and the goldenweed will not be ripe much longer.

Originally published in mathNEWS 156.1, September 13, 2024.

❦

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?

The parking lot was at, generously, one percent capacity. We had to drive along the entire length of a fence to get in, erected about a decade ago to keep out protesters. We passed the iconic Marineland sign; looking closer, we noticed that the picture of a whale that used to be on the sign had been hastily removed, leaving blood-red scars across the paint, which felt like a metaphor for something.

And through all of it, we were dead silent in the car. We didn’t speak. We didn’t hear anyone else speaking. It’s not even that the park was empty—I could count about 20 cars in the parking lot—but I couldn’t hear anything.

The lady at the ticket booth told us we were lucky, that the park’s last day of operations was just three days from when we arrived. We passed through and met two ticket checkers, who waved us in with a smile, without checking if we actually paid.

Those three were one-third of the active staff in the park that day.

~

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass…

I’ve written a lot about Marineland, and I’ve danced around the issue of animal welfare for a while, mostly because I didn’t think I had anything new or insightful to say. For just about my entire life, Marineland has been a cultural pariah. I could add to the consensus, but what would be the point of that? You know it’s bad. I know it’s bad.

I can’t do that anymore. Of course you knew it was there, but you could look away. You could distract yourself with pageantry if you really tried. Not anymore. All of that is gone. The rides are all closed, all the shops and restaurants are boarded up. They took the nozzle off the goddamn water fountains. Everything has left this place except for the animal in the tank and you.

I know what the moral argument is here: that these animals are intelligent and dynamic and are being put in positions that feel tantamount to torture for the sake of the hedonistic enjoyment of tourists. What gives us the right to inflict so much misery on another being? How dare we?

I happen to think that this argument is correct. I would, however, like to offer an additional point: watching these animals makes me feel fucking miserable.

These are intelligent, majestic creatures, and all they do now is swim in silence for no one, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no end in sight. The closest thing we humans can experience is solitary confinement, broadly considered by experts to be torture. But what if you had all the restrictions and isolation of solitary confinement combined with the deep humiliation of being observed by tourists at all times?

Everyone at the park seems to recognize this, too. I exchanged some looks with the parents who had brought their overexcited preschoolers to the park to burn off some energy. We're all playing the same game: I know this is wrong, they know this is wrong, but the kids don't know this is wrong, so we all say nothing. We just watch the tanks together.

The entire time I was there, I felt the overwhelming sense that I shouldn’t have been there. This park is deeply, deeply evil.

But there was something my eyes kept getting drawn to, if only to give them some means of escape. I kept looking at the kids with their faces pressed up against the glass, staring in amazement as a dolphin swims by. They were all, genuinely, in awe.

One of my friends quipped that this trip “ruined their childhood”, and suddenly everything clicked into place. I wasn’t watching the kids, I was watching me at age five. This park was made for them. This park was made for me.

I was watching ten years into the future, when those kids are old enough to realize the context of their trip, why their parents were so hesitant to go. They’ll realize, as I did, that these animals were tortured for them. And then they’ll realize the park had placed them into the center of a moral minefield without their knowledge, to be revealed only when they got old enough to understand it.

~

I feel guilty that this place exists. Should I?

I know, on some level, it’s ridiculous. I didn’t build this park. I didn’t condone its existence. I’ve spent frankly unreasonable amounts of my life vocally upset by its existence. But it was made for people like me, and in a past life, I enjoyed it. I proved them right.

When I see an injustice in the world that I did not cause, but still benefit from, how am I supposed to feel? I know what I’m supposed to do—fix it—but am I supposed to take on societal guilt? Should I feel personally bad about it, or is it enough to acknowledge it and move forwards? Logically I want to say the latter, but something in my gut feels like that isn’t enough.

Can I admit that I felt a bit of involuntary awe at seeing the dolphins and belugas? Can that awe be offset by the overwhelming guilt I felt next? Did the tanks get smaller, or did I get bigger?

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

~

John Holer founded Marineland in 1961, and ran the park until his death on June 23, 2018. Stewardship passed to his wife, Marie Holer, until her death on September 6th, 2024.

What’s left of them now? What did they give us to keep?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~

Oliver, Mary. “The Summer Day”. New And Selected Poems. 1992.

For detailed reporting on animal cruelty at Marineland, please read:

Diebel, Linda. "Marineland animals suffering, former staffers say." Toronto Star, 15 August 2012. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/marineland-animals-suffering-former-staffers-say/article\_3a527a21-191c-5ce0-aa9b-bab31284bbea.html

Moon, Jenna. "The Last Orca." Toronto Star. 10 December 2021. https://www.thestar.com/interactives/everything-she-does-she-does-alone-marineland-s-kiska-has-been-called-the-worlds-loneliest/article\_eea1add0-ffe8-11ed-a7b8-177aca4118f5.html

Well, it wasn’t exactly the painting I found interesting. It wasn’t bad, it was just… normal. It was a portrait of an unspecified Flemish noble who lived some 300-odd years ago.

Unspecified. That’s strange.

“Hey, look at that,” I said to my friend. “They don’t know who the guy in this photo is. You’d think if they took the trouble to paint him, they’d try to remember his name, too.”

“I mean, there’s no guarantee that was anyone important,” she replied. “The elites of the time would use portraits like this to project power. It wasn’t someone important, it was someone with money who wanted to be important.”

“It’s the Flemish equivalent of a photo on the Linkedin bridge,” she quipped.

We walked to the next thing, and I kept thinking.

For the artist, this painting probably wasn’t their masterwork. It may not even have been something they were particularly proud of. It was a job. They went in, did what they were paid for, and went home at the end of the day. They spent the money on food and clothes and shelter.

Back in the 18th century, the point of this art was the noble. It was to be displayed in his halls, gifted to his allies, all to spread his image (and therefore, influence) in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. To the noble, it was likely less ‘art’ than it was a tool. Maybe the artist even thought this way, too.

But what survived? Time stripped the practicality away and now only the art remains. We look at this work, designed to be entirely functional, and it’s now entirely known for the human element. We see this piece of career work, designed to obfuscate the person behind it, and the creativity is all we see. We can’t help but attach ourselves to it.

The noble, meanwhile, has faded into history. We don’t know anything about him. He wanted to borrow the talent and labor of the artist as a proxy for longevity and it did not work.

History teaches us that the makers—the workers—are remembered. The nobles—the owners—are not.

~

I saw some paintings with my friend a few weeks ago. We walked around an art gallery together, enjoyed each other’s company, and talked about the things we’d make that people would see in a museum someday.

Soon, I saw another interesting painting. It was very similar to the last interesting painting I saw, honestly. Maybe I have a type. The difference this time was that this one was a painting of an unknown noble done by an unknown artist.

“Hey, look at that,” I said to my friend. “They don’t know anything about who made this.”

We sat and looked for a bit, a strange melancholy setting over the work.

“Imagine that’s all that’s left of you,” my friend said. “You work your whole life on art you put your heart and soul into, and all that survives is your passionless contract commission of some noble who history won’t even remember. It’s the only chance left to communicate with this person, and they made it incidentally.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “How would that make you feel?”

I tried to think of an answer.

We sat watching the painting for a while.

This was not my choice. I crossed the point of no return years ago. Maybe I should have insisted that my high school friends set up a Discord group chat instead. Maybe I shouldn't have volunteered to run multiple club Instagram pages. Maybe I shouldn't have decided to start a photography account.

At any rate, I'm trapped. I need easy access to Instagram on my phone or my computer. This is a problem, because Instagram is awful and I actively hate using it. It's a Frankenstein's monster, created slowly over years as Meta grafted aspects of other social media platforms onto the bones of a humble image-sharing app.

Snapchat got popular and they introduced stories. TikTok got popular and they introduced Reels. A messaging system? Fuck it, Meta has like 10 of these already! What's one more? I think there's still a store but I'm too scared to check.

Over the last year or so, I've grown a stronger aversion to social platforms which are too hyper-generalized in function, as well as platforms which shove algorithmically-recommended content in your face. Instagram is aggressively both of these. I want to feel like I have agency over my digital consumption, that I'm choosing how I spend my time and what I take in. I don't want to passively digest junk food, I want to find the delicious, gourmet Lazeez and consume that instead.

But what is there to do? Instagram knows it has me trapped, so it's turned the enshittification dial all the way up. Posts are strategically arranged to draw me into distraction and away from the actual life updates I told Instagram I wanted to see. There's no way I can just take an axe and chop everything I hate out of the app.

At least, not out of the app.

Let me introduce you to my beautiful friend the Firefox Mobile app and his handsome wingman, the Firefox Mobile Extensions Store.

I've been using this as my mobile web browser for about a week now and I have no idea how I lived without it. I'm not even an anti-Chrome guy, but the mobile internet is so comically unusable without AdBlock, it's startling to me that anyone uses anything else. Don't you guys want to see the website?

But that's not what this article is about. I realized that if I could block ads, surely I could block other things. Say, the specific elements of a website that irritate me and I wish would just go away.

Instagram has a mobile site.

Using the extension IGPlus, I was able to remove every aspect of Instagram that bothered me. I turned off Reels, the Explore page, the non-chronological main feed. Then, drunk on power, I turned off like counts and stories, and then changed the font. I don't even hate Instagram's font, but I changed it because fuck you, I own the computer and I'm the one who gets to decide how it looks.

It's perfect. I unfollowed like 800 people I barely knew and now my feed is entirely cool things going on in the KW region and one picture per day of someone I actually care about.

The best part? You can do this for other sites, too. I installed a bunch of extensions for YouTube so that when I access it from the browser, I can freely access features I would have otherwise needed to pay for (no ads, playback with the screen off) and even a few that are completely impossible officially (automatically skip sponsor segments, change titles and thumbnails to be non-clickbait, no algorithmic video recommendations at all). I don't use Twitter or Reddit on my phone anymore, but there are extensions to strip out all the algorithmic distractions from them, too. If it has a website, it's possible to pull this trick. Hey—why not use these extensions on your PC, too?

Look, we all know that social media is bad for us. You don't need that lecture from me. It's destroying our attention span, our brains did not evolve to know what is going on across the entire planet at all times, etc. Going cold turkey is probably the healthiest way to handle this stuff, but it's not actually practical for most people.

To be honest, though, that's not why I'm doing this. I'm just picky and particular and I want the tech I use to form itself around me. I want what I want and only what I want.

Big Tech hasn't wrested the web away from us just yet, and we can still use it's openness and adaptability to our advantage. We can filter out the garbage and have a healthier relationship to the platforms that dominate our lives. We can finally start to assert ourselves, and let our tastes change the platforms—not just let our tastes be influenced by the platforms.

And then, once you try it, maybe I can convince you to join me and become an email newsletter guy.

On the surface, it’s an idea that might appeal to people. WUSA is, to put it mildly, pretty unpopular these days. Students seem extremely disengaged from campus culture and student governance at Waterloo. The idea of taking the power centralized in WUSA and distributing it fairly to the people is tantalizing.

I have several critiques.

What Is GooseDAO?

First, it’s important to get everyone on the same page about what a DAO actually is. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. The main idea is that there’s no governing body at all, just an automated system that administers rules and allocates capital based on how people vote. All voters and votes are recorded permanently on the blockchain, so the whole process is transparent. Since the voted-on actions are executed instantly, the whole thing is purely democratic. Every action was selected and voted on by a public poll.

The point of GooseDAO is to use a DAO to do the job of a student union. That means that which clubs get funded or which advocacy work is done is decided by the students collectively, instead of a theoretical central leadership.

What's Wrong With This Idea?

If you’re like me, you may have noticed some red flags even from that idealistic description. “Transparent voting” means complete non-anonymity. It’s pitched as a solution for opaqueness within WUSA’s leadership team (which is a real problem), but GooseDAO's transparency applies to everyone, including non-elected students, massively changing people's behavior. Imagine a queer student who couldn’t support the activities of LGBTQ clubs on campus for fear of that public interaction outing them to their relatives. Full transparency creates as many problems as it solves.[1]

To be extraordinarily clear, I do not believe that anyone from GooseDAO or the UW Blockchain is intentionally anti-inclusive here. I believe these consequences are entirely accidental.

Digging a little deeper, they mention that while every student gets a token (Goobi) that allows them to vote, there’s an additional token ("HONK"—these names are so stupid[2]) that gets distributed and does… something. Both the Imprint article and GooseDAO’s own website are unclear on what specifically HONK does, but according to Imprint, holders of more HONK have "more of a voice", and their online pitch deck mentions "weighted voting" on proposals.

After reaching out to the organizers for clarification, it’s clear to me that voting will not be a "one person, one vote" system. It’s likely that the political power you wield would be tied to the amount of HONK you hold. For people unfamiliar with DAOs, this can seem strange, undemocratic, and easily exploitable. It is all those things, but it’s also extremely common in the crypto sphere. For instance, the DAO for the theoretically popular Decentraland weighs voting based on how many specific tokens you own, and the rough prototypes that GooseDAO have already created have the functionality to weight the voting power per user.

The problems with this potential kind of system are obvious. This voting system would give specific individuals an outsized voice in student governance: the exact problem that WUSA has today. In fact, it would be worse than we have today: not only can HONK be bought and sold for money, allowing people to literally buy and sell influence, but more importantly, this behavior would be built into the system permanently.

The reason this institutional power lock-in happens in WUSA is because of a complicated series of institutional barriers that, crucially, can be changed. It’s a difficult task, but it's possible. In the GooseDAO, the lock-in of institutional power would be an intentional outcome of the system’s design.

Once that power is granted, it can only be revoked if those well-connected people decide to give it back. They have all the control over how the DAO operates. GooseDAO promises to strip power away from WUSA’s current executive class, but they won’t give it to the majority—they’d likely just create a new untouchable upper class, same as it ever was.[3]

Why It Matters

I’ll be honest, I thought hard about whether this was an article worth writing at all. It doesn't take a lot of thinking about GooseDAO to be able to poke holes in the idea. So what's the point?

It almost feels like I’m picking on them. The buzz around crypto has almost completely died out. Most NFTs are worthless. The only time I ever hear about crypto these days is when a project goes belly-up and a million people lose their retirement savings. This project will almost certainly not get off the ground, and I don't want to discourage new ideas, even if they won't work.

The reason I decided to go through with it is because I think people deserve a serious breakdown of why this won’t work. The passive, non-questioning language of the piece obfuscates what UW Blockchain actually intends to do. The worst thing that could happen is that the lack of detail tricks someone into thinking that GooseDAO is a good idea. I have nothing against the people behind it, I just fundamentally disagree that this would be better for students.[4]

WUSA is a severely flawed organization. It’s tempting to simply trash it all and start over. But we must be smart enough not to let those fears trick us into replacing something bad with something worse. The way we’ll improve this school isn’t by hoping a technical revolution will solve our problems as we just sit back and watch. We need to roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and not stop until the job is done.

I believe that better student governance is possible. In fact, I believe it’s inevitable. I just don’t think it’ll have a name like Goobi.

~

1. According to the organizer I spoke to, visibility is tracked between specific crypto wallets, and not directly linked to any one uwaterloo.ca email account.
2. According to the organizer I spoke to, the name "HONK" is already taken so they won't be able to use it, but if I used "the token formerly known as HONK" I'd go way over my word limit.
3. According to the organizer I spoke to, the way they plan to avoid this is through tightly controlling the way HONK is initially distributed (ie: only to clubs) and regularly diluting voting power by introducing more HONK.
4. If you go and be mean to these people because they had a bad idea, you're a dipshit and a bad person and are henceforth banned from reading mathNEWS.

In N minutes, no one will be able to play it. Let N be a natural number that’s smaller than you think.

~

Preserving art is hard. Preserving a video game is even harder. To archive a book for future generations, all you need to do is transcribe the words and make it available in a safe library or some permanent storage mechanism like the internet. Film is slightly more difficult, but it’s not that difficult to digitize old film prints. Plus, once it’s been preserved, there’s no special requirements needed to view it. The movie plays just fine on any screen you want to watch it on.

Games are different because, as software, they’re so tightly linked with the hardware they’re meant to execute on. It’s not as simple as translating it to a new media format or making the contents available in a different medium. Video games, particularly console games, and especially old console games, are designed to run on a specific piece of hardware and only that piece of hardware.

The original Legend of Zelda or Metroid are hugely important games in the history of the medium, but they were only designed to be played on an original NES. There was a limited number of Zelda cartridges produced in the world, not to mention the notorious unreliability of the NES systems themselves. Theoretically, there will come a point where we run out of functional cartridges or systems and the game becomes completely unplayable.

I imagine most mathNEWS readers are aware of what the solution for this problem has been thus far: emulation. While Nintendo might give me a glare for saying this, emulator developers are some of the most important people in the industry. With the advent of modern emulation software that runs cleanly and easily across all kinds of hardware, playing a game from the 80s is a lot more like watching an old film: find a copy (LEGALLY!), download it (LEGALLY!!), and play it on the screen you already own (LEGALLY!!!).

We can do this reliably for almost any console older than 15 years, and game preservationists have grown accustomed to this ease of access. Putting aside the purist nerd arguments (are you really playing the same game if you’re playing it with a keyboard instead of the N64’s terrible controller?), most people assume we’ll eventually have access to every game ever made via emulation.

That complacency makes me worried. We’re hurtling towards a crisis in the field of game preservation and everyone seems to be looking the other way.

The basic problem is the same: games require special hardware and software to play, the two of which are so tightly linked that losing the hardware usually means you lose the software, too. The problem now is that the hardware isn’t a game console, it’s the server you need to connect to in order to boot the game at all.

Almost every culturally significant game from the last decade locks a significant portion of the game, if not the entire thing- behind a connection to some kind of server. To be clear, I’m not talking about the trend of games using the internet to deliver new content; I’m a Destiny player, if I complained about that I’d be the biggest hypocrite at prod night.

We’re putting so much of gaming history on death’s row by tying it to services that will all one day shut off. By making so much of the cultural output of the 2010’s and beyond tied to these servers, we’re setting ourselves up for a gargantuan chunk of our own artistic history as a culture to become completely inaccessible.

And these are just the games that are tied to fragile online services once you download them. What about the games that require server connections to download? Such digital-only games are especially vulnerable to this, being only available through digital marketplaces. But even physical games are at risk here. These days, most big AAA releases are too large to fit on disks. Only part of the game is loaded off the disk, and the rest is downloaded from that damned server.

By the way, one day, Steam will shut down. Your mortgage-sized collection of games will become completely inaccessible. You’re on a time limit to get through your backlog. Sleep well tonight!

Think about when these online stores eventually go down. When this has happened in the past (RIP Wii Shop Channel, 2006 - 2019), it’s happened with consoles that don’t have such a codependent relationship with their shops. We haven’t really felt how bad this is going to be yet.

But the worst culprit is a menace that lurks just over the horizon- cloud-based gaming. Big companies have been threatening to make fetch happen with cloud gaming for a decade now. Imagine- the dream of a gaming platform that is one hundred percent reliant on a company deciding to keep their servers up!

This nightmare scenario has already happened with Google Stadia when it shut down in early 2023. Fortunately, there were no historically significant exclusive games on Stadia, so we’re cool for now.

I honestly don’t know what we can do about this. If I know society at all, we won’t change anything until the crisis actually starts. Find me in a decade so I can say I told you so.

~

Fortnite is not just a game, it’s a critical cultural artifact of our time. Its impact on art and youth culture is immeasurable, and its influence on design in the medium will be felt for decades.

In N minutes, no one will be able to play it. Let N be a natural number that’s smaller than when you started reading this article.

Any devoted fan would attest that there’s simply no greater thrill on Earth than sitting on the edge of the PAC stands, watching the waves roll in our non-regulation size pool, feeling the tubes of the champions crash against each other, and hearing the thunderclap of shots sent and saved.

Those who say that would be wrong. A greater thrill is playing.

~

For those who haven’t been exposed to the sports sensation sweeping the school, inner tube water polo is an intramural that Waterloo Athletics runs every term. It features the general structure of water polo- you’re in a pool and you have a ball you need to get into the other team’s net- but with a single new addition: the tube.

Yes, you play inner tube water polo entirely from inside the titular inner tube. Some people look at that rule and see a game that’s neutered, or less skilled in some way, just because you aren’t physically moving around and tackling the other players. Those people are only sort of right.

The floor for the amount of physical athleticism is much lower than in regular water polo, helped by the ability to “rest” and float passively on the water in a way you can’t during the non-tubular version of the game. But the ceiling of talent is as high as any “real” sport you can play.

You need speed and strength, sure, but that’s just the surface. You need to be able to read your enemies, and have the game-sense to position yourself right where they need to be, or slip behind them without them noticing- a difficult thing to do when propelling yourself requires you to splash.

See, the tubes themselves change the dynamics of the game completely. If you’re on defense, it’s much harder to strip the ball or make an interception, so the ideal tactic is strategic positioning. Conversely, if you’re on offense, it’s almost impossible to make a shot if you’re surrounded by defenders, so the ideal tactic is nimbly passing the ball around to the least defended player, positioning yourselves so that someone is open at all times.

Even if you don’t have the physical stamina to play football, basketball, or even dodgeball, you can still easily be competitive playing inner tube water polo. A smart player is much more dangerous than a strong one.

~

When you slip into the tube, you can feel the rest of the world slipping out.

It almost acts like a sensory deprivation experience. Besides your complete mental focus on the state of the game, the noise generated by 12 people smacking the water as hard as they can will allow you to tune out the noise of the crowd, the sidelines, and your thoughts. If you need to take off glasses to participate, you get the further effect of having the entire world other than the boundaries of the pool literally melt away.

You focus on speed, and position, and analyze, and execute until you blink and realize that it’s been fifteen minutes and your legs and arms are sorer than they’ve been in months. You swim off to the sidelines, and only then does it hit you that you’re up a point.

Some inner tube water polo players say that the greatest thrill you can have is playing. Those people are wrong. A greater thrill is winning.

~

I think the thing that surprises people the most about this sport is how seriously everyone takes it. At first glance, it can seem pretty silly: a dozen college kids flailing around in inflatable floaty tubes, bouncing off each other and yelling at the top of their lungs. But look any closer and you can see that these people care about what they do.

Teams have rehearsed strategies and coordinated cheers and matching branded shorts. You can feel the tenseness of the sidelines- not to mention the crowd- as the ball goes back and forth and again.

It’s a give and take situation, of course. Everyone on some level knows that these sports don’t really matter: they aren’t matters of life and death, nor even a matter of personal prosperity (like getting an education at all). In order for you to feel like this, you need to take the first step.

If you want to create a world in which people care about anything, you need to believe in it too. While this confidence is irrational at start, rationality often grows around your own beliefs. The most reliable way to create the world you want is to pretend you’re finally there.

It’s shocking how effective a change strategy (believe in something extraordinarily hard) actually is, huh.

~

You slip out the backdoor of PAC and step into the biting, punishing Waterloo air. It’s a night with clouds, and a slight sprinkle of snow- the first of the year- but the sky is considerate enough to give you a full view of the moon. You’re wet, and it’s cold.

Walking back, you can feel a repressed frustration. You had fun, of course, but you wanted to win. It’s intensely petty to admit it, but it bothers you.

But there’s no time for frustration to fester into self-pity, as the people around you start directing that frustration by colluding about what’s next. Making plans to dominate next season, which turns into eagerly making plans on how we’ll fill our lives beyond the game.

You count yourself incredibly lucky.

Some people say the greatest thrill you can have is winning. Those people are wrong. The greatest thrill you can have is losing, because it means you still have something to play for.

~

Do you feel me? Are you in?

For everyone else, Marineland is a marine-life themed amusement park in Niagara Falls, Canada that’s been open since 1961. It’s most notorious for their exceptionally poor treatment of the sea animals in their care, as well as for management’s stubborn refusal to bend to activist pressure and change the park in any way. Many have expressed surprise that the park is still solvent, owing to its unpopularity with basically everyone.

I don’t want to undersell the animal abuse inherent to the foundations of the park. There’s some truly heinous shit that Marineland has pulled- but, in a way, I think that focusing on just that aspect of the park almost lets it off too easily. It acts as a lightning rod for criticism, when there’s so much else wrong about Marineland that goes unaddressed. Even if it fixed its treatment of animals overnight, it would still be deeply baffling as a theme park.

The most confusing thing, to me, is size and location. Marineland is huge. It’s bigger than all 4 of the Disney World parks combined. The first thing people notice when they go is just how empty it seems, not just because it’s a dying park that nobody likes, but because the handful of people that do go are spread out over an area that is roughly the size of Poland.

The pathways between areas are wide enough to drive several lanes of traffic through. There’s no ambient music being played, so all you hear is the humm of ride machinery and the distant noises of upset animals. The park has an inexplicable half-assed medieval theme, so you’ll occasionally run across run down, shitty looking 1500s cabins that were food stands a decade ago but have been closed since god-knows-when. There’s a real train track that runs through the park- not a ride train, an industrial train- because Marineland is somehow situated exactly between two factories that run raw materials between each other through the park.

It would be one thing if they needed all this space, but Marineland barely has any rides, and most of the ones they do have are lightly themed, off-the-shelf flat rides (think carnival rides but marginally safer). Many of these are closed often. One of their rides, a Topple Tower that they creatively named “Topple Tower”, was installed improperly in 2007 and was down regularly for maintenance until it closed permanently in 2011. They left it standing, abandoned, for 11 years. The ride they replaced it with, Star Voyager, is closed as of the day I’m writing this article.

Even the good stuff at Marineland is tinted with these incomprehensible design decisions. Take Sky Screamer. It’s absolutely their most iconic ride, a gigantic S&S drop tower you can see from any point in the Niagara Falls skyline. It literally towers over Marineland in every sense.

Riders can reach a maximum height of 450 feet off the ground… but the tower itself is only 300 feet tall. This is because there is a 150 foot hill you have to climb up in order to even get to the ride. Like everything in Marineland, this is not a small hike, and there’s no tram or escalator to make it easier. To get to the Sky Screamer, you’ll need to climb a mountain.

But the weirdest ride in the park has to be Dragon Mountain, Marineland’s sole roller coaster targeted to adults. I could dedicate another thousand words to it, but the gist of it is that Dragon Mountain is the only part of Marineland to feature any level of care or ambition… and it still fails in fascinating ways.

Built in the 80s as a counter to the competitive force of the recently opened Canada’s Wonderland, the original plans called for one of the largest roller coasters by track length in the world, with the riders traversing Marineland’s vast backlot, around a quarter-scale replica of Niagara Falls, and to end the ride by circling the inside of a model volcano.

And then they ran out of money.

What they ended up finishing was the track of the ride, the wireframe of the volcano, and an absurdly elaborate queue where you go through the mouth of a carved stone dragon. Eventually they got the money to finish the outer half of the volcano sometime in the late 2000s, 20 years after the ride was built.

Once you know this, you can really tell. There are some genuinely good elements, including a unique bowtie element, and it covers a staggering 30 acres of land. But there’s also long stretches of nothing happening because that’s where they were going to put the fake waterfall. And it was built in the 80s, so it’s really rough. It all averages out to an okay ride with a very strange history.

The key thing to understand is that Marineland is not a normal business. Their operational goal is not to entertain. It’s not conservation or education. They don’t even operate on the principle of attempting to make as much money as possible- if so, they’d cash out and sell their extremely valuable land. No. They operate out of spite.

They exist solely because people say they shouldn’t. They will keep existing as long as people say they can’t. It doesn’t matter how hated they are, how run-down the park is, how much it deteriorates, how much the animals suffer. Marineland, the weirdest, worst park in the world, is going to outlive all of us.

mathNEWS articles are written on Mondays for publishing on the following Fridays. That means that, as I’m writing this, Apple has just announced their long, long rumored AR/VR headset, now officially titled the Apple Vision Pro. I’m sure by the time this is published, we’ll have all sorts of think pieces and memes about this thing, but I wanted to get my initial reaction down raw.

Who knows, maybe the goggles will turn out to be revolutionary in the same way the Mac, iPod, and iPhone were- not the first in their category, but the first to make the category accessible and desirable to the average person. Having watched Apple’s presentation, that’s what they seem to think they’re doing. Apple is wealthy enough and stubborn enough to wedge this into our lives if they really, really tried. It’s been a while since they’ve launched a flat-out flop, and I expect this to be a moderate success, at least. And you can head to East Campus to see what happens when you bet against Apple.

But I see a lot of major issues with the product as presented this afternoon, and I think it’s worth getting these thoughts down today. Who knows, maybe I’ll be wrong and this will age like all the people who thought the internet was a fad, and we can all look back in a decade and laugh at me.

Let’s get the obvious problem out of the way, the one that everyone seems to be focusing on- that price tag. $3500 USD. That’s $5000 CAD. I know this is a new product category, I know this is an Apple product- but man. There’s no getting around how much that costs. Apple had to ease people into $1500 phones, and even now they offer cheaper options. Starting at $3500 is bananas, and means this first generation is going to be very limited to developers and rich weirdos.

For most first-generation products, that might not necessarily be an issue- but Apple is going to want as many people to have this as possible to get people used to how these overgrown ski goggles look. Their demo showed people walking around an office or their home with these on, and it was impossible to take seriously. People mocked AirPods when they came out, but this is going to be a whole lot harder to take seriously when you run into someone wearing them at Starbucks.

Not that you’re likely to see that, because the stated battery life is an atrocious two hours WHILE physically connected to a mandatory external battery pack. Look- I’ve been around the block. I know that when a tech company gives you a battery life estimate, you halve it. But even with 2 whole hours, this is just fundamentally not something you could take into the real world, beyond an outlet.

And that’s assuming you’d even want to use it in public anyways, since the stated control methods are “eyesight, hand gestures, and voice”. If I want to open Instagram under the table in class, I can do that relatively low-key. If I want to open it on the headset, I need to do some combination of yelling at myself and frantically waving my arms around. I don’t know if anyone at Apple has social anxiety, but using this machine in public seems to be impossible without looking like an idiot and/or someone having a stroke.

Those things are relatively minor flaws, though, in the sense that there’s a clear path to fixing them. Not that it’ll be easy, but “the battery life needs to be better” has a conceptually simple solution- “make a better battery”. Apple knows what they need to do.

The deeper issue is the one that’s plagued all XR headsets trying to masquerade as “the future of computing”- what exactly does Apple expect me to do with this thing?

Forget the fact that they only showed the OS as a CG concept video. In those concept videos, the only thing Apple can seem to imagine people using this headset for is… all the things they already do on their phones and PCs. Taking FaceTime calls. Texting their friends. Using email. Watching movies. Playing games. Spreadsheets. Oh boy, they’ve got spreadsheets on this thing.

Everyone already has a way to do all of this. The fortunate of us have several (and considering the price, Apple is definitely targeting the fortunate of us). It would be one thing if AR was a more convenient way to do these things, but… it isn’t! Wearing a headset all the time is tiring and significantly less convenient than using your phone you’ll be carrying with you while you wear this anyways.

Apple seems to think that people will want to use AR to do the things they already do just fine because… why? Now you can do it while looking like a jackass, talking to yourself and waving your arms around? It just seems like yet another tech company creating a product they deem to be “the wave of the future”- not because it actually enabled anyone to accomplish anything they couldn’t do otherwise, but because it was in science fiction and it’s technically possible now to do it.

The iPhone was so successful, not because it gave people new things they could do, but because it took the existing capabilities of other products, combined them, and made it frictionless. The Vision Pro only introduces friction.

I want to be wrong. I feel like something like this is probably the future eventually. And I’d especially love a whole new paradigm of computing to explore, to work in, and to imagine new exciting things to do with. I don’t think we’ll be using PCs and phones forever.

But I have a really hard time thinking this is it. See you all in a decade for either a good laugh at my expense… or for when another company tries to do this again.

~

February 2025 Update: I was totally right about everything in this piece lol

But why does it suck so much? Why hasn’t it ever changed?

Most people, at this point, are aware of how social media apps aren’t neutral platforms that present an unbiased view of the world. They show you content in a deliberate, particular way to support their own agenda. This agenda isn’t a political one, as some might suggest- rather, it’s a financial goal: keep you on the app (and looking at ads) for as long as possible.

Sure, these apps nominally try to do this by allowing you to view global news or your friend’s vacation pictures, but these aren’t the ends- they’re the means. They’re the hooks by which they lure you onto the platform- and, crucially, they aren’t the glue that makes you stick. The constant dopamine rush of the content infinity pool, plus the potential for ceaseless validation by strangers and/or constant insecurity by comparing yourself to those strangers: that’s the real product that social media companies make. The platforms try to subtly guide user behavior in order to keep the app open on people’s phones as long as possible. That’s their only goal.

So why don’t we look at dating apps this way? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem like Tinder has any incentive to actually find you a partner.

Most of the financial motivators are the same as Instagram or Twitter. These are free apps that slowly, subtly monetize their user base. They have the same investors who demand infinite growth in user numbers with a finite amount of people on Earth. The biggest difference is that the bulk of their revenue comes from selling premium services like the three thousand different tiers of Tinder you can buy- which gives them even more incentive to not let anyone find a long-term connection. After all, if you’re happy with your dating life, how could they convince you to spend $40 a week (the actual max price of Tinder Platinum! What the fuck!!) on improving your odds?

Many people have drawn some pretty drastic conclusions about themselves, other people, and the world from observations gathered during online dating. And I definitely don’t want to discount the personal/societal aspects here- there’s a lot of really gross things people do, unprompted, on dating apps. I’ve had more than one woman tell me the reason they agreed to a date was because I didn’t immediately- as in, within the first message- ask for sex. Obviously, at the end of the day, people make a choice to be weirdos, no matter what the systemic incentives are.

But my point isn’t just that things are bad, it’s that no one involved has any incentive to try and make it better. A population composed of users who find it extremely difficult to date is actually what they want. Like so many other things in our society, it’s convenience at the cost of quality. I don’t work for Tinder, I have no idea how much of the shittiness of their platform is intentional and how much is accidental, but the effect is the same.
I think the ripple effects of this (intentionally?) poor design goes out further than you think. Like I said earlier, a lot of people don’t look at Tinder and see a flawed system, they see a flawed society- or worse, a flawed self. For a lot of people- a lot of young men, in particular- the conclusions they draw from this can lead to some really self-destructive behavior.

Traditional male gender expectations include a very strong correlation between self-worth as a man and your success in dating. A lack of these things can lead to the development of some very serious inferiority complexities and/or the buildup of resentment towards society at large and women in particular. This is ridiculous, obviously, but it’s real.

There’s no better symptom of this warped worldview than the phenomenon of Andrew Tate and his various other troglodyte worm-like imitators, who prey on men who feel lonely and unsuccessful and convince them that the problem is they’re not a big enough dipshit. (The sinister part of this is that the more you act like a complete asshole to people, the more people will not want to associate with you- which, to the person convinced they’re fighting The Matrix, is just evidence they were right all along and the solution is giving Andrew Tate more money).

I firmly believe that it’s not that hard to date, and that most people will find someone eventually (that’s not me being romantic, that’s just the hard stats. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking you’re literally one in 8 billion. Odds are you’ll find someone your particular quirks and appearance resonates with).

But if you thought that online dating was dating- that the experience of using Tinder was not a warped view of reality, altered for financial reasons- you might think that the loneliness and frustration of the app experience is all that awaits if you try to reach out to other people. It isn’t.

You aren’t having a bad experience because you’re unlovable, it’s because a tech company refuses to give you the company and companionship you desire, because keeping you sad and lonely and desperate is better for their bottom line.

See guys, it’s actually capitalism’s fault I’m single.

the city comes to life again
upon the early dawn
at long last, you now feel free
to cut across the lawn

yes, you need to grab your scarf
yes, the wind still bites
but it’s fangs are not so sharp
it’s grip is not so tight

as you step outside your shell
to see the world transform
that long, black jacket’s very thick
honey, aren’t you warm?

the frigid winter has a way
like ice, of freezing pain

but

this time of year, it always seems
to wash out
with the
rain.

If you’ve ever been to Niagara Falls, you’ll probably remember Clifton Hill, if not by name. It’s the lane of cheap, junky tourist traps directly perpendicular to the waterfall itself, like a gaudy capitalist leech clinging onto a genuinely beautiful natural wonder, hoping to siphon some cash from tourists with mirror mazes and expensive ice cream. Objectively speaking, it sucks.

So how come I love it?

I grew up in the Niagara region (not the city of Niagara Falls, for the record), but it’s not like we would go very often. It was a 20 minute drive away, back when going for a drive meant getting my parents to drive me (at least before all my friends got licenses—but somehow, when that happened in late 2020, no one was super thrilled to go into a large crowd of tourists). I would visit three times a year, maximum. I went to the dentist more often than the Falls.

But still, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I’m obsessed with this place. I mean it. There is a very high chance that I am the number one Clifton Hill fan on Earth.

Why is this? I know, consciously, that it’s cheap, cynical garbage stuffed with wax monsters and/or bored teens. I haven’t even been inside most of the buildings. Either they’re too expensive (I’ve got bills to pay), or they’re haunted houses (I’m easily frightened), or they’re vape stores (I'm not cool). The draw can’t possibly be the actual content of the Hill. So what is it?

Is it as simple as childhood nostalgia? That would make sense, right? I didn’t go that much, but when I went, it was meaningful. It felt like a trip to Disney World that didn’t cost my family several thousand dollars, just 25 bucks for parking. There was always something new and exciting to do, but even if we just walked down the street, being in the thick of this bizarre carnival was enough for me.

I was watching a YouTube POV of someone walking down the hill when I realized something: I had some form of attachment to every single building. Maybe it was a fully formed memory—that’s where I had my first date, that’s the wax museum we stopped at on a field trip, that’s the haunted house I wouldn’t even walk on the same side of the road as. For others, it was as small as a fragment of an emotion, the lingering remnants of a laugh or a scare or simply a curious glance I had when walking by the building as a kid. Every single building has, in some way, stuck with me.

Maybe Clifton Hill is just my thing, y’know? My one, bizarre, completely impractical obsession that’s stuck with me from childhood. Everyone has their thing, and maybe this one is mine.

(As an aside—I don’t trust people who don’t have a thing. People who are too embarrassed or proud to admit they care too much about something random and stupid, or that they only have ‘adult interests’, tend to be really boring and/or insecure.)

But somehow, I don’t think that’s the whole story. I have a lot of things I was interested in or attached to as a kid, but now I’m not interested anymore. I used to watch the movie Cars once a day when I was a kid, and now I only watch it once a week. I feel like I’m pretty aware if I’m just swept up in nostalgic excitement, but this feels deeper than that.

Maybe one of the reasons could be just how aggressively, impossibly gaudy the entire thing is. Which seems like a reason I’d hate it but… I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s so extreme it almost feels like an elaborate joke. As if it’s some Omega Mart-like elaborate parody of itself, or I’ve stepped into a sitcom where a family visits the most absurd tourist trap in the world.

Consider, for example, the House of Frankenstien—an honest to God combination haunted house/roller coaster/Burger King.

Look at it. Seriously, look at it.

This looks like a Simpsons gag. It looks like something from Itchy and Scratchy Land. The elaborate, gothic castle facade, with a winding roller coaster plopped awkwardly on top, tied together with a gigantic Frankenstien, towering over the skyline, munching down on a delectable Whopper.

This shouldn’t exist. It just shouldn’t. It’s not a real building, it’s a Grunkle Stan-style over-the-top absurd hustle. It’s the tower of Babylon, a testament to humanity’s shamelessness and boldness and ego that something like this exists, and a part of my mind finds it impossible to imagine as anything other than an elaborate joke that I’m also in on.

I can’t help but laugh along. Yeah man, it’s hilarious you built a go-kart track on the edge of a waterfall. Remember that awesome bit where you have a decomposing, decrepit Planet Hollywood directly across the street from the Duty Free? It’s so funny you had a wax museum featuring Wax Jack the Ripper, Wax Jeffrey Dahmer, and Wax Hitler- and it’s even funnier that someone stole Wax Hitler and they never found him again.

That Wax Hitler story is true, by the way. Look it up.

On that note, maybe that’s another part of what fascinates me about this place. The stories that have built Clifton Hill are varied, and mostly crazy- but they’re also obscure. Information about specific events, or even records of when something was built/destroyed can be extremely difficult to track down.

I’m, in particular, fascinated by Marvel Super Hero Adventure City—a defunct Marvel themed arcade/amusement center built into the basement of a hotel. It featured officially licensed Marvel attractions—plural—anchored by an honest to God 3D Dark Ride starring Spider-Man, one of the top 5 most popular fictional characters on the entire planet—and no one seems to know anything about it.

I had to have seen it. I have no memory of it, and I would have been really young, but the timeline of my youth and its existence make it basically impossible that I wouldn’t have gone.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the information age, where I just take for granted that some obsessive superfan will keep track of this information for me to look up at my leisure. The fact that something this big, featuring the most popular superhero in the world, can just appear and vanish without a trace… It drives me crazy. No one but me cared enough to pay attention.

There’s one ride video that exists, and it’s from the production company that made it, uploaded in 2007. Nothing else exists besides old Flickr photos of the outside of the building, and pictures from the Niagara Falls public library. There isn’t even an exact date for when it got the Marvel theme stripped away—2007 to 2009 is my best guess? There isn’t even an official reason, as far as I can tell.

I’ve always been most interested in the things we know very little about. Even as a kid, I gravitated towards stories about folk legends, cryptids, things that could only be half-true at best. I loved diving into the margins and living on the fringes. I found staying on the well defined road with the well defined facts to be extremely boring. I much prefer having to find the truth to being told it.

Clifton Hill is packed with these kinds of stories. Full attractions that existed for years that no one cared enough to document. Thousands of man-hours spent imagining and constructing it, potentially hundreds of thousands of people who have walked through, been entertained, been scared, been intrigued, had their lives touched ever so slightly by these experiences- and all we have to show for it is a handful of forum posts from 2003. What a legacy to leave.

Researching this stuff feels like archeology. I could fall into hour-long rabbit holes looking for any evidence that these things ever existed. In fact, researching this article, I fell into the Spider-Man rabbit hole again.

(If you’re interested, the Marvel complex still exists and is now simply Adventure City. It sits at the bottom of the hill, right next to the last Rainforest Cafe in the country. The Marvel characters have been very, very lightly rethemed, but most of the structure still exists. Like most things on the Hill, it sucks and I adore it.)

There’s one more dominant feeling I got from Clifton Hill, and I think it’s an interesting one. Every time I went to a good themed entertainment center as a kid, something like a Disney or a Universal, I always walked away with a sense that I had been transported into another universe. It barely even registered to me that someone made these things. Even as an adult, I look at those experiences with an admiration for the creativity, engineering, and ingenuity it takes to make an experience on that scale. I remain deeply in awe of the artistry of many of these experiences.

The feeling after I left Clifton Hill was different. It was almost always “I could do that”- and later, “I could do better”.

Even as a kid, I could always see the seams. I knew that “haunted castle” was made out of plastic and plywood. I could see the exposed wiring and the chipped paint and the barely-disguised projectors that make up what could charitably be called attractions. I knew these were man-made.

If the goal was immersion, then these experiences obviously failed. If the goal was entertainment, then their success is debatable. But they had a different effect on me, one I’m not sure they intended—they inspired me. These were deeply flawed and messy, but they felt made by real people, not just dropped from space. They were understandable, comprehensible—and it made me feel like if I just worked hard enough, I could make something like that too. It took the act of creation and helped me realize that mere mortals can do it too.

For as long as I remember, I’ve always wanted to entertain. When I was really young, the vector through which I tried to do that was by dreaming up my own ”rides” that I could make with an iPad, a copy of iMovie, and the toys in my basement. I would film a POV of running around in the backyard, then play it on a computer monitor. I would sit my little brother in the chair and shake the chair around in time with the action on screen, to simulate a 4D theater effect.

I’m not sure what in my childhood made me so determined to work so hard on ways to surprise and entertain other people with the power of cool technology. But I know for sure that Clifton Hill—via sucking so much—made it clear to me that I could. I can trace the path my life has taken back to that original inspiration in a pretty straight line.

I’m not sure if I have a closing point to this. I don’t really think I’ve gotten to the bottom of why I care so much about this terrible, terrible place, but I think I’ve come to at least understand it—and myself—a little deeper.

But I guess a sensible explanation, or an obvious explanation, or a conclusive explanation, or even just a good explanation… that wouldn’t fit the spirit of things, now would it?