October 20, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 20, 2018

Here is this week’s list of poems and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Ode to a Head Cold. I don’t remember ever seeing a poem dedicated to the common cold before, but this was a lot of fun to read.

Being Shy – What It’s Really Like and What to Do About It via bloggerbythesea. Go read this if you’re not shy and you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be this way.

Halloween Is Coming. Who else identifies with this feeling?

Autumn Colours. Now I’m craving pie.

Remember When via AbeLopezAuthor. Ooh, this was a good post. I can’t imagine spending this much time focusing on such a short period in your life, but it does happen.

Life Lessons from Playing Chess via eralbertson. I keep flirting with the idea of learning how to play chess. This post might push me to finally doing it.

Finally, this Harry Potter Homecoming Assembly performance is every bit as cool as it sounds.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Suggestion Saturday

October 18, 2018 · 1:00 am

3 Things I Love About Autumn Hikes

This autumn has been an odd one so far here in Ontario as climate change continues to disrupt our normal weather patterns.

Early September is often still hot here, but the heat continued on through October this year. I was actually still wearing shorts and other summer gear as recently as a week ago!

Now the weather is jumping back and forth between unseasonably warm and cold temperatures from one day to the next.

One of the most noticeable side effects of this strange weather has been a delay in when the leaves began to change colour and fall off for the year. There are still quite a few trees with green leaves in southern Ontario even though we’re already more than halfway through October.

I’m hoping this will mean that we’ll have a delayed beginning of winter as well. There hasn’t been enough time to spend exercising while out in nature as I like to have when the weather is mild.

Hidden Details Being Revealed

Some of the trees in my neighbourhood have begun to change colour. Once the weather cools down enough for other species to join them, the landscape changes quickly as other trees follow in their footsteps. At some point, all of the non-evergreen

As much as I’ll miss the sight of green plants this winter, it’s always interesting to spot the now-abandoned nests that birds created when no one could see what they were doing up in those branches or to see how sparse a forest can look when all of the plants go dormant for the winter.

If I still wrote poetry, I’d write a poem about all of the things we might not have noticed when the year was still young. There’s so much room for inspiration when you visit a place you’ve been to many times before and notice something there that you hadn’t picked up on before.

Friendly Weather

I was originally going to call this section mild weather, but it honestly feels downright friendly to me after the long, hot summer we had. It’s so nice to go outside again without feeling like you’ve stuck your head in an oven.

Not only are the chances of suffering frostbite or a sunburn are lower than usual at this time of the year, October is a pretty pleasant month if you like spending a lot of time outdoors. Any shivering or perspiring is generally kept to a minimum, especially if you dress in layers and remove or add them as needed.

Despite my interest in fitness and nature, I’m not the sort of person who enjoys spending a lot of time outside when it is very hot or cold outside. This is something that confuses certain folks when they first get to know me, but there’s a massive quality of life difference between spending hours in the woods when it’s 15 degrees Celcius (60 Fahrenheit) versus -15 C (5 F) or 45 C (113 F).

To me, nature is something best explored during moderate seasons like spring and fall. Yes, they can both be unpredictable at times as far how quickly their temperatures can shift, but they’re generally the best times of the year to spend hours outside without suffering too many negative health consequences for that decision.

Mentally Stimulating Exercise

There’s a huge difference between exercising to a pre-recorded video indoors on a cold winter day and getting to explore the world around you when the weather is more agreeable.

I’ll get my workouts in either way, but I have to say that I find a lot more pleasure in exercising at the park where I’m surrounded by the sights, smells, and sounds of autumn.

Something as simple as hearing the crunch of leaves as I pass through them or seeing a neighbour’s dog stubbornly chase squirrels adds a little bit of joy to my normal routine. (Don’t worry – I’ve never seen a single dog catch a squirrel at my local park. The wildlife here is too smart and fast for pampered city pets to keep up with).

It doesn’t have to be anything exciting in order to catch my attention. Even subtle changes are enough to keep me interested in my surroundings as I exercise.

How does the changing of the seasons affect your workout routine? Will you be hiking or walking anywhere interesting over the next few months?

2 Comments

Filed under Fitness

Tagged as , , ,

October 15, 2018 · 1:00 am

Reader Question: Should I Read Science Fiction or Fantasy?

Someone recently found this blog by googling the following question:

Should I read science fiction or fantasy?

I thought it was a great prompt for today’s post. Just like apples and pears are both types of fruit, fantasy and science fiction are part of the wider speculative fiction universe that also includes sub-genres like horror, dystopian, utopian, supernatural, science fantasy, and superhero fiction. Science fiction and fantasy share a lot of similarities, but they aren’t identical by any means.

On the off chance that they ever see this post, I’d be happy to give the person who did this search some personalized reading recommendations if they’re interested in such a thing.

Since I don’t know that person or what their tastes in reading material are like, I’m going to keep my advice as general as possible. The only assumption I’ll be making is that you were interested in exploring both of these sub-genres and are wondering which one you should dive into first.

Like most children in western cultures, fairy tales were my first taste of speculative fiction in general. I quickly developed a preference for the original, and often surprisingly macabre given the age group they were marketed to, versions of classic fairy tales, so I was soon introduced to the horror and supernatural genres as well through my insatiable appetite for as many new fairy tales as I could find at our local library.

There is so much overlap between the science fiction and fantasy, though, that I quickly found myself wandering deeper into the science fiction end of the spectrum. I now have a preference for hard science fiction, but I’ll never forget my love of fantasy or many of the other sub-genres under the speculative fiction umbrella.

The question of whether you should read fantasy or science fiction really depends on the sorts of stories you enjoy versus the ones that you don’t find so alluring. I’m going to be making some broad generalizations here that definitely won’t apply to every book or author out there. They may be helpful in steering the original visitor and everyone else reading this towards a specific section of the library or bookstore as you decide what you want to read next.

Science Fiction tends to be:

  • Realistic.
  • Related to what is, or could be, scientifically possible. For example, the discovery of a vaccine for AIDS or a cure for cancer.
  • Set in the present or future.
  • Rational. When someone weird happens, there is generally a logical reason for it.
  • More political (in many cases).
  • Interested in exploring specific ideas, ideologies, or conflicts. These themes can often be traced back to controversial subjects that are or were hotly debated when that specific book was first published.

Fantasy tends to be:

  • Imaginative.
  • Related to things that will never be scientifically possible. For example, the existence of Hogwarts (*sob*) or a pet dog that suddenly begins speaking plain English.
  • Set in the past.
  • Supernatural and/or magical. When something weird happens, it is not generally explained rationally to the reader.
  • Less political (in many cases).
  • Interested in world-building. You stand a good chance of meeting dozens of characters and many different fictional cultures when reading fantasy, so their page counts can be dramatically bigger than a science fiction novel.

Again, there is a lot of overlap between these sub-genres and these lists shouldn’t be taken as a strict interpretation of what you’ll find in either one. There are many speculative stories out there that combine elements from both of these sub-genres together (along with many other themes), but many of them do tend to lean one way instead of the other.

This isn’t even to mention all of the other genres, from romance to mystery, that are often swirled into these tales as well. Figuring out how to label books these days is so complicated, especially for fans who don’t always enjoy seeing their favourite genre being mashed up with other styles of writing, that I think I’ll save a more detailed discussion of that aspect of it for another day.

Readers, what would you recommend to this person? is there a specific fantasy or science fiction author you think would be a nice introduction to their genre? Which types of speculative fiction do you tend to gravitate towards most often?

Leave a Comment

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as , , ,

October 13, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 13, 2018

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

National Coming Out Day. This is a good read.

Why Your Kid’s Sniffles Make Me Sweat. Cold and flu season is quickly sneaking up on us again. While I’m still young and healthy enough to only be annoyed by these diseases, there are many people out there who can become critically ill or even die if they’re sickened by those same germs.

Beware of Those Who Do Not Clap via FictionOfTruth. Yes, precisely. You can tell a lot about someone based on how they react to the successes of others.

Sometimes You Need to Reboot via JamesPackWriter. I couldn’t agree with this more.

10 Little Things Morning People Love via SophiaWhitte. There are so many people in my life who are not morning folks at all. If you’re one of them, go read this.

Pumpkins Prompts. This is a cool new weekly writing prompt thing that a friend of mine started. I highly recommend checking it out.

Harry Isn’t Quite Out of His Teens When It Fully Hits Him. Yes, this is about Harry Potter. I hope you all love it as much as I did.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Suggestion Saturday

October 11, 2018 · 1:00 am

Why I Prefer to Exercise Alone

As I’ve mentioned here in the past, I didn’t learn to enjoy exercise until adulthood in large part because of my negative experiences in physical education classes.

To summarize that post for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, my gym teachers never explained why exercise was an important part of living a healthy lifestyle. It was something we were compelled to do without being told why it was important.

They also put such a heavy emphasis on competition and team sports that I didn’t realize there were many other options for those of us who have no interest in winning or playing on a team. While I understand that my school districts weren’t wealthy ones and couldn’t afford specialized equipment, in the post I linked to above I did come up with quite a few alternative forms of exercise that they could have incorporated into gym classes without breaking the bank.

It was only when I discovered all of the solitary, non-competitive ways to get a workout in that I began to look forward to this part of my regular routine. Not everyone has these same needs, but I’m happier exercising alone for the following reasons:

1. Peace and Quiet 

Some people are energized by loud music or the cacaphony of sounds that occur when a large group of people are all using the same facilities.

I am not one of them. While I do spend time in loud, crowded places, they are never the first place to come to mind when I’m deciding where I’d like to go. To me, this would be like going to your dentist’s office just to hang out and listen to the distant hum of the dentist drilling someone’s tooth to fix a cavity.

If that’s something you find amusing, fantastic. I can think of a very long list of places I’d rather be instead, though, and none of them involve drills or ear-splitting gym tunes.

2. No Scheduling Conflicts

Many of the people I know do not greet mornings with joy. While I’m leaping out of bed and feeling my highest energy levels of the day, they’re drinking coffee and barely keeping their eyes open.

If we were to attempt to synchronize our schedules, it would be tricky to balance their sleepy reactions to the morning with how I tend to behave in the evenings. There have also been times when my workouts lasted for shorter or longer periods of time than I thought they would based on how I was feeling that day.

Exercising by myself simply makes more sense until or unless I meet another unapologetic morning person who takes the same approach to fitness that I do.

3. Personalized Fitness Goals

As I mentioned above, competition does nothing to encourage me to exercise. In fact, it discourages me from pushing myself harder due to how much I dislike the winner vs. loser approach to getting fit.

What does work for me is to set personalized fitness goals that I can easily measure and track. This could be a short-term goal like increasing my step count or a long-term goal like reducing my body fat percentages. I like the process of keeping track of numbers like these and seeing how they change over time. If a friend wanted to see my statistics for some reason, I wouldn’t have a problem sharing them.

It’s the competition I’m really trying to avoid, and keeping my goals personalized is an excellent way for me to do just that.

4. Shorter, More Efficient Workouts

Occasionally, I have exercised with other people. It’s been my experience that a lot of folks enjoy talking throughout their workouts.

I enjoy conversations in just about any other setting, but I really don’t like pausing a workout in order to chat. If I’m lifting weights or walking briskly, I want to focus on how I’m moving my body instead of what so-and-so said last week.

Socializing is important, but I’ve found that I get much better results when I completely separate that from staying fit.

Do you prefer to exercise alone or with a group of people?

7 Comments

Filed under Fitness

Tagged as ,

October 8, 2018 · 1:00 am

Characters I’d Invite to Thanksgiving Dinner

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers! I’m enjoying a nice, quiet Thanksgiving this year while also wondering what it would be like to celebrate this holiday with characters from some of my favourite books.

If I could, I’d sure love to share this holiday with the following people:

1. Anne Shirley from the L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series.

She’d be welcomed to bring her legal guardians, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, along as well. As someone who is almost always quiet, I’d love to listen to her chatter about whatever it was that had happened to her recently.

It would also be interesting to get more details about her life before she was adopted if she was willing to share them.Some of my favourite scenes in this series were the ones that showed how they all enriched each other’s lives.

2. Afsan from Robert J. Sawyer’s Far-Seer trilogy. 

Not only would it be cool to see what a Tyrannosaurs would want to eat for Thanksgiving, I’d love to talk to this character about his impressions of human customs in general. (His species was sentient and quite intelligent in this series). He’d almost certainly be as horrified and/or amused by some of the things we do as we would be by certain Tyrannosaurs customs.

3. Starr Carter from Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give.

Starr was such an easy character to love. My sympathy for her only grew stronger after she watched a police officer kill her best friend in one of the earliest scenes of her story. I’d want to fix her a big plate of food and offer her any comfort I could over the holidays.

4. Anna from Claire Cameron’s The Bear.

Anna was a six-year-old girl whose family went on a camping trip in a remote section of a national park. After her parents were killed by a bear, she had to figure out how to get her younger brother and herself to safety.

This was one of the most intense things I’ve ever read. I wish it were possible to catch up with characters years later to see how they’re doing. She was so young when the attack happened that she didn’t understand what was going on. While I would never ask about the deaths of her parents specifically, I’d love to know what her life was like after the events of the final scene.

5.  Patricia Cowan from Jo Walton’s My Real Children. 

Patricia might have lived in one of two different timelines during the course of this book depending on which memories of hers you tend to believe are the genuine ones.

Not only did the course of her life take radically different turns in each timeline, the course of human history did as well. I can’t say much else without giving away spoilers, but I’d sure like to talk to this character so I could find out which version of the events she remembered actually took place.

6. Hattie Shepherd and her descendants from Ayana Mathis’ The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

The first chapter of this tale showed Hattie desperately attempting to save her first two children, a set of twins who were dying from pneumonia in 1923 when such a disease was much harder to treat than it is today. The rest of the storyline showed what happened to this woman and the nine other children she had after the deaths of her first two babies.

Her extended family as a whole wasn’t a particularly emotionally healthy one. I believe that Hattie would have been diagnosable if she’d lived in a time and place where seeing the doctor for mental health concerns was socially acceptable. As it was, her undiagnosed illness damaged her relationships with all of her surviving children and their families.

Sometimes dysfunctional ways of interacting with the world can be passed down for generations when people either can’t recognize the harmful patterns in their family or aren’t willing to try to change them. I’ve seen it happen both in real life and in fiction. It’s as sad as it is fascinating. I’d love to invite different combinations of people from this family to various dinners to see if I could figure out how they’ve changed over the years.

Which character would you invite to your Thanksgiving dinner?

2 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

October 6, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: October 6, 2018

Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers! May your meals this weekend be immensely satisfying. Here is this week’s list of Thanksgiving-related blog posts and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Are Potatoes Good for You? Thanksgiving is one of those meals when I don’t worry about the nutritional content of my dinner in any way. I think it can be healthy to eat food based solely on how much pleasure it gives you every once in a while. With that being said, this was still a fascinating look at the latest research on how potatoes affect the human body. Spoiler alert! Depending on how they’re prepared, they can be very good for you as a regular part of one’s diet.

Literary Thanksgiving via CandyKorman. Star Trek and other pieces of hopeful science fiction set in the future are my literary thanksgiving. What’s yours?

A Case for Canned Cranberry Sauce: Defending Thanksgiving’s Most Controversial Side Dish. Yesterday I made fresh cranberry sauce for the first time and learned that I do not like the homemade version of this dish at all. This came as a bit of surprise to me since I don’t mind the canned version. How do you all feel about cranberry sauce?

Is Thanksgiving Trying to Kill Me? via Austin_Hodgens. If you have ambivalent feelings about this holiday, go read this post.

Vintage Photo Tuesday-Celebrating Thanksgiving Part 2. There’s something so interesting to me about seeing the way previous generations celebrated various holidays. The photo that had a table full of desserts was my favourite one. Either they were meant to serve a very large family or the person who made them really loved desserts! Either way, they looked amazing.

How to Make Thanksgiving Top-12 Allergen Free and Fun for All! This is such great advice. My Thanksgiving dinner is going to be completely dairy-free as usual, and I’m going to try to keep soy out of the equation as well this year. I can only imagine how complicated meal planning would be for groups of people who have multiple allergies or food intolerances.

Egyptian Pumpkin Pie with Almond Creme Bechamel via onearabvegan. Ooh, this sounds good. I’ve never met a pumpkin pie I didn’t like.

Thanksgiving Feast. Humans might not be the only ones having a feast today.

From Dumbkin via ‪StuartRWest‬:

You know what I found out recently?

My mom won’t pay for a can of pumpkin because it costs more than the price of tea in China.

Comments Off on Suggestion Saturday: October 6, 2018

Filed under Suggestion Saturday

Tagged as

October 4, 2018 · 1:00 am

Hopeful Science Fiction: Semiosis

Last June I blogged about my desire to read more hopeful science fiction. Since then I’ve talked about Woman on the Edge of Time and The Lovely Bones. Today I’m back with another suggestion.

If you have recommendations for future instalments of this series, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment below or send me message about it on Twitter.

Semiosis

Sue Burke’s Semiosis is a 2018 hard science fiction novel about colonists from Earth who travel to a distant planet in hope of making it their permanent home. The storyline followed the original group of explorers as well as their descendants for several generations. They knew almost nothing about the planet they named Pax  before they arrived there, so preparing in advance for what they were about to experience wasn’t easy.

Nearly every chapter in this book showed how the most recent generation in this timeline adapted to the many challenges they faced while attempting to survive on a planet where RNA, not DNA, was the building block of life. Generally, one chapter was assigned to each new generation as they came of age and began making decisions for their community.

Th experiences of the first generation were promising. The land was covered in vegetation, much of which their scans showed was safe and nutritious for humans. They quickly began attempting to build shelters and adjust to the many differences that came with living in such an alien environment.

Plot-Based, Not Character-Based

As you might have already guessed, this was a plot-based novel. Since each section more or less introduced an entirely new cast of characters (based on how many members of the previous generation had managed to live to see old age), there wasn’t a great deal of time for any one character to steal the spotlight.

I normally have a strong preference for character-based stories, so I did need some time to adjust to the fact that I would only have a short amount of time with any of the fascinating people I met as one generation was slowly replaced by the next.

Given how long it took the original group of immigrants to realize that many of their assumptions about what life on a distant plant would be like were completely wrong, it made sense for the whole adventure to unfold slowly over the courses of multiple lifetimes as new generations built on the knowledge their parents and grandparents had painstakingly put together. No individual human could ever live long enough to gather all of the clues they did over such a long period of time.

However, I would have liked to see more continuity between the generations. I understood why the lifespans were shorter for humans, especially in the beginning, but I spent so little time with the many characters that I didn’t feel like I bonded with any of them. They were there in one scene and then sometimes gone in the next.

Persistence

There are many details about the plot that I can’t share with you without giving away huge spoilers. Needless to say, the characters in this book were surprised over and over again by what life was really like on their new home in just about every way you can imagine. The food obviously didn’t taste anything like food does on Earth. Calibrating what was and wasn’t dangerous on this planet was hard for them, too, as well due to how little they knew about life on it ahead of it.

All of their previous training was useful, but it couldn’t have possibly prepared them for everything they were about to experience. They had no way to contact Earth, leave Pax, or receive any additional supplies, so they had to figure out ways to keep going no matter what happened to them.

The first generation had some really rough experiences due to a string of bad luck and not having the right types of supplies at critical moments. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. There were conversations about ordinary things like unpacking the ship or how to decide when to switch from the food they brought with them to scavenging for a fresh dinner. I especially loved the characters’ contagious excitement at finally getting to explore the land without having any idea what they might find there.

Mixing those moments of grief in with all of the other emotions they experienced was a nice touch. It reminded me a lot of what happens in real life when someone is dealing with a difficult problem but also still has to do totally mundane things like sweep their floor, plan dinner, or take their pet for a walk. Life is hard sometimes, but it still goes on.

This feeling returned once they realized there was an intelligent life form on that planet that all of their previous scans of it had failed to pick up. I couldn’t stop reading once I reached this section, and it only got better from there.

The Big Picture

There are two reasons why I’m recommending this as a hopeful science fiction read.

Number one, we’ve all had days that were so frustrating or painful they felt like they’d never end.

This book could describe a day like that and then zoom out and see how that experience mattered (or didn’t matter) in the longterm. There were questions asked early on that didn’t receive answers until decades or even generations later.

There’s something comforting in seeing that pattern play out over and over again. What doesn’t make sense to us now might make sense years from now. Alternatively, it might fade away and not be meaningful at all after enough time has passed.

Number two, things did improve for the characters over time. The tragedies they experienced were real, but so was the hope they found as they adjusted to the challenges they faced and figured out how to look after themselves long after all of their Earth supplies had run out.

What hopeful science fiction stories have you been reading recently?

Leave a Comment

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 1, 2018 · 1:00 am

4 Reasons Why You Should Attend Nuit Blanche

Nuit Blanche is a free annual art festival that occurs overnight or at night. The first one happened in 1990 in Barcelona. As the tradition spread to other cities and countries, they used their own language’s words for White Night as the name for this event.

Here in Toronto, Nuit Blanche generally occurs in late September or early October. It begins at 7 pm and ends at 7 am the next morning, but not every city follows this same exact schedule.

I’ve been attending this event for years now, and I thought it was high time to discuss it in detail with my readers. The photo that accompanies this post wasn’t taken there, but it did remind me of a cool exhibit from it from 2015. While I didn’t add them into my post for copyright reasons, you can see actual pictures from this year’s festival here.

If you’re ever in Toronto, Barcelona, Montreal, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Naples, Cairo, Havana, Paris, or any other city that hosts its own version of Nuit Blanche when this festival is taking place, here are four reasons why I think you should check it out.

Art is for Everyone

One of the things I love the most about Nuit Blanche is how accessible it makes art. While some of the attendees are obviously experts on the creation and interpretation of this sort of thing, many more are people who are casually interested in the topic but who have no specific training or background on it. Some of them are even small children! This isn’t something that is specifically geared towards this age group, but there are exhibits every year that are child-friendly.

I adore the mixture of people that show up for an event like this in general. You’ll see very young infants all the way up to senior citizens enjoying the exhibits, and I’m not even kidding about that first part. I’ve watch the expressions on babies’ faces at the most colourful ones, and they were definitely liking what they saw. Tourists who can’t speak any English at all will marvel at the same exhibit alongside people who have spent their entire lives in English-speaking countries. People from every race, nationality, sexual orientation, social class, and  every other possible demographic group you can imagine are there, too.

There’s something to be said for works that can appeal so many different groups simultaneously. It’s magical.

It’s Interactive

I’ve wandered into the middle of a zombie uprising, danced with spotlights, explored an abandoned subway tunnel while listening to music the creator thought would increase the chances of us spotting a ghost, and heard the stories of people who work or worked in the sex industry at this festival in past years.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the creative things artists have done for it. It’s incredible to see what the participants are able to come up with and how hard they work to make their ideas spring to life. As much as I enjoy wandering around art museums, too, this is nothing at all like that experience. It’s more like the energetic, joyful, and slightly rowdy environment you see on Church Street after the Pride Parade each summer.

No Two Years Are Ever the Same

Let me be really honest with you here. There have been a few years when I didn’t emotionally connect to any of the exhibits I saw for a wide variety of reasons. Not every Nuit Blanche has been spectacular for me as an attendee, but that’s actually a good thing.

I value risk-taking in the arts. Artists and other creative folks who are willing to stretch themselves and their creative works should be admired. It’s much easier to make something that could blandly appeal to most people than it is to drill down and come up with an idea that’s thought-provoking, shocking, humorous, or memorable.

This means that some years will be better for me than others, and vice versa. Not everything can or should appeal to everyone.

Your Definition of What Art Is Might Change

This year there was a dumpling exhibit that caught me a little off guard at first. You could go into it, buy real dumplings (all of which smelled amazing), and eat them while you walked around looking at other artistic displays.

I never would have thought something as ordinary as food preparation could be reimagined as art, but that exhibit was extremely popular. The lines for the dumplings were huge, and everyone who got one looked pretty happy.

As someone who is casually interested in this topic, I appreciate the fact that this event stretches my understanding of what art is or could be. It made me think of what I generally consider to be the fairly mundane practice of cooking and baking food in a new light.

The next time I make cookies, shepherd’s pie, or any number of other dishes, I’ll see it in a way I’ve never seen it before. (I still won’t look forward to washing the dishes, though!)

That’s the beauty of art. If nothing else, I hope that will be what you take from Nuit Blanche if or when you ever see it for yourself.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Personal Life

Tagged as ,

September 29, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: September 29, 2018

Here is this week’s list of links from my favourite corners of the web.

Anxious Always via JamesPackWriter. If you’ve never had anxiety, go read this. It’s a wonderful explanation of what it feels like.

How Mars Will Be Policed. I sure hope someone writes a story about this soon. There’s so much material here waiting to be explored.

How Muscular Dystrophy Shaped Me as the Person I Am Now via kerrymThompson. This was a very interesting read. I’d never randomly ask someone who had muscular dystrophy such personal questions about their life, so it’s nice to find the blog of a person who is willing to talk about it.

End Procrastination in 1 Step via Iedab. I can’t stop laughing at this.

Diagnosing the Past. This is for you, mom. You’ll love it.

‘A Lot of Hate and Bigotry Around’: Church Terminates Sign Contract Over Refusal to Post Gay-Positive Message. If you need a pick-me-up, go read this. I wonder if I would have kept attending church for many more years if I’d had access to something like this? My best guess is that I would have…. and that my deconversion would have been a happier process. As much as I love the idea of a truly LGBT+ affirming congregation, even that wouldn’t have been enough to keep me around longterm. It’s hard to say for sure without inventing a time machine, though.

Finally, I have a short assignment for all of you. Go watch Lord of the Rings (but with Mice) if you had even the slightest bit of interest in the original story. I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post, or you can click the link above.

4 Comments

Filed under Suggestion Saturday