Category: Life

My uncle Gord passed away yesterday, after a long battle with cancer. Miss you. Here he is with my two fantastic cousins.

In the last month:

• Jay & I moved. Our new home is downtown, minutes away from where all the action happens. The bus routes here are great, and yet despite its central location, it’s quiet as can be. We’re no longer surrounded by neighbours who have their subwoofers on max at 3AM! No more old ladies that glare at you when you come home! No having to take a taxi to get home on Sundays because bus service stopped for our part of town! A big thanks to our friends & family who helped us move: Jeremy, JT Alfons, Eric, Max, Chaiya, Brad, and Jay’s parents.
• I joined a gym. I’ve been going three times a week for three weeks now. While I weigh more now than ever before, or so at least I suspect, I feel much better. I have more energy now. Every time I come out of that gym, I just feel so great.
• I got out of my burn out. I had a burn out because of work. This was work related to my trip to South Africa. In any case, work got to me. I had a sit down with my boss, and we were able to resolve the issue. As a consequence, things are much better at work now.
• I decided to resume work on the Botnet movie starting January 1st. I stopped working on Botnet when I was in the burnout. I just had no will to do it, despite a great support network including DJ IDE, who kept doing his best to make this happen. The new plan is to shoot every weekend until it’s done.
• JT Alfons finished his book, Surrogate Stars. Which means he is now fully free to be the lead on Botnet. Selfish me! :p
• Befuddler (link) is a success. At least, if you were to define success by how many download sites it has spread to (link). I’m sure most of that spreading is automated, but don’t burst my bubble. :p In the “that’s random” category, someone in Japan talked about Rice Tea (link).
• It’s winter and Christmas will be here in less than 9 days. Need I say more?

That’s all for now. And again: A big thank you to everyone who helped Jay and I move!

Since my last post on the matter (link), I have actually purchased an eBook reader. It’s a Sony thing, which works quite well. That said, I still insist that I’ll never buy an eBook – at least one that’s DRMed. This reader is for work PDF documents, books in the public domain, and other items I can obtain legally.

A story just came out (link) that reminds me why I have no appetite for paid-for DRMed eBook: Amazon just decided to take down a portion of it’s erotica books from it’s site. Not only is it doing that, however, but it’s also going to remove those books off of the personal libraries of the customers that bought the titles. You read that right: they’re going to delete books from the customers that purchased them.

The erotica books in question deal with incest. Alright, so incest is not my thing. But these books deal with adults, and as far as I’m concerned, you should be able to read whatever floats your boat. We’re talking about words and language here.

If Amazon wants to take the books off of their site, that’s fine. They’re allowed to choose what they want to sell or not. What crosses the line is when they go into their customer’s private space, into their digital library, and delete the content they don’t want their customers to have. This is why I maintain that when you buy something that’s DRMed, you don’t own it. You think you’re purchasing it, but in fact, these companies are “renting” whatever you bought – at full price.

Another DRM frustration: I bought a good game the other day called Wings of Prey (link). It’s a good game, but the DRM they put on it limits me the amount of times I can install it to 3 times. Keep in mind, games I love, like Battlefield 2, have been easily installed a dozen times over the last five years. My computers change, the hard drives die, shit happens. So now if I install Wings of Prey twice more, I’ll be forbidden from using the product I legally purchased.

The most annoying bit is that this is all in the name of stopping piracy, and yet, it doesn’t. The pirates still get to play the game, and they don’t even get their books deleted off of their eReaders, or have limits on how many times they can enjoy the game that you or I purchased at full price.

Piracy is supposed to entice people because it’s free, not because it’s better.

Aunt Caylin isn’t real. It’s just a name I picked to protect her anonymity.

Aunt Caylin is a wonderful person. She’s always been there for me. When I was down, she was always there to stand up for me, or to console me in her way, or whatever was appropriate. If I needed a hand, she was there in a pinch – even when it meant scratching her own schedule. I’ve looked up to her my whole life.

The other day, aunt Caylin and I went out for some tea. I don’t know how it started, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the one to bring it up, but we ended up discussing same-sex marriage. Aunt Caylin knows about me and Jay, and she’s just fine with that. But she let me know that me marrying Jay would defile the sanctity of marriage. Make marriage as a whole worth something less.

This hurt me. I asked her did me being in a happy marriage with the person I love somehow make a stranger’s commitment to their partner in the Yukon something less? My sister’s commitment to her husband? It may just, she said. This hurt me more.

We agreed that a bad marriage was one where the love had vanished, if it was there ever at all. A good marriage, I argued, was one where the love remained. So how could two people, who love each other, defile the essence of marriage? No – marriage was always a man and a woman. What about a black man and white woman? Not too long ago, that too wasn’t permissible. But I made no headway.

Now the conversation wasn’t as polite as above. I used arguments that shot below the belt, and Aunt Caylin might have used a cuss word or two. I know we love each other very much. Nevertheless, when someone tells me that my dedication of love somehow lessens the worth of someone else’s relationship, that hurts.

It hurts because this person who means so much to me doesn’t believe I’m worth affording the opportunity to express a life of love with my partner, no matter how strong the love, the bond, no matter how great of a person, or a father, my partner might be. It hurts because my Aunt Caylin won’t ever be able to recognize this and change her mind, because in her view, it isn’t about that. It’s about the sanctity of marriage.

And there’s no going against that is there.