A painting of me
  • Blame the nerds for low voter turnout in the Ontario election. 

    Over the past two decades, campaigns have become increasingly data-driven, by which I mean parties have become a lot more interested in identifying their existing supporters and making sure they vote than they are in winning new ones.

    I’ve had the NPD show up at my door twice this election, trying to confirm if I’ll vote for them or not. If you follow this blog, you know i’m a pretty hard core NDP voter, but i’m not sure i’l vote for them this election. Right now i’m leaning towards voting communist—for real.

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X-Men: Days of Future

   29 May 2014, mid-morning

X-Men: Days of Future past seems to be well loved, though I’m not sure why. It’s definitely a huge improvement over X-Men: The Last Stand, but on the whole it felt like it fell short. The story retells the classic Chris Claremont comic book story, in which Kitty Pryde is sent back in time to stop Mystique from killing a senator in the 70s, which is the trigger that sets of a chain of events that ends with a present day robot apocalypse. This film follows a similar story, but instead of Kitty Pryde going back they send Wolverine—of course. (Hugh Jackman is crazy ripped in this film, incidentally.) I had high hopes for the movie. It’s a crazy cross over with the cast from X-Men: First Class. Ultimately I found it lacking. I thought there was too much exposition. You are constantly being told what is happening and how to feel about it. There are some cool action sequences, but they felt like they were few and far between. There is nothing like that opening sequence with Nightcrawler from XII, which was spectacular. Anyway, how are you going to not watch this movie?

The official X-Men: Days of Future website.

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Akira

   28 May 2014, mid-morning

I watched Akira again over the last few days. It was released on Blu-Ray for its 25th anniversary, which I promptly purchased. I’ve come a long way from my friends VHS copy. I’d tell you what it’s about, but who really knows? There are motorbike gangs, activists, secret agents, corrupt government officials, and children with the ultimate psionic power all futzing around in post-apocalyptic Tokyo. None of that matters. In my mind it is the pinnacle of Japanese animation. The whole film is a visual wonder. It had an Inception soundtrack 20 years before Inception. Akira is majestic brilliant beautiful obtuse incredible. It is one of my favourite films.

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  • Checking the math on Tim Hudak's million jobs plan. 

    … the half million jobs the Progressive Conservatives were promising to create with their plan (base-case economic growth was expected to provide the other half-million jobs) was really only about 75,000—fewer than the 100,000 public-sector jobs they were pledging to eliminate.

    It’s too easy to make fun of Tim Hudak. That guy is a dope. Sadly, much of Ontario is filled with dopes. And what are the alternatives? The terrible Ontario NDP or the Liberals who have been fucking up for a decade now?

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  • SPACING INVESTIGATION: Timeline of the Scarborough Subway. 

    A reminder that the Shepard LRT would have been done last year if the Liberals hadn’t cut funding way back when—followed by a series of fuck ups from city council, the mayor, and the provincial government. The Liberal government has basically done fuck all for transit in the city, right? Though I guess that’s true for every single party.

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Throwback Film

   23 May 2014, early morning

I’ve had some film sitting in my fridge for 4 years now. Some of the film might be closer to 5 years old, I suspect. I used to be reasonably good about processing my black & white film as I shot it, but once you slip it’s easy to end up with an insurmountable backlog. Thankfully I found someone in Toronto who will process the stuff for me. It’s getting quite tricky to find places that process film, let alone black & white film. So, now I have film I need to scan. That part of the process might be worse than the developing.

This photo is probably from the summer of 2010, based on the other photos I found on the roll. Shima is probably pregnant with Mythilli. You’d never know. I like the composition. In particular that both are hands are in the shot, and that her arm seems to belong to someone else. It looks like it is photobombing this photo.

Shooting film has several pluses completely unrelated to the quality (or lack thereof) of the images you get back. Film can be like a time capsule. Who knows how I would have felt about this photo 4-5 years ago. Today it is interesting simply because of the amount of time that’s passed since I shot it.

Originally posted to my 4ormat blog.

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