The lows are low, but the highs are home

I’m not going to include the things like candy, body wash, and socks that I received - know that I received at least two of each of those in addition to everything else.

• A two-way bus ticket to Toronto and two concert tickets (an early gift)
• A good (i.e. expensive) electric razor
• The World Ends With You (DS)
• Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light (DS)
• Folklore (PS3)
• The Sly Cooper Collection (PS3)
• Two pairs of slippers - one to keep at my mom’s, one to keep at my dad’s
• New pyjama pants (timely given that my second pair just disappeared)

        The games and trip were all at my request, but the razor was a very nice surprise. My mom was buying things for my brother even yesterday to even out the spending - I couldn’t figure out why, because I thought the things I had already picked out for my brother were enough (Epic Mickey and Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and Rune Factory 3 for DS, Azumanga Daioh omnibus, Gunslinger Girl season 1, The Witcher + The Last Remnant + Super Meat Boy from Steam, a Lego boardgame thing, and a book) but I guess that was an expensive razor.

        Bonus: You now know what my brother got for Christmas. Also he got a pair of skates but that was one of those “you really didn’t need to” gifts.

I’ve already posted that I’m with my grandparents for Christmas, and I ought to mention that Christmas is a religious event for them. Christmas, for me, has been purely commercial from a young age, without even getting into my lack of faith. They don’t mind going to Christmas mass - being stuck with far too many people in a hot, sweaty church listening to an excessively long sermon, late at night when you’d rather be in bed. I’ve been able to shirk the responsibility of going by way of my father a few times, because he isn’t religious either, but now I have no excuse.

        My mother, it seems, is either religious or feels compelled to be religious to please her parents - I’ve never figured out which, as she doesn’t really . She has tried a few times to bring us back into the fold of Christianity, especially around the accepted ages for first communion and confirmation, but eventually we’d get lazy and stop going. So I’ve had my first communion and I’ve been confirmed and I’m “a member of the Catholic church” and as I told her today I don’t want or need that status. And, I think, she feels like it’s her failing as a parent that I’m not particularly faithful.

        Earlier my mom told us that we would, in fact, be going to Christmas mass. A shame, really, because I was planning to learn Python at that time. Anyway, she took my brother and I aside to tell us that we would be going and we would be participating in communion (I’m sure that’s not how you’re supposed to say it). Some more backstory: I decided not to do communion at my brother’s confirmation, though I don’t remember what inspired that little rebellion. I know that I told my mom it would seem dishonest to do that when I don’t actually believe. At any rate, I told her that I would do the socially accepted thing and avoid making her look bad in front of her parents. She said that she knows we don’t go to church often, and that she’d like to fix that, and asked whether I would go to church with her in Ottawa. I said no, and that I don’t need or want it.

        The part that makes me suspect she feels responsible for my lack of faith, and that it’s bad/wrong for me to not be religious, is that she said there might come a time in my life when I want to be religious so that my children will have a place to belong. I feel bad about that, but I’m doing my part and going to church tonight. I don’t, however, have an hour or more to waste every sunday morning. Sunday morning is when I buckle down and do schoolwork. If I’m going to replace good working time with something else, it’s got to be worth more than whatever work I could be doing, like fencing practise.

        There’s no real moral or purpose to me telling you this, I just felt like making a post about it for the sake of exposition. So now you know, and my disk defrag is done, so I can get back to using my PC. My dad used to run a disk defrag overnight and forbid anyone to use the computer until it was done, and I guess I picked up the habit.

I went to a lab fair for Cognitive Science, which means various lab directors from Carleton sat down to chat about their projects and where they needed assistants and things like that. So aside from learning a few names and getting my name out there, I’ve also gotten a position as a volunteer research assistant (i.e. no benefit for me unless we get published), and names of a few people with research grants with which to pay people like me to do things. I’ll go through those in order.

        First, the volunteer stuff. Met a man named Jim Davies, who carries five notebooks with him to write down his research ideas. He has also given a TEDx talk at my school. I haven’t watched it yet, though I will, but first I have some stuff to do. But anyway! So he’s doing research on building a computer that can imagine the way humans do. The ultimate goal is to construct a massive database of images, with various parts labelled, and have the computer construct images based on keywords. So, for example, based on its experience of “car” images, if you say “car” to the computer it will make a car and perhaps put it on a road or driveway. If you say “puppy” it might put it near some grass or flowers.

        So my help with this is to create a Python program (note: I don’t yet know Python, so that’s step 1) that will submit queries to the Oracle of Objects, and so if I say (on the proximity page) “dog” it tells me there’s a 10% chance a picture of a dog will include a man. So that’s the basic “AI” of the imagination-bot, to go through its database of images and calculate these percentages and use them to generate its images. Now, one caveat is that it will be creating a kind of collage out of the images in its database - it isn’t going to spontaneously create these images like a human being might. So someone else needs to work on its ability to do photo-stitching, i.e. super-powered photoshopping.

        So yeah! That’s something to do in my spare time. I have to report back on my progress January 4th.

        Also? Jim Davies had two widescreen monitors set up in his office, except one was vertical (portrait orientation) and it was pretty cool seeing him manage them. Still kinda toying with the idea of more monitors. Also the main method of co-ordination with him and his assistants is shared google calendars. Thanks, Google!

        Now the paid work, which is… well, much more interesting to my wallet. Carleton has a Language and Brain Lab, as well as a Logic, Language, and Information Lab. Both of these labs have acquired research grants, allowing them to pay undergraduate students to do work as research assistants for them during the summer. So, essentially, summer jobs doing interesting research. This is far better than my planned summer jobs working for the government. I have to send out a few e-mails to the people I spoke to today, but one in particular mentioned that he would be looking for applications soon. Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect.

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        In unrelated news, I did a cool thing in Echo Bazaar, but it’s pretty spoilerrific. This is the culmination of a long series of silk hunting/spider extermination expeditions at The Silken Chapel near the Wolfstack Docks. Something that was immensely boring, unrewarding, and unsatisfying. Until this happened! Now it’s kinda cool. Image is here, if you want to see it.

I don’t think I’ve made a tumblr post about GodVille, so this is my post about my entire experience with the game.

        I failed to be engaged by this game at every level.

        Maybe playing it as a Google Chrome extension would have been more fun, but I don’t use Chrome that much and I wasn’t engaged enough to want to open a browser to play it. That is, I wouldn’t open my browser solely to play it. I would, absolutely, open my browser and do nothing but play BvS. I open my browser just to play EchoBazaar multiple times per day. If I remembered GodVille at all, it was as “well I’ve got five seconds to waste.”

        After the first few days I stopped reading those amazing journal entries. I just checked my hero’s equipment, healed him if he needed it, then went off. Even generic facebook games engage me - for whatever brief period of time - more than GodVille did. I just felt absolutely no reason to “play”. As an iPhone app - something I would have instant access to, anywhere, any time - it might be perfectly acceptable. Tolerable for a few minutes per day. But when I try to go for a PvP fight - the most involving part of the game - and it takes half an hour, with no signs of stopping (both the other player and I had stocked up on healing power), that’s bullshit. You don’t spend half an hour in a single PvP fight in a real game, and you shouldn’t spend half an hour in a PvP fight in a game that otherwise involves no real “gameplay.” I wasn’t sitting there watching the stupid fight, namely because it is stupid, but I tabbed over every once in a while to click heal.

        I think there’s some kind of passive bonus if you’ve on the page (“watching your hero”) during a PvP fight? But essentially what it amounts to is a big waste of time for two people, when the fight could move 2-5x faster and nobody would be hurt.

        So I quit before the fight was over and decided I didn’t care who won, but I went back a few minutes ago to tick the “pure Zero Player Game” button. For the record, I did not check to see who won the fight. But what the pure ZPG button means is that my hero will revive himself and continue doing the exact same thing he had been, until their servers go down or they implement inactivity deletion.

        The true lesson is that a game needs to be engaging, as opposed to “immersive” or “good” or any of these other things. Vael said it in a post about Echo Bazaar - it’s not like the gameplay is very “good”, it’s just so damn interesting that you can’t give it up. Its interactive story, unique to it as a game, makes it engaging. In Billy vs Snakeman, the basic form of engagement is character progress - get more shiny stuffs to power up your character, do more content, get more stuff. I’ve reached the very tip of the shiny stuff iceberg, and I’ve stopped playing my daily stamina. I go on the weekends for BillyCon (in-game conventions, which are amazing) but aside from that I’m just not engaged anymore. I was more engaged in the game while grinding stats than I am with my current stage of “throw stamina at monster, hopefully get reward.”

        So, engagement. Something browser based games have to work really hard to create. I’ll also note that I haven’t logged into MurCity or MonBre for months, even though I would only need to go on for thirty seconds. Again, no engagement anymore. I’ve tried a few skill builds and that’s that, unless I were to try a different race.

        I’m not really going anywhere with this, but there you go. Stay tuned next time for similar ramblings about the current “console generation,” which will likely become an outdated term in a few years when the Wii 2 comes out!

I may/may not have mentioned that my psychology lecture is given in the largest theatre at my university, but it does. This theatre also happens to be a literal theatre, and so I see posters for events on a regular basis. There were advertisements for a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is an interesting name, and the poster had people in dark clothing and white makeup looking dramatic so I figured it would be interesting. I didn’t want to go by myself, but had no one to invite really, except for my brother - and so we went tonight, to the last showing.

        There were… a couple dozen people there. Kinda disappointing :/ I’m not sure how to describe the play. It turns out it’s eighty years old and it has a wikipedia article, which describes it as “a satirical tragicomedy,” “part of a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism,” which means it’s like a play concentrated. The best analogy I can give is to “true” avant-garde music, the kind that stops being pleasant to listen to. It’s a great mental exercise to write and discuss, but not all that great to experience.

        This is a great story, and you’re going to love it, so I’m glad I wasted two hours there. First of all, the play is about a play, and so when the actors in the play take a twenty minute break, you, the audience, sit there for twenty minutes. It’s not really an intermission. There just isn’t anything interesting happening. Two actors get on stage and improv a silly argument, but that’s it. There’s another ten minute breaking, so a quarter of your two hour experience is you twiddling your thumbs.

        The basic premise is that these characters have been abandoned by their author and need a new one, and want the director (character in the play) to write their play for them. But they won’t allow themselves to be played by actors because then it isn’t truly their story, it’s the actors’ interpretations of their story, and they insist that they as characters are more real and alive than human beings because at least they’re well-defined.

        But two of the six are dead (this isn’t a spoiler - in my case, they were dolls, rather than actors, so) and the rest are varying degrees of crazy, so you get insane screaming and outbursts and things like that, complete with unpleasant background music. The story of the characters is revealed bit by bit, so you’re always interested (except during the “breaks”) but at the same time it’s very unexciting and weirdly unsatisfying to experience. It’s like if I tried to tell you my life’s story, but half of it was cut out in transmission. You just want more from it.

        That being said, the wikipedia article has a link to the text, and mentions two film adaptations. I’d be interested in seeing how they handled it as a film - as a play, it’s limited in what it can portray, but editing magic could make it great. Check those out if you’re interested.

Note: I’m just writing this to validate the many hours I’ve wasted checking this stuff out. Hopefully somebody thinks some of this stuff is cool. I actually feel better than I did though, because now I’ve resolved the issue, as opposed to spending hours and having no results. Plus I really haven’t suffered anything for it. I’m practically running ahead of schedule in terms of school. You’ve been warned, anyway.

        So after finding Rainmeter a few weeks ago, feeling like I didn’t want to fiddle with it, running around looking for all kinds of ways to do stuff, I went back to Rainmeter and realized the default Gnometer skin had everything I wanted.

        I tried Snarl, and using it requires installing plugins and keeping your program open - so if you want to know that you have new e-mail in Thunderbird, you have to keep Thunderbird open all the time. You want notifications from something else? That’s another program running idly in the background.

        I read that Growl for Windows uses more resources than Snarl, which is frightening, because Snarl uses twice as many resources as Rainmeter is using right now. Plus running whatever programs.

        So I had to start using Gmail because it seems far more popular among Rainmeter folks, and I may have to fiddle a little to get perfect access to stuff on the top of my screen while running Rainmeter, but aside from that everything is good. So. My current technology set up:

- Google Calendar for tasks and events - desktop access via Gnometer (Gcal pop-up)

- Gmail for e-mail - desktop access also via Gnometer (Gmail pop-up)

- Gnometer’s iTunes pop-up for knowing what I’m listening to

- GReader on iGoogle - keeps me from checking shit all the damn time

- Aerofoil, which turns off Aero Glass when I switch to battery life - have yet to test if that’s beneficial at all

        So I’m uninstalling Thunderbird (e-mail with calendar add-on - I’m not going to waste my time teaching it to send e-mail) and SpiceBird (Thunderbird+) and that’s all well and good. It’s not like I need a dekstop program to access my internet contents. I’m going to check out Remember the Milk, Teux Deux, and Toodledo to see if I like any of them better for managing a to-do list.

        Now I’m off to eat lunch, brush my teeth, have a shower, and go meet a researcher to talk to her about being in french immersion :D I wrote a paper about it, she was about to start doing research for her Master’s, I approached her to discuss, and now I am a subject. Neat!

This is post #200, and I thought I should do something good with it. So I’m finally writing this post. Except now I know I don’t need to write as much as I planned. But that’s the end of this whole thing, so let me start at the beginning.

        I finally finished Persona 4 this summer, and I started over and played through the beginning a bit. I was really inspired to write an amazing essay for Destructoid about the game, the journey of the main player, and just the themes of the game in general. If I were to do that, though, I’d have to replay the game and get quotes and refresh my memory on things to talk about, so I lost the will for it. But I’ll write a little bit and introduce the game. I don’t remember how much this stuff featured in Persona 3, and I have no idea how much (if at all) it’s featured in Persona 1 and Persona 2.

        Everyone in the Persona games has a basic alignment with one of the Tarot deck Arcana, and the main character is always aligned with The Fool. Igor, the master of the Velvet Room who opens your powers to you and guides you on your journey, describes The Fool as “zero,” “empty yet full of infinite potential,” one who could become anything at the end of their journey through life. What this means is that you can be whoever, and whatever, you want to be throughout the game - taking whatever personality you need at the moment to help other people out. As the infinite potential goes, your character is the only one with the ability to “change” Arcana in such a way - everyone else is restricted to their innate Arcana, but your main character simply starts as the Fool and can change Arcana like one changes a mask.

        Everyone also has an innate Persona that represents their inner strength, which is aligned with their Arcana. Some people go blindly through their lives, never coming to terms with the strength they have inside. Perhaps they’re carried along by negative emotions, and never able to overcome them. Maybe they’re too apathetic to reach their own potential. Throughout the game, you change masks as you need in order to help other people reach that potential. It’s just a part of your journey through life. You don’t take any credit, you don’t make a big fuss about it, you just stand aside and support them so they can do what they need to do. With your general social links, you just help people along and at Rank 10 things are more or less resolved.

        It gets a lot better with your party members, because they also unlock the powers of their Personas. Igor describes the power of Persona as (something like) a mask worn to face the hardships of life. Persona 3 had a different system for unlocking Personas, but in Persona 4 everyone had to face a dark, mutated version of their Persona in order to unlock their inner strength. This dark Persona represents the big conflict in their life, something they need to overcome in order to get on with their lives. A weak person might give in, but to accept their problems and acknowledge that this darkness is a part of who they are represents true strength. After facing this part of themselves, they unlock the power of their Persona, and join your party. It might not be perfect, but now they have the strength to face their problems - the strength of heart to face themselves.

        So I thought to myself that I ought to write about a problem in my life that I might not have otherwise faced, and challenge everyone to find the strength of heart to face themselves - if they haven’t already. At first I wanted to write about the breakdown of my relationship with Britt, then the end of my relationship with her (which didn’t end up happening - we’re all fine now), then about my general status with girls. Then I thought about it some more last night, and I thought about the problems the characters in Persona 4 had, and I realized that to claim I needed to face myself would be stupid. I’ve already done that. My big challenge, the jump I needed to make, was the initial overcoming of my depression and associated problems. I’ve already done that. Sure, I’m not perfect yet, but neither were your party members in Persona 4. They still had growing to do, and so do I. That’s just how it is.

        I’ll need a few more level-ups before I’m as good as I’ll get. Maybe at Rank 10 (maxed social link in Persona ¾) I’ll get a shiny evolution. But I’ve already reached Rank 1 (just after facing themselves), and I’m working my way up. So yes, I’ve found the strength of heart to face myself. Have you?

It is not - as it seems to many women - that men are bums who seek to deny women authority. Many men are inclined to jockey for status, and challenge the authority of others, when they are talking to men too. If this is so, then challenging a woman’s authority as they would challenge a man’s could be a sign of respect and equal treatment, rather than lack of respect and discrimination. The inequality of the treatment results not simply from the men’s behaviour alone but from the differences in men’s and women’s style: Most women lack experience in defending themselves against challenges, which they misinterpret as personal attacks on their credibility.

        A very interesting quote from an article in my applied linguistics class about gender differences in language. The author, a woman and an expert in her field (sociolinguistics), cited various examples of men controlling conversation - even men who knew nothing about linguistics trying to challenge her authority.

        Then she cited a study where pairs of men, pairs of women, and mixed pairs were videotaped while discussing the effect of television violence on children. Before the discussion, some of the subjects were given extra information on the subject - basically, making them the experts in their pair. Men, when confronted with a male expert, would often gain the upper hand in the conversation. When confronted with a female expert, the men would control the conversation and the woman - despite being more knowledgeable - would spend MORE time agreeing with the man than they normally did. And when the man in a mixed pair was the expert, he would control the conversation from beginning to end.

        I felt this was a very utopian quote, despite the whole gender imbalance thing. Or maybe even because of it. I wouldn’t say that being a utopian is “a male thing” - rather, I’d say that it’s all the more impressive for a girl to hold her ground against this kind of jockeying for position. And, I think, that it would be good for we Y-chromosome folk (men) to be conscious of our tendency to take control and quell it somewhat to level the playing field.

        Case in point: There are a lot of girls in the fencing club, especially among the beginners, and even moreso among the foilists. There are, by my count, three male beginners fencing foil and… five or six girls. You know what happens when two guys fence? Intense competition. I fenced a guy last night who’d been dominating in his bouts against a few of the girls, and destroyed him - the score was 5-1. We shook hands, and he told me I was the “king of parrying.” Funny that I didn’t parry once the entire time, except to counterparry (ok, the distinction is kinda important) his ripostes.

        When I fence the other guy, who’s less competitive with me but more aggressive against the girls, it’s more or less the same - we’re always testing each other to see who will win this time. But as I said, when he fences one of the girls, he goes nuts (which is poor technique) and tends to win because they back off. Case further in point: when two girls fence each other, it’s pretty much an even split.

        Case further in point, the girls fence each other on pretty much even footing. When I fence one of the girls, I try to give constructive criticism so they can beat me next time. I try not to use the same trick over and over, but if they do fall for a nasty one, I’ll show them how they can stop it. But, yes, I do try to control the bout. Why? Because the person in control is the one who gets to attack, and I want to practice and learn what works and what doesn’t. When I started fencing, I thought I could be a master defender and win through perfect reactions, but I lost every damn time. I know winning doesn’t matter, because it’s all for practice, but half-assed practice is almost worthless. So I go all out, and occasionally, that does result in a one-sided bout. I love to lose, though, because then I get twice as much experience. I can learn what they did well on the offensive, and I can learn what I did poorly on the defensive.

        However, I admit one failing in this - the extremely aggressive girls were told to fence sabre (slashing weapon, run at each other and swing), and the tall girls were told to fence epée (long pokey weapon, touch them before they touch you) so that left the submissive girls on foil. Also the girls who were too meek to insist on fencing a different weapon. So, yes, there are girls who dominate the dudes, and guys who don’t try to compete against them. Just not among the ones I fence with.

It’s like the Sunday Something, but slightly in advance. Yay! I just can’t contain my excitement for you to be excited about these things that are exciting. Plus I hate a cluttered bookmarks toolbar. that’s why Read It Later is perfect for me, because I never have to remind myself of the things I’m not doing.

        Extra Credits via Escapist Magazine - Brilliant, absolutely brilliant series of videos. They’re about six minutes in length each, and if you watch three in a row every day or something you should plow through them in no time. They are all worth watching, because each examines a worthwhile issue in an enlightening way. Let me backtrack - basically a couple of people with experience in different parts of the industry make a brief video each week talking about some aspect or another of video games. Some highlights include God of War 1 as a Greek tragedy, the psychological basis of any proper survival horror game, and the term “gamer.”

        I planned on only watching a few today, and ended up watching every single one. There’s only 15 actual episodes, with a few PAX 2010 videos you should probably watch and a few you may not bother to watch. They’re as good as any podcast or essay you might find on a gaming blog, but a fraction of the length.

        Winter Voices: Avalanche - An episodic strategy RPG, the first episode of which is currently available on Steam for $5. Further episodes are supposed to released every week, but it looks like they have a vague definition of “week.” At any rate, RPS tells you a lot of what you need to know about the game, and why you may or may not want to spend $5 on it. In terms of gameplay, the battles are metaphorical representations of you taking on your inner demons, your skills are coping mechanisms like Denial or Imaginary Friend. The game has some horrible flaws, but for $5? You’re not risking much.

        I have bought it, but I have yet to play it. I want to enjoy the games that I play, and I don’t want to waste my time with a bad game - hence why I tend to avoid flash games these days. I hope, though, that the premise and everything else can overcome the poor gameplay, and more than that I hope the gameplay gets better in later instalments. If it does, and you’re not convinced on this one, believe me - you’ll find out, and then you can buy Episode 4 and it’ll be great.

        “Another clever aspect of the combat is your character’s Memory statistic. When you’re allocating stat points after you’ve levelled up, you can increase your memory to boost the rate at which you gain experience (because you learn more from each talk and encounter), but it also causes the demons you wrestle with to grow in strength (your sad memories gain clarity).

        All it amounts to is a completely seamless dynamic difficulty slider. Want more skills and more complex battles? Crank up your memory. Or is your character breaking down as she runs out of energy during every single fight? If so, you leave your memory well alone. You try and forget.”

        God, this game deserves its own post. If that last paragraph isn’t some amazing game design, I don’t know what is.

        Touch screen material to run out by 2020 - That article contains a link to a much, much longer gizmodo article which I wouldn’t recommend unless you really like rocks and stuff, but the single sentence “modern touch screens are made with a rare material, which will only last until 2020 if we’re lucky” is all you really need to know. It’s a great reminder of how we treat our planet, though. How long have we really been getting into this touch screen stuff? I doubt the DS uses this particular material, but I’m sure the iPhone and your Droid phones and all that stuff uses it. So, at best a few years. And we’re tearing through this incredibly limited resource like there’s no tomorrow. Suddenly the post-apocalyptic world of your choice is ushered in by the demise of the amazing touch screen.

        You enjoying that iPhone? I really hope so. There’s only a billion of them in existence. Very rare. Rare enough to kill for.

(is that a bad joke about post-partum depression, I hope not)

        Alright so back from class, here’s how my weekend went after the party. This is some reaction to it, and some funny stories about Halloween.

        I slept in a bit on saturday, got up feeling like I sincerely did NOT want to be in my room. I figured I should sit in my room and study, but it was just not going to happen. My laptop was in the living room, by the couch, so I sat down there and booted it up. All well and good, then my mom gets up and is on her laptop and turns on the TV. Oh no. Television. Much as I hate it, it is there, and I end up getting distracted by it constantly. I spend a few hours doing stuff on the internet and talking to Britt about how busy I am and how I’m not keeping my promises to her and stuff like that. Savin’ it for another post. Wait for it. Anyway, eventually around maybe 1:45 pm or something? I got off my butt and went over to my dad’s so I could be alone.

        By 3 pm, I had showered and gotten my stuff organized, but no matter what I did I couldn’t really sit down and do any homework. My dad’s house just doesn’t have any place for me to work - I have no desk, the table is covered in crap, etc. I ended up accomplishing stuff by setting my laptop aside and using the piles of wood my dad had ordered as a desk. I knew, of course, that I could spend the weekend relaxing - but I needed to do work to keep myself busy while I was secluding myself, so I ended up taking notes on the fifth chapter of my linguistics textbook, doing the homework questions for it, and my french homework.

        Sunday, Halloween, I… hmm… I didn’t do much for most of the day. The most notable thing is, of course, trick or treating children. My dad bought candy - two boxes of 94 chocolate bars (two to each child) and two boxes of 24 bags of cheesies (do real people say that, cheetos seems like such an awkward thing to say - anyway, one per child) - so that’s enough candy for 130 children. We had 12 trick or treaters. Four children, eight teenage girls. One teenage girl said she liked my Born of Osiris hoodie and I said “eh, they’re alright” because alright is the best word to describe them. Other than that people just seemed to walk around in costumes without going to any houses. So now we have a disgusting amount of candy and I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it.

        My mom had at least 50 trick or treaters, when I last checked in with her, but according to my dad that was because she lives near a bunch of low-rent apartments - most of which are along the bus route that comes to Carleton. Huh. Well, kids. Around my dad’s it’s just old people and people with older kids. Does that mean he lives more in the suburbs than my mom? Ah well.

        Oh, and sweet story about the Halloween party:

        Near the end of the conversation with my coach and the two guys from Ottawa U, our hostess dropped by and flaunted her numerous assets for our benefit. But we would not be swayed from our riveting fencing discussion. After a brief lull later, one of the guys from Ottawa U remarked that we deserved a Darwin Award for spectacular failure to procreate.

        “Given the choice of finding an attractive female to talk to, or talking to a couple of dudes about fencing, we’re like ‘oh man you could try this, or try that’ and there’s hot women like right there! Right there! And we’re like 'fencing, awesome!’”

        edit: Oh and I watched The Trotsky (Canadian film) and the first three episodes of The World God Only Knows (subbed anime via Crunchyroll) while waiting for non-existent trick or treaters, and liked them both a fair bit. The Trotsky isn’t a must-watch, but I enjoyed it. You might enjoy it a tiny bit less if you don’t know french. The World God Only Knows is about a guy who’s pro at dating sims but has never even held hands with a girl, and he accidentally signs a contract with the devil to collect souls that are living in the hearts of girls by - of course - kissing them. If that premise sounds awesome, you should watch it. Otherwise I have nothing to say to you.