Maëlys McArdle

Category: Life

Every other post.

  • This blog is twenty years old

    My first website was around 2000-2001, when I had a presence on GeoCities. At the time, this was the most common way for someone to have their own place online, as this was before social media.

    My GeoCities website. The weather map no longer loads as it is from a long-gone source, and the transparency effect for all the blue boxes no longer works as it was made in a way before browsers took on standards, but it gives you a rough idea.

    What would become this incarnation was put online in November 2003. For context, MySpace launched only three months earlier.

    A lot has changed since this website has gone up for millennials:

    • Music used to be listened to on CDs
      • Spotify launched in 2008
    • Movies watched in theatres or on DVD
      • YouTube launched in 2005
      • Netflix streaming launched in 2007
      • Apple TV+ in 2019
    • Games played on discs
      • Steam launched in September 2003
    • Books were physical
      • Kindle first came out in 2007
    • Maps were on paper
      • Google Maps launched in 2005
    • Programs were listened to on radio
      • The term “podcast” was coined in 2004
    • There was no contactless payments
      • You needed to sign a receipt if you paid by credit card
      • A lot of smaller places were cash-only
    • There was no self-checkout
      • Cashiers handled every transaction
      • Other jobs – like handling payroll – had dedicated people
    • There was no billion-user social media
      • MySpace peaked at 300M users in 2007
      • Facebook launched in 2005
      • Tumblr in 2007
      • Instagram in 2010
      • Snapchat in 2011
      • TikTok in 2016
    • There were no apps or infinite scrolling or cellphone addiction
      • iPhone launched in 2007
    • You ordered cabs with a phone call
      • Uber launched in 2009
    • You stayed at hotels
      • Airbnb launched in 2008
    • Payphones were a common way to place phone calls on the go
      • Cellphones were only starting to pick up, and could only call and text
    • Banking was done via ATM or with a bank teller
      • Cashing a cheque couldn’t be done via app yet
      • Cheques were the most common way to transfer money
        • e-transfer launched in 2003
    • At work, conversations were in-person or via call
      • Slack launched in 2014
    • People still sent letters
      • E-Mail was a thing, but most companies would communicate to you via letters, and some acquaintances as well
      • Bills came in the mail
    • CRT televisions / monitors were the norm
    • Light bulbs were predominantly incandescent
      • LED light bulbs hit the market in 2009
    • Buses didn’t report their position with GPS
      • You consulted a schedule to know when it was expected to show up
      • You consulted a map to know which streets routes operated on

    I focused on millennials for the above because for the elderly, my parents’ generation now, they largely do things as it was done in 2003. I don’t think they’d attempt using a self-checkout, tap to pay, navigate by GPS, subscribe to a streaming service, etc.

    Other changes since 2003 include the cost of living:

    • Average home price in 2003 was $220,000
      • In 2023, it was $745,000
    • Median income in 2003 for 35-44 year olds was $45,200
    • Some private-sector jobs still offered pensions
      • Now at best the company might contribute a single year’s worth of income to your RRSPs over 30 years – if job security weren’t similarly a thing of the past

    And the matter of rights:

    • Same-sex marriage was not yet legal across Canada
      • First jurisdiction was Ontario in 2003; across Canada in 2005
    • Trans people had to have surgery, even if they didn’t want it, to update legal documents – and surgeries weren’t covered in Ontario
      • CAMH was practicing conversion therapy on trans youth until 2015
    • Employers were firing staff for being gay or trans in greater numbers

    There was a physicality, and inherent slowness, that existed in 2003. What we do now is broadly the same, but this is accomplished is completely different, bequeathed to software. I’m not only talking apps; but products invisibly eliminating careers altogether and substituting them, if at all, with lower paying precarious alternatives. Similarly, those careers that remain face downward pressures on job quality, that is, unless they are in the business of contributing to those downward pressures for others.

    My 2003 self was optimistic for the future.

    My 2023 self has a more complicated outlook.

  • Time traveling with film

    Time traveling with film

    I watched 1987’s No Man’s Land the other night. I loved it, not for the writing or the acting, but because it felt like I was visiting another time: a version of the eighties showcased through home interiors, streetscapes, restaurants, cars and tech. There’s something about being able to step into the eighties, nineties, and early aughts through movies that’s really pleasing to me.

    Even animated works satisfy that itch; Akira drips the eighties not only through its animation style but in how the technology of that decade defined its vision of the future.

    This visual satisfaction stretches into works from the early aughts like 2003’s Lost in Translation. Through my millennial perception of time, that doesn’t seem so long ago, until I remember that 2023 is to 2003 what 2003 was to 1983. How people accomplish tasks has completely changed since 2003: this was before apps, tap-to-pay, LED lighting, Google Maps, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, YouTube, WhatsApp, Spotify, Facebook, etc. You listened to CDs, watched DVDs, cashed cheques at a bank, phoned a cab company, used paper maps and phone books, etc. There was a physicality required, either through objects or presence, that the intervening years obsoleted.

    So that Lost in Translation lingers so much outside of the characters, words and stereotypes to highlight that world is a pleasure:

    Depictions of earlier decades don’t provide this same comfort. Perhaps that’s to do with my having been born in 1985; time passes slower as a kid, so the nineties and the totems of the eighties that lingered in that decade have an outsized presence in my mind.

    I would never want to relive those years, but to be a tourist in those decades by way of incidental footage is my guilty pleasure.

  • Anti-trans and anti-gay rallies across Canada, deconstructed

    Anti-trans and anti-gay rallies across Canada, deconstructed

    Following the failure to portray gay people as an existential threat, conservatives have shifted to trans people’s increasing acceptance as the latest wedge issue. Supported by an ecosystem of American conservative television, British tabloids, reactionary content creators, and a long-standing history of homophobia and transphobia domestically, these forces have resulted in the biggest rallies against gender and sexual minorities in Canadian history. These actions are enabled by legacy media and public institutions that overlook the unhinged bigotry of its organizers, the bomb threats and physical intimidation of its adherents, and sanitizes the genocidal views expressed while depicting them as mere opinion.

    Polling and political trends suggests that the virulent transphobia being observed will only get worse.

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  • Childlessness, Grief & Future

    This May will mark ten years since I went to the fertility clinic to freeze my sperm. I’m don’t think I will renew this year. The way I saw it, I had three options to conceive a child:

    • Doing so with a partner
    • Going solo with adoption
    • Going solo with a friend as surrogate

    The opportunity for the first has passed. I’m single, it would take me five years to be comfortable with a partner to consider having a child, and I don’t want to be fifty with a five year old. The second didn’t ever appear like an option: I could never afford a house and the middle-class appearance that was its entry requirement. The third was what I had my hopes for doing, and a friend had volunteered to be that surrogate. She was not going to be able to co-parent full-time and wanted to live away, so I would be the primary caregiver.

    It took me years to be emotionally ready. When I finally was, I realized I couldn’t do it. I had watched those around me with young children: they were often two parents, with dual incomes, each’s own parents and grandparents helping with childcare. They barely held on in the early years. How could I pull off taking care of an infant alone while also working full-time to make ends meet without any meaningful support. A few single parents I knew were doing alright, but some were really suffering, even now that their kids were older. The same day I went to tell my friend who agreed to be a surrogate that I wouldn’t be able to do it, she was going to tell me that she also was no longer able to do so, as the country she had since moved to had outlawed it.

    Part of this was self-inflicted. I came out of my youth with a fair amount of psychological maladaptations, which caused me to poison relationships, as well as made me enter relationships with emotionally underdeveloped individuals. I was both a cause of harm in my relationships with others, and accepted the harm others did to me. It’s only now, after years of therapy, conversations, and rock bottoms, that I’ve overcome most of these maladaptations. Had I been better adjusted younger, I would have maybe been in a long-term relationship by now, with a house, and who knows. Or not.

    Whatever the case, time doesn’t pause, and now I’m here, in middle-age.

    Being childless does open some doors: I can travel any time of year, anywhere. There’s no school or extracurricular schedule to work around, or child whose experience I’d want to prioritize. I can live anywhere – no need to move close to a school. Likewise, as I wouldn’t want to remove a child from their social network at school, I wouldn’t be tethered to that proximity to their school like I would be had I a child. I have much more time to pursue interests, and money to do it with – at least compared to single parents. So while I wish I could be a mom, I know that my friends who have children (and love them!) wish they could sometimes enjoy the long uninterrupted night’s sleep and spare time and freedom they once had. I can do that.

    Not that I haven’t felt anger and envy – I have. But those are a manifestation of wanting a different outcome. When that’s no longer realistically possible, those feelings can become a crutch, and artificially make life more miserable. So I accept my circumstances, allow myself to feel that sorrow, and open myself to appreciating the unique opportunities I have. That is a recipe for a higher quality of life.

    To those well-meaning people who want to offer platitudes that deny the reality of my circumstances, I won’t accept them. “There’s still time” – yeah sure, until I’m dead I suppose. But to me that sounds like keeping myself in an unrealized state for the emotional comfort of others who are uncomfortable with this “unhappy” ending. It doesn’t allow for acceptance, grief, and moving on.

  • International Chess Federation Bans Trans Women

    International Chess Federation Bans Trans Women

    The International Chess Federation, FIDE, has banned trans women from participating in women’s events in a new policy:

    In the event that the gender was changed from a male to a female the player has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women until further FIDE’s decision is made. Such decision should be based on further analysis and shall be taken by the FIDE Council at the earliest possible time, but not longer than within 2 (two) years period.

    Trans men meanwhile risk demotion:

    If a player holds any of the women titles, but the gender has been changed to a man, the women titles are to be abolished. Those can be renewed if the person changes the gender back to a woman and can prove the ownership of the respective FIDE ID that holds the title. The abolished women title may be transferred into a general title of the same or lower level (e.g., WGM may be transferred into FM, WIM into CM, etc.).

    If a player has changed the gender from a man into a woman, all the previous titles remain eligible.

    The implication from these two policies is that women are less intelligent than men, and their titles are worth less. There’s an absurdity to this.

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