Omega Point

Catherine Winters is not the top hit for “Second Life Vancouver”

This week, the Geor­gia Straight’s Stephen Hui inter­viewed me for Straight.com’s weekly Geek Speak fea­ture.

I just fin­ished read­ing the inter­view and I’m happy to con­firm that I didn’t sound insane or say any­thing ter­ri­bly inap­pro­pri­ate this time. I find I do have some­thing of a ten­dency to do this. If we’ve spo­ken in any capac­ity, you may have con­firmed this for yourself.

Case in point: at the end of the inter­view, Stephen said, “We did a story last Decem­ber on Sec­ond Life and Google Lively. I wish our writer had been able to get in touch with you for it.”

“Oh, am I not the top hit on Google for ‘Sec­ond Life Van­cou­ver’ any longer?” I asked.

I really can’t believe the things that drift out of my mouth sometimes.

But more impor­tantly, no, no I am not the top hit for ‘Sec­ond Life Van­cou­ver’! In fact, I’m not even on the first page.

Cur­rently, the top hit is an arti­cle about the Van­cou­ver Police Department’s recruitment/awareness project under­taken by the Mas­ters of Dig­i­tal Media pro­gram, prior to my employ­ment there at the Great North­ern Way Cam­pus.

That’s only periph­er­ally related to me! Man.

Any­way. You should go read the Q&A at Straight.com!

Pride by any other name

As a quick aside, one argu­ment I’ve heard about the Gay Pride Parade recently is that if its pur­pose as an activism tool has ended in North Amer­ica, maybe it shouldn’t be called “Pride” any­more. Hon­estly though, we have vir­tu­ally no hol­i­days or tra­di­tions that make any sense when viewed from their orig­i­nal con­texts. Seri­ously, Guy Fawkes Day? Valentine’s day? April Fools’ Day? Look­ing for authen­tic­ity in hol­i­days is pretty futile, in my opin­ion. They are what we want them to be, and they’re sig­nif­i­cant because we cel­e­brated them last year and the year before that, not because our great-grandparents observed them exactly the same way as we do.

Frankly, in a thou­sand years, when Pride has become all mixed up with St Patrick’s Day and every­one car­ries a genet­i­cally engi­neered blue cucum­ber because that’s tra­di­tional, the ori­gin of the day’s name–whatever that may be by then–is just going to be a weird bit of trivia men­tioned on the news on years when they need hol­i­day filler.

So there.

Critical Pride Part 2: Midnight Mass & the Dyke March

As a fol­lowup to some of the dis­cus­sion result­ing from yesterday’s post com­par­ing Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass, I thought I’d extend the metaphor to my pre­ferred alter­na­tive events: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Speak­ing per­son­ally, Pride is gen­er­ally not gen­er­ally my thing: it’s loud, it’s hot, and the parade, at least, is not really par­tic­i­pa­tory. I don’t like watch­ing things, I like doing things. One of the things I like doing is the Van­cou­ver Dyke March.

Rather than a spec­ta­tor, I find myself tak­ing the role of a par­tic­i­pant, walk­ing up Com­mer­cial Drive with friends, amongst a fairly laid-back crowd, where one is more likely to see women with strollers than thongs. Hon­estly, I like the fact that it’s a smaller event, as well: for me, there’s a much greater feel­ing of com­mu­nity than I feel at Pride.

But back to Mid­night Mass. (“That’s a Catholic thing, right?”) Some­times! In this post, how­ever, Mid­night Mass is Vancouver’s answer to LA’s Mid­night Ridazz group: a reg­u­lar late-night ride through LA — with a num­ber of reg­u­lars num­ber­ing in the thousands.

When I look at the Mid­night Ridazz site, the first thing that stands out to me is a shout-out to an LAPD offi­cer that escorted them on a recent ride:

The Mid­night Ridazz would like to extend a sin­cere thanks to the LAPD and espe­cially to the offi­cer (whose name we did not get) who recently helped to escort our ride through the streets of Los Ange­les. We are all part of the neigh­bor­hoods we ride and we sup­port the LAPD!

Hear­ing this mes­sage from a loose group with a strong DIY, anti-commercial per­spec­tive is likely sur­pris­ing for any­one expect­ing this to be Crit­i­cal Mass at night, but the Mid­night Ridazz’ site describes the ride as both anti-confrontational and apo­lit­i­cal as well.

Respect for space, dri­vers and the sleep­ing res­i­dents of the neigh­bour­hoods through which they ride is also a core value of Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass com­mu­nity: In this post to Vancouver’s Mid­night Mass Live­Jour­nal com­mu­nity from 2007, one par­tic­i­pant shares his con­cerns about the ride becom­ing too rowdy.

We don’t need to ride 6 peo­ple abreast and block 3 lanes of traf­fic. There are only like 20 odd peo­ple; this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. We really should keep over to the side and just take one lane. It is all we need.

I can appre­ci­ate this because it’s not jus­ti­fy­ing, nor crit­i­ciz­ing Crit­i­cal Mass. The point is that this isn’t Crit­i­cal Mass. Rather, the author is just point­ing out the dif­fer­ences between con­duct expected among the small crowd present at Mid­night Mass and what was observed.

“So Cather­ine, if you’re skep­ti­cal of both Pride and Crit­i­cal Mass and a fan of both their smaller, less-flashy coun­ter­parts, does that make you some­one who just hates things because they’re popular?”

You hush. The Dyke March has its roots in some­what more con­fronta­tional pol­i­tics than the Pride parade, orig­i­nat­ing as a protest both in favour of les­bian (and later, bisex­ual and trans­gen­der) rights, as well as against misog­yny within the gay rights move­ment of the 80s and 90s.

(Also, yes, yes it does.)

So, if you’re inter­ested, the Van­cou­ver Dyke March begins walk­ing towards Grand­view Park from McSpad­den Park at 12 noon this Sat­ur­day, August 1st. I hope to see you there!

Mid­night Mass Van­cou­ver occurs every sec­ond and fourth Thurs­day of the month, start­ing from Grand­view Park at 12 mid­night. I am usu­ally in bed by this time.

Orga­niz­ers of both events rec­om­mend show­ing up early to meet fel­low participants.

Critical Pride

On his blog this morn­ing, Buzz Bishop posed the ques­tion: Are you proud of Pride?

In his post, Buzz asks if the imagery we’ll see in Vancouver’s Pride Parade this Sun­day is really the best way to demon­strate that gays are just like every­one else. This reminded me of another famil­iar argu­ment, about Crit­i­cal Mass: are 3000 peo­ple on bicy­cles block­ing com­muter traf­fic really help­ing the image of cyclists?

Hon­estly, Buzz does raise a good point, though it’s hardly a new argu­ment, going back to the exclu­sion of activists we would today con­sider to be trans­gen­dered in the imme­di­ate post-Stonewall era.

Still, as I wrote in Buzz’s com­ments, it’s a debate I feel is pretty well moot at this point. As of last week, it’s been four years since we for­mally enacted gay mar­riage nation­wide here in Canada, an anniver­sary that totally passed me by due to no men­tion what­so­ever in the media. Peo­ple don’t care.

At the same time, though, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that Cana­di­ans are very cau­tious not to offend. At all. Ever. (We’re very passive-aggressive, though.) The prob­lem I have with this is that it’s fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est. Frankly, as much as I like not hav­ing bot­tles hurled at my head should I choose to hold my girlfriend’s hand in down­town Van­cou­ver, it would be nice if peo­ple adver­tised their hate and intolerance.

“Cather­ine, stop blog­ging while drunk,” you might say.

No, I’m seri­ous. I want to know who to avoid. I want to know who’s trust­wor­thy and who’s biased against me. It may not be pop­u­larly accepted that we’re all prej­u­diced, but I’m sorry, we are. Frankly, humans are a bunch of xeno­pho­bic jerks. Our abil­ity to pigeon­hole “the other” is why, as I men­tioned to @_lisas on Twit­ter this morn­ing–in the course of explain­ing why I’m freaked out by birds of all things–there’s a sin­gle species of human sur­viv­ing today.

Everyone’s a lit­tle bit racist. Sure, we’re taught that it’s wrong, but I think this leads less to dis­cus­sion and edu­ca­tion, and more to big­ots becom­ing clos­eted themselves.

So… obvi­ously my friends are cool with it. Very few of the peo­ple I know are homo­pho­bic in the least. But I don’t date a lot. I haven’t had a girl­friend in… well, let’s just put it at “a while”. Very few peo­ple I know have seen me totally mak­ing out with girls. Doing so wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily pro­voke a homo­pho­bic reac­tion, more “Cat does PDAs? Since when?”

Would my land­lady be on board with my being gay? Prob­a­bly not, but it’s never come up. She’s con­tent to assume that my extreme height is what has pre­vented me meet­ing a suc­ces­sion of hor­ri­ble, chainsmok­ing boyfriends to bring home to the hottest 300 square foot apart­ment ever known to mankind. But at the same time, it’s not like I would bring boys there if I was into that sort of thing either.

Last year, I remem­ber her express­ing skep­ti­cism about Obama and his abil­ity to han­dle the finan­cial cri­sis, which I pre­sumed to be of the usual Cana­dian vari­ety: “Can you believe he doesn’t sup­port single-tier health­care!?” It turned out that, no, she liked McCain bet­ter. I had def­i­nitely never heard this view expressed by any­one in Van­cou­ver. I real­ize I’m stereo­typ­ing, but there is a bit of a cor­re­la­tion there.

The major­ity of Cana­di­ans are in favour of gay mar­riage, with an over­whelm­ing major­ity at least being on board with some sort of “sep­a­rate but equal” equiv­a­lent. The most con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment of my life­time has stated the mat­ter is set­tled. That may be debat­able, but it’s just not some­thing we’re spend­ing time on.

At the same time as this was going on at Buzz’s blog, there was a con­ver­sa­tion occur­ring on my Twit­ter feed about the VPD advi­sory regard­ing the esti­mated 3000 cyclists par­tic­i­pat­ing in this month’s Crit­i­cal Mass. (Mind you, I’m highly skep­ti­cal about the like­li­hood that so many peo­ple will brave 30° Cel­sius weather just to irri­tate com­muters and climb up on top of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.) Still, the eter­nal “yay, Crit­i­cal Mass”/“stop being ass­holes” debate rages on.

You know what? I sup­port the Bur­rard Bridge bicy­cle lane project — which seems to be work­ing out just fine at this point. (I do agree with Van­cou­ver City Coun­cil mem­ber Andrea Reimer, how­ever: “Enough about the Bur­rard Bridge.”) I sup­port the con­struc­tion of increased cycling and tran­sit infra­struc­ture. We need bil­lions of dol­lars more for tran­sit and mil­lions more to improve bike lanes.

But is Crit­i­cal Mass the way to con­vince other peo­ple to get on board with this plan, nec­es­sar­ily? Yeah, prob­a­bly not. I actu­ally do under­stand the “now dri­vers know how we feel!” argu­ment. But, dude? No they don’t. Now they hate cyclists even more. And the dri­vers who didn’t ever con­sider cyclists much? Yeah, they remem­ber that it took them two hours to make their 20-minute com­mute home after a long week.

And ulti­mately, this acts against my inter­ests as a cyclist.

At the same time, Crit­i­cal Mass looks like a lot of fun. It’s just fun at the expense of other people’s day. And I’m a staunch believer in the idea that we’re all enti­tled to do what­ever we want until such time as what we want inter­feres with oth­ers’ abil­ity to do what they want. Also, sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

So how do I pair my this with my moral out­rage towards post-Stonewall activists fight­ing for “straight-acting” gay and les­bian rights 30 years ago, or my posi­tion that it was was wrong and ulti­mately self-defeating to delib­er­ately exclude the rest of the LGBT community?

I don’t know. I’m judg­ing his­tory from the per­spec­tive of some­one who didn’t live through it, who just inher­ited the world activists worked towards a gen­er­a­tion ago. And frankly, that’s dan­ger­ous. Today, it may seem obvi­ous that includ­ing bisex­u­als, effem­i­nate men, butches and trans­gen­dered peo­ple has always been the right thing to do, but I have to con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that I can even assert that posi­tion today because of the fact that they were effec­tively booted out of the move­ment decades ear­lier. Which is actu­ally really depressing.

So, would a 21st-Century-style Pride parade and LGBT move­ment have flown in the early 1970s? The spec­ta­tors and par­tic­i­pants def­i­nitely wouldn’t have been the same, but the fact of the mat­ter is, if you think The Queers are doing things to the soil, nobody’s going to con­vince you oth­er­wise with a float cov­ered in incred­i­bly ripped guys wear­ing thongs.

So maybe that’s not what Pride’s for any­more. Maybe it’s just a party. As Buzz’s com­menter Eter­nal­Cana­dian points out, hon­estly, what’s the dif­fer­ence between Pride and Mardi Gras or Carib­ana?

Edit: Also see Crit­i­cal Pride Part 2: Mid­night Mass and the Dyke March.

Blogathon 2009: The morning after.

Well, I like to think I came close to mak­ing it, anyway.

Unfor­tu­nately, my abil­ity to ham­mer out posts dried up shortly before I lit­er­ally tipped out from exhaus­tion, so those of you at home missed out on the effects of that.

Thanks to those of you who donated directly and to those of you who pledged per-post to the Cana­dian Can­cer Soci­ety! The final count was 28 posts on my part and $108 raised on yours.

I did man­age to have fun, at least. Thanks to Rebecca, Raul, Rain­coaster and every­one else at Work­space last night who helped us all along!

On a brighter note, I did work on many more post out­lines than , so at least I have a back­log of mate­r­ial to fin­ish up over the next few weeks.

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: All in One SEO Pack must be configured.

So ear­lier today, I was informed by all-around nice guy and occa­sional WordPress-handholder Tris Hussey that I ought to be using the All in One SEO Pack on my Word­Press blog.

So I got it, only to dis­cover that all the con­fig fields were empty. Appar­ently ver­sion 1.6.4 has a bit of a prob­lem with not pre­pop­u­lat­ing the fields with the proper strings and escape char­ac­ters. Whoops.

For­tu­nately, Tris found a site that had a giant screen­shot of the actual set­tings here. So in the event that you’re tak­ing advice about the ver­sion 1.6.4 of the All in One SEO pack for Word­Press, do check that out, won’t you? You’ll have to retype every­thing, but still, awesome.

I really don’t want to see this yel­low “All in One SEO Pack must be con­fig­ured” mes­sage at the top of all my posts, and hey, bet­ter SEO stuff would be super, too, so I’m fix­ing that right now.

If you’re not using it, you should be. More hits are bet­ter hits.

(Thanks, Tris!)

Blogathon 2009: Arts and crafts? Oh no!

Want. Seri­ously.

I spent so much time play­ing Lem­mings when I was younger. What an awe­some game. June of Plan­etJune has included cro­chet pat­terns and sug­ges­tions for acces­sories on her blog.

And to cro­cheters out there: what bet­ter than cro­cheted Lem­mings to go with my Weighted Com­pan­ion Cube? I mean, really.

(Via jwz.)

Blogathon 2009: Fortified with essential caffeines

When I worked at the Great North­ern Way Cam­pus, there existed an unwrit­ten but very offi­cial decree: under no cir­cum­stances was any­one to allow me to have any Red Bull.

So… yeah, we’ll see how that goes tonight.

Blogathon 2009: What kind of site do you think this is, anyway?

So I was check­ing out my Google Ana­lyt­ics stats just now to gauge the impact Blo­gathon is hav­ing upon my site traf­fic. Answer: lots. Obviously.

How­ever, I couldn’t help but notice a num­ber of inter­est­ing searches by which peo­ple are com­ing here.

Okay, that’s different.

This sums up my day fairly accurately.

Other bewil­der­ing search terms peo­ple used to arrive here include:

• brid­get botelho choco­late sweet deal
• omega.com robot chat
• pen­ta­gon demon
• the omega point that could make the end
• vac­uum ejaculator

You peo­ple. Seri­ously, what the hell?