This weekend was about nesting, making my new apartment almost as functional as home. I discovered how complicated and labor-intensive simple tasks can become in an unknown city, where everything shuts early, taxis have to be called and I don’t have access to a Communauto. Sometimes it feels like I’m back to pre-industrial times. Tasks that take me half a morning in Montreal become whole-weekend pilgrimages here.

Marie-Ève doesn’t have a cellphone so I got to remember what it was like to lose someone in a crowd in pre-cellphone times when we became separated at Ikea, where we had gone by taxi (my second visit in as many days, because we couldn’t get everything done in one load). Then I tried putting together the furniture but had no tools. Destroyed my hand trying to twist screws without a screwdriver, and hammering with a shoe. In the end the furniture was held together mostly by hope, and I actually feared leaving the window open lest the wind blow my Billy shelf apart.

Even if I didn’t have about 12 different screwdrivers at home in Montreal, buying one would have been a matter of crossing Mont-Royal street to one of three nearby Ronas. Not so in Newcastle. After running around town in search of tools, and finding everything closed (at 4:45 PM!), I remembered a 24-hour Tesco located out of town. Walked 40 minutes to get there (for a &?%$#@ hammer!), past billboards boasting its opening hours with slogans like “Tesco - Still Open!”. Got there and found it closed. Ah ben SACRAMENT! On a bright, cheerful sign that shouted “Open 24 Hours!” at me, were also listed the actual opening hours (10 am - 4 pm Sundays, and not one day where it doesn’t shut). What?

The washer/dryer with whom I’m living a lie (I suspect it of just being a washer) is covered in forgotten, obscure Runic symbols instead of text, and locks my panties inside if I don’t enter the right incantation combination of buttons.

With the months all this will probably become familiar and I can carve out an efficient life for myself. However, the Buddha on my Billy would say that for the time being, it’s probably best to let go of such opulent luxuries as a dépanneur.

UPDATE: I can’t make this shit up. I found the washer/dryer manual online at work, and sent myself the link at home. Get home and set up the laptop nearby, click the link, and it’s blocked as inappropriate content. If I was high I’d be seriously paranoid right now.

I was wondering how people here would react to England’s elimination. Found people in the pub strangely philosophical about the whole thing, kept saying they didn’t deserve to win.

Dr Wank says: “That’s the brits for you: Keep Calm and Carry On (i.e., unless you’re actually AT a football game, in which case freak out and beat the shit out of everybody).”

So I’ve moved to Newcastle in the UK for a few months, to work on this with them. It all happened quite quickly… so here I am and after 3 days pretty much offline I’m like a very relieved addict getting a fix. Even doing a blog post.

Newcastle looks like an old town that’s had a lot of investment to modernize it, full of Edinburgh-like brownstone, spires and ancient cathedrals, mixed in with a lot of modern “culture centre” buildings. The result is schizophrenic, but not without charm. In some areas the understated modern signs work well with the stone walls, in others (a huge sculpture of DNA made of shopping carts next to a wall built by the Romans), it’s a stretch. A search for a Tesco (UK version of Loblaws) took me for a walk down Quayside near the water last night, and it was quite beautiful.

The apartment is great. Centrally located, clean, bright and modern, with huge windows and a view over the city. Enough groceries were waiting for me to make dinner and breakfast stuff, as well as a bottle of red. Strange priorities, though: there are puzzles in case I get bored, but no alarm clock. Gardening stuff including earth and seeds, but no hair dryer. Along with the absence of an Internet connection or TV service, it seems this trip is intent on connecting me with my inner Zen.

Have already hit a few of the UK required milestones: Friday night at the pub, Tesco, curry and Antiques Roadshow. Football tomorrow!

Charcoal cloth

Originally uploaded by lightspeedchick

I once dated a windsurfing instructor for 5 years, and over 5 summers of frustrating, hard training and personal instruction, I never managed to learn to windsurf. That’s when I realized that mastery can never come from just training. You need training AND potential.

I’ve always thought I could draw if taught, but my drawings have always been technical-looking outlines, with shading and color my nemeses. I’ve been taking some lessons over the past few weeks, and the instructor had me do this charcoal exercise to overcome some of my shading demons. It’s been fun but exhausting getting over my normal style.

Here’s hoping drawing doesn’t become another futile exercise in windsurfing.

Last night I gave a talk at the Montreal Geek Girl Dinner about the future of storytelling and emotion in videogames.

Afterwards, several members of the amazing Station C audience requested references to some of the games I mentioned, so I’ll delay my post on how Jane Austen has finally made it into the modern space opera to provide these.

Games with good story elements
Mass Effect: The one with the romance.
Bioshock: The one with the Fountainhead references.
Portal: The one with the cake. Tells a fantastic story without cutscenes. Available on PC through Steam for 20$.

Top recent Xbox/PS games mentioned
Some of these are also available on PC.
Modern Warfare 2
Mass Effect 2. You can also read my take on the first one here.
Assassin’s Creed 2
Uncharted 2

Other games mentioned
Execution (free)
Wedding Dash is available for free download (for an hour, then 7$ to purchase permanently) on Big Fish Games, along with a host of fun time-management and other games.

And for other meaningful games, you may want to try
The Marriage (free)
Gravitation (free, donations encouraged)
Braid on Xbox live

Thanks to all that showed up, I had the best night in ages! (And Canada trouncing Russia was just a bonus!). Huge love to Tanya and Station C.

Next post: How Mass Effect 2 put Mr. Darcy into a Canadian commercial from the 80s! Really! Honest this time!

Public service announcement: Are you a creative English-speaking woman in Quebec? You could get up to 25000$ in funding for an interactive project!

Filmmakers, photographers, new-media creators, graphic designers, sound artists, programmers, interactive storytellers, writers, and other techie creative creatures are invited to apply to First Person Digital, a new program set up by the NFB with Studio XX.

Representatives will be present at my Girl Geek Dinner talk next week.

You can also listen to one of the organizers talk about FPD on Wednesday’s edition of CKUT’s XX files.

Deadline for application is March 1st. Go!

Next post: How Mass Effect 2 put Mr. Darcy into a Canadian commercial from the 80s.

Okay, the world is now officially fucking insane. Car dashboards with integrated web browsers this year.

“Heading to Madison Square Garden for a basketball game? Pop down the touch pad, finger-scribble the word “Knicks” and get a Wikipedia entry on the arena, photos and reviews of nearby restaurants, and animations of the ways to get there.”

Can’t picture myself finger-writing “Knicks” on the dashboard while driving in NYC, without mentally killing a pedestrian and rear-ending a cab.

But don’t fret: these genuises have thought of everything. “A notice that pops up when the Audi system is turned on reads: ‘Please only use the online services when traffic conditions allow you to do so safely.’”

When I went to Indonesia in 1996, I remember seeing an ornate “window” in a hostel, which was essentially a nicely-shaped hole right in the concrete wall, with no glass or screen. I saw this and had the thought, “but what do they do in wint-? oh… right”. It’s those little things that make you realize that a lot of what we take for granted are really special features of Canada.

I was in Scotland over the holidays and I made a lot of fun of the country for being paralyzed by so little snow. Snow that grass poked through created enough havoc to cancel some of the family’s holiday festivities, including a dinner. But although it was a wuss of a winter (-8C at worst I saw there), it was definitely harder to live with than here. I remember feeling and hearing drafts in every pub and house I entered, and in most places the heating couldn’t cope well enough to warm the interior completely. Ever since I’ve been back, I’ve been appreciating the simple fact of being able to actually be toasty when inside, or walk confidently on the sidewalk (on which abrasives are used). If Britain is so unused to what little winter I saw there, I’m not shocked that the prolonged frost they’ve been getting is screwing them up completely, and I feel for them.

My friend Charles, on a sabbatical in New Zealand, has noticed that the doors there are often left wide open, leading to birds often being seen in cafés. He adds, “nobody seems to consider this a public health hazard”. That fear that beasties, including domestic ones, are unsanitary, seems typically North American. Everywhere I’ve gone (including Europe), I’ve seen owners bring well-behaved dogs to restaurants, and on trains. There were at least 5 dogs (leashed, not caged) in our one crowded compartment on the train to Glasgow. In Indonesia I dined in a restaurant where I could see a rat walking on the awning of the bar. My hotel in Venezuela, the same one where the UN Secretary General had recently stayed, had cockroaches. Sure, I wouldn’t like to eat next to rats and dead birds, but I think we’re a little overcareful when it comes to dogs, cats, birds, squirrels, geckos, and the like. People aren’t that afraid everywhere. They really are especially afraid here.

I was recently talking to my friend Thierry, who moved to L.A. last year, about the American healthcare reform. He felt that a key difference between American and Canadian attitudes with respect to this was that in America, it’s accepted as common sense that a public figure or richer person should get better and faster treatment than the rest of the population, in all things. Conversely in Canada, according to my friend, we expect all to be equal, for better or worse. This is definitely supported by the indignation we saw when Claude Dubois jumped the H1N1 vaccination line this fall, and last week when Halle Berry skipped the queue at Trudeau airport. One commenter said that the outrage over this is strictly Canadian, as in most places people expect stars to get VIP treatment everywhere, including at security checks.

This is how travelling makes you know your own country better. Some things others may soon have to learn from us, while for some other things… I wish we’d learn from them.

I was motivated to write something about Halle Berry skipping the airport line in Montreal, but it seemed inappropriate for the first post of the year.

A lot of links and articles are going around these days about how to keep one’s resolutions, with most advising to make your objectives specific, and share them. As with any resolution, New Year’s or otherwise, I’m always reluctant to share because it seems to give the ol’ entourage licence to nag, but I guess that’s kind of the point.

Well, licence or no, here are mine:

1 - Hit a BMI of 22 (that’s about 10 pounds away)
2 - Take piano lessons and practice (my least likely to be observed)
3 - Do something social once at week at least (must observe, as I think it’ll be hard to do this in 2011 when the new game is due)
4 - Read at least one book a month
5 - Find real ways of worrying less, other than waiting for the wisdom of old age to set in
6 - Make that cool website idea of mine a reality (another long shot)

Yours?

Can’t we get us one of these guys in Canada? (en français)