Six Characters in Search of an Author

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.

I didn’t get around to it last night, but I meant to write a post about my day yesterday including the dream I had that morning. Seeing as I probably didn’t go to bed until after midnight, although I forget when it was. So read on while I tell you of the amazing dream that I had, and don’t forget that as cool as it sounds with me writing out what I remember, it was ten times as cool originally.

        The basis of the dream was that an extremely advanced alien race was slowly abducting random humans, and most of us didn’t remember anything about it. So who knows what kind of experiments they were running. However, every person they abducted gained at least a basic telepathic power, depending on their natural aptitudes. We all became connected to a telepathic sort of hive mind, allowing us to communicate with eachother by thought as well as hear eachother’s thoughts. Not many people knew about it, though, because they were too absorbed in their own thoughts to listen in on the thoughts of others. For most people, we would need to consciously tune out of ourselves in order to hear other people’s thoughts. People who don’t tend to think much, though, spent all of their time unconsciously listening in on the thoughts of anyone and everyone who happened to get abducted.

        So in my dream, I was unaware of what powers I might have because I didn’t know I had been abducted. I’d heard stories about it, though, so it wasn’t a crazy abstract concept that would make me go crazy if someone sent me a telepathic message. So the start of what I remember about my dream is that I was laying in bed, and apparently fantasizing about someone or another. Then, in my head, I hear my brother’s voice telling me that T-Snap (a stupid guy I used to know) was enjoying my thoughts. So I was like damn, I don’t want him hearing my thoughts! I hate that guy! So then I started trying to censor my thoughts and think about unimportant stuff, though I don’t remember anymore what I was thinking about. My brother sent me some more messages to explain why I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and somehow managed to communicate to me that he had gained the ability to teleport to places the alien race had set up thought harvesting devices for their own teleportation, including their grand library of infinite knowledge. So he went there and learned all kinds of crazy stuff and developed, like, every telekinetic power ever.

        At some point during all of that I actually woke up and continued laying in bed trying to censor my thoughts and seriously debating the idea of speaking all of my thoughts out loud. While anyone nearby would be able to hear them, that would probably mean fewer people than all the people who could listen to it if I thought it in my head.

        Then eventually I rolled over or something and realized I was no longer dreaming.

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        My grandparents brought our dog to us this past weekend, and so far she’s working on settling in. Because I’ve been outside working with my grandfather, and she loves him to bits, and because I hang out with her a lot (I leave blankets or clothes on the floor, and she makes herself a nice little bed out of them) she loves me a little less than him, so when we’re outside working she wants to be outside with us. Unfortunately, this means that she’s barked at and scared a few people who got too closer to our property. First it was our neighbour, as he was going into his house, and the thing about my dog is that she sounds like an attack dog twice her size in terms of weight. So he was pretty much terrified and didn’t stick around long enough for me to apologize after I brought her back home. This was her first act as the new Neighbourhood Menace.

        Yesterday, though, she was even worse. Back home, we left her out front on her leash for a couple of months when we were at school, and she was bestest buddies with the lady who delivered our mail. When we moved her leash out back, our mail lady asked us where she went, lol. So I know she’s not a vicious beast, you just have to acknowledge her as opposed to running off in fear. If you stop and say hi, she’ll warm up to you. If you run away as fast as you can, she’ll think she did a good job of defending her family and mark you as a target for the future.

        Unfortunately for our new mailman, he chose the second option. I had her on her leash under the carport, where we were hiding from the sun, and he walked by on the way to our neighbour’s house. She started barking and made a mad dash for him, and I pulled her back. Then she tried to go under the table we were sitting beside and nearly knocked it over, nearly pulling me over it in the process, which probably only scared the mailman more. So we’re definitely going on his mental list of crappy houses to deliver to, and if it happens again we might end up on the list of houses with dogs to look out for. But we’re working on fencing the back yard (it already has a hedge and a fence around most of it, so we just need to close it off) so she’ll be pretty harmless when we finish with that. Either she’ll be inside or have no way to get out of the back yard, so she shouldn’t scare anyone too badly.

        So that’s how my dog has become the Neighbourhood Menace within less than a week. Nobody around here has a big scary dog, so it’s somewhat new to these people to have her around. At least we’ll be protected from the big scary criminals here in the big scary city. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with something that sounds like her.

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        So the basic thing you need to understand about my grandfather is that he does whatever the hell he wants. If he doesn’t know how to do it, he’ll learn. He’s an electrician by trade, and he’s been working since he was six years old. He’s now 73. Skills I can confirm that he has: carpentry, car mechanic, boat mechanic, plumbing. Who knows what else he’s taught himself to do. I have stories to confirm all of those things, like how he built the house he and my grandmother STILL live in to convince her to marry him, or how he helped build a $400,000 modified hydraulic dump truck out of $30,000 worth of parts. But the moral of the story is that he’s basically the handiest handyman ever, and he’ll drop by to fix whatever problems you might have without any question of repayment. They live in New Brunswick, but he plans on coming back here (a 12 hour drive) after he collects some supplies back home, so he can redo a lot of our ancient and terrible electrical work. Chances are he won’t be back as soon as he thinks he will be, but I expect next time I see him I’ll learn how to install a new circuit in my house and which tools to use to drill through a concrete foundation.

        Yesterday, after finishing the construction of a handmade sliding gate for our deck, he began work on new handrails for the steps going off the back of the deck. Underneath one of the old rotted ones was a small hornet’s nest. Rather than think “bleh hornets better work around those” like a mere mortal, he smashed it open with a hammer and crushed three of the hornets that were inside one by one. There may have been a fourth, but again, it was a small nest. Then he wiped the dead hornets off the deck and got to work putting that new handrail on.

        This is the man who inspired my middle name, and I’d feel like such a badass if I built a house to convince a girl to marry me. If only it was the late 1950’s and there was land basically everywhere for people to spontaneously build on.

This post has several pre-requisite knowledges that you must have in order to find it remotely funny. Number 1: Watch anime, or at least know what it is. Number 2: Know what a “bad dub” is, whether you’ve watched it yourself or watched youtube clips of particularly embarrassing shows.

        Now, on average, most immigrants will continue speaking their original language after they move. If the children were born in Canada or the US or wherever, usually their parents will teach them their language (even if they speak english themselves) and they’ll speak that to eachother. Apparently, not everyone does that. Some of them try to improve their english by speaking it all the time. As with most people learning a second language, they don’t speak it as easily as someone who’s been speaking it all of their life. Engrish, lolol, etc.

        Now, the thing about learning another language is that not everything translates perfectly. If you’ve watched a bad dub, you know what I’m talking about. In Japan, they have a thing for using sounds rather than words. Rather than yell “Oh my god, Jason! Nooo! Jason! Oh my god!” they will instead yell “AAAAAAAAAAAH” for a minute and a half. While things like “ugh” and “meh” are relatively common in english, we don’t have an easy equivalent to a lot of their exclamations.

        So, this all comes together in one hilarious incident when I was in Home Depot today. An asian girl was standing near the entrance to the store, alongside a very disinterested asian girl fiddling with an MP3 player. A slightly older asian guy brings a huge cart in the door, and the first girl yells (what I assume was) his name, surprising everyone in the vicinity. Then she runs towards him and jumps on the cart, plonks herself down and sits cross-legged on the cart. Then she yells “eeeeeeehhhhh I wanna go for a cart ride!!!!!” at which point everyone is like wtf r u doin? Even the cashiers were leaning around their stall things to take a look. Then she looks at the second girl and yells “sister! join me! we’re going for a cart ride eeeeeeeee!!!”

        It was just such a perfect moment. My grandfather and I looked at eachother and he just shook his head, a little dismissive shake along the lines of “I have no time for this foolishness.” I didn’t want to laugh because it would just ruin it. But like, just hearing her speak with the right words in the wrong way like any crappy dub, and the other girl’s expression, and the whole spectacle of it. I swear if someone dubbed real life it would be the greatest thing ever.

        PS: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game is a fun side-scrolling brawler like any you may (or may not) have played before, with a lot of neat little features that are probably pilfered compiled from all over video game history. Also it’s really great as a co-op game. You can revive and heal your teammates, or pick them up and use them as weapons. You can work together for super attacks and combos, and you can lend eachother money to purchase power-ups and healing items. Should your teammates suck and fail to help you, you come back as a ghost and can steal their extra lives to revive yourself. They don’t get to say no!

        Also as a word on how awesome this game is, Scott’s late-fees are an actual thing in the game. As in you go to the video store and there’s a $500 item called “Scott’s Late Fees.” I don’t know what paying them off does, but it has to be awesome. Also I bought a game called Speedy the Porcupine and it gave me +50 speed so I’m awesome now. I was $8 short of buying Never-Ending Fantasy :(

Carleton University Summer Orientation

Things I learned at my orientation today:

• they have a Womyn’s Institute
• there’s a fee inside your tuition that gives you a complete public transit pass for Ottawa during the school year - something like half of what you’d have to pay going to school and coming home, except you can go anywhere ever, whenever you want
• there’s a fee inside your tuition that gives you complete access to all their sports facilities, including yoga, pilates, and martial arts classes, as well as two gyms, a dedicated cardio room, a large pool, squash courts, etc.
• they have like 7 places to eat, including a food court (A&W, Subway, Pizza Pizza, stuff like that), at least one dining service area - I’m under the impression that there is at least one other - where chefs stand in front of you and prepare everything from grilled cheese sandwiches to stir fry to pizzas to whatever your favourite ethnic specialty food happens to be - Chinese and Indian style meals were on offer today, a cafe inside the library (kinda like the Starbucks in Chapters, only on steroids), and a full service restaurant (waiters, menus, the whole deal)
• they have a book store that will not only buy back your books, but is now offering book rentals for about 50% of new retail price - you sign a contract promising to return the book a few days after your final - which may be a loss if you’re a good used book salesman, but otherwise everyone wins
• they have lecture theatres that… you may not believe this… STILL HAVE CHALKBOARDS IN THEM. I realize that with a much larger facility than my high school, it would be very expensive to update them, but like, chalkboards… and then slideshows… SmartBoards were invented specifically to combine these things into one beauteous creature
• they recycle pretty much everything for you, from batteries to empty printer cartridges, and then they actually use these things - I saw an LCD monitor made from what must have been the recycled remains of an old white CRT monitor, because there’s no way it was originally made that way
• after two years there, you can go on an exchange for one (or both) semester(s) to pretty much everywhere ever - perhaps I shall go see the world
• our school colours are red with black, which is unfortunate because I actually own no red clothing, but I own plenty of black - as far as I can tell red is the social stuff and black is the serious academic stuff? seemed to me like the fun things were red and the academic stuff was black, anyhow, so I guess that’s appropriate
• they have a computer science degree focusing on social networking and social games

Things I experienced worth noting:

• there will be a lot of exchange/international/whatever students, like seriously a lot
• there will be a crazy large amount of people in general, which is to say that people with all kinds of interests will be available to agree with you or simply be attractive
• I shared the empty spots at my table with a girl and her mom, the latter of which joked that she would e-mail my mom to say I had met at least one person
• I met an ex-Polish guy wearing a Rush t-shirt named Conred (pronounced Conrad of course) who assured me that the Polish are terrible, embarrassing people
• I really wanted some pizza for lunch but like there was nothing disgusting and unhealthy like that, although I did manage to find some french fries and had some cookies for desert

Yeah so I dunno that’s what I did today. I’m not trying to promote stuff or say my university is better than yours, like I’m not some super excited school spirit guy or anything. I guess I accidentally promised (more like sarcastically humoured the request) to go do Fall Orientation, for a cost of $75, which is called C U (Carleton University, get it) At The Circus and I have zero interest in that, especially since I live off-campus. And so my mom paid for that already and now I feel guiltily obligated to go and not enjoy myself. Allegedly it’s all non-drinking, which is to say they won’t be providing drinks, but that’s not much of a guarantee that nobody will be drunk. As far as I can tell I accidentally made my mom pay $75 for these things (go to the events thing) and like I might go see a good movie if they were going to something good. I don’t really want to go to the beach and not be with anybody or go to a concert if there’s nobody I want to see, and the rest is so un-noteworthy to my mind I won’t even declare my non-interest in them.

        Academic orientation will be useful, although I would have assumed that was for everyone? Carleton Complete may or may not also be informative, likewise with Expo Carleton. According to their “why should I bother” section of the FAQ Carleton Complete will make me a brilliant success so it had better be worth $75 alongside the academic orientation. Actually, I don’t care about the money even if I have to give my own money to my mom. Expo Carleton could possibly be a showcase of thing people from the university have done, as I know for example that we have our own art gallery somewhere.

        I’m not hellbent on being boring and not meeting anyone, don’t get me wrong, I just look at this list of events and feel very disinterested. Turned off, even, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain that. Of course I’ll go out and do things that interest me, if I know they exist and can find my way there. That’s why I’m going to go see The Holly Springs Disaster next saturday. I’m not worried about being awkward and out of place there, because I’ll enjoy the event regardless of my locally friendless state. I can only hope that my charmingly polite attitude and witty banter will charm people taking the same classes as I am, though they may not necessarily share all of my classes because of my wonky degree. Thus far, this is the only way I know how to meet people. Its effectiveness is yet to be determined.

        Oh, slight caveat: each of our classes seems to have a discussion board or something for the students in the class to get information from their teacher and make plans to study together and discuss material and whatever, where I know all kinds of things about being awesome and befriending people. I knew my years of lurking would be good for something in university!

So I realize that perhaps I’ve barely mentioned my current real life status here on tumblr. Since people I talk to all the time were unaware of why I was absent. Perhaps those of you who know nothing but what I post on my tumblr worried that I was dead, or that I had abandoned you. No, I was just in the middle of moving fifteen hours away from the city (more like overblown town) in which I was born and raised. From peaceful little Summerside, Prince Edward Island, where you could have found my house if I told you the slightest bit about me, I have just finished moving to Ottawa, Ontario, where I could give you my full name and you could never find me. Prince Edward Island had a provincial phone book. Ottawa has two, or maybe three, phone books to itself. And each of those is at least twice the size of the PEI phone book. Yep, it’s a change of pace.

        We’ve been all moved in and everything for a little over a week now, and it’s kinda weird taking all of the *stuff* from your house and putting it into a new building, where you will be living from now on. We didn’t get internet because we were trying to find a good deal, and we ended up with Rogers because Bell was hardly an option. Their good service wasn’t available here, and we wanted good. So Rogers it was, and so far I’m not exactly happy. But I’ll live. Life goes on. I have a lot of catching up to do, but I’m alive! Hooray! And I’m so bored that I could post every day if I felt like it! I even have posts pre-written to post, but I’ll try to space things out. Honest. I’m going to post one now, and then another tomorrow or the day after. Sound like a plan? Yes? Great!

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        If Serial Experiments Lain, Welcome to the N.H.K, and Inception had a threesome, Chaos;Head would be born. I can’t speak for the visual novel it’s based on because I didn’t want to change my language settings just to play it, but holy crap, what an entertaining show. Those of you who don’t like subs (hi vael) won’t be able to watch it for a little while yet, but it has been licensed, so yay.

        It starts with a series of unexplained events dubbed the New Generation Madness by @Chan (it’s full of less-than subtle references like that, but some are funny), starting with a group suicide and a man becoming pregnant. The hero of our story, Takumi Nishijou, lives in a storage container on top of a tall building, where he spends his time watching anime, being the best at an archaic MMO (why would the data for his character be stored on his harddrive, and furthermore, how could he play in an internet cafe that way…) and jerking off to plastic figurines. Takumi has no friends, goes to school only as often as he needs to graduate, and hallucinates that one of his figurines is alive and talks to him. His sister occasionally comes to his “base” to make sure he’s still alive.

        Then he stumbles upon the third event of the New Generation Madness, the slaying of a professor studying a phenomenon called GE-Rate. The killer is… a cute high school girl. Who suddenly appears at Takumi’s school the next day and claims to be one of his only friends. The plot thickens!

        Takumi’s pretty much nuts and the whole idea is that half the time you don’t know if anything is actually happening. He hallucinates pretty frequently, often erotically, only to hear someone say his name and realize it wasn’t real. Then these hallucinations start becoming reality, simply because he imagined them. Then girls with swords no one else can see start paying a whole lot of attention to him. Then he becomes a suspect in the murder of the professor, and then stuff gets really crazy.

        It’s only twelve episodes long, and honestly it’s pretty well paced. There really aren’t any boring sections where nothing really happens. It’s one mystery after another, and as the pieces start to come together it all works pretty well. Off the top of my head, I don’t think there are any loose plot threads. It just clicks in a really satisfying way, and I think it would be as interesting to watch in one sitting as it would be to watch it slowly and give yourself time to think about it. In the last few episodes, there were a few times where I stopped for a second to connect little details and figure things out. One thing it doesn’t do is patronize you - no big villainous reveal followed by “yes indeed, I AM the villain!” Rather, you’ll see a chat screen left open, and then a confrontation. No need to tell you what you already know. So I like that about it.

        One of the characters was tortured as a young child and developed some serious psychological issues, as well as her special powers. She sees the world through mystical fantasy terms, like Black Nights and Demon Kings rather than people with special powers and mind control machines. She makes several references to Cocytus, the River of Grief  in Hades, only one of several horrible and depressing rivers to be crossed. At the end of the series, she realizes that the rivers past Cocytus don’t make passing it meaningless; rather, they validate the effort as a proof of strength to surpass further trials. Having passed one challenge, one can clearly pass the next, and the next, if only through willpower alone.

        Meanwhile, in Synthetic Worlds, the author compares the endless grind in an MMO to the trial of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to roll a boulder up the side of an impossibly tall mountain. Only at the end of the day, as he neared the top, his strength would fail and the boulder would fall to the base of the mountain. The reason people enjoy the grind in an MMO, however, is because they aren’t simply crawling up one large mountain. They’re crossing an entire mountain range, getting the reward for each milestone they pass rather than only being rewarded at the very end.

        Greek mythology aside, the two philosophies are similar at their core. Having climbed one mountain, you don’t admit defeat because there’s a taller mountain ahead. Nor should you expect a grassy plain on the other side, because there will always be challenges to be met and problems to be solved. No amount of success will guarantee a worry-free life forevermore. However, we need to take pride in our accomplishments and relish the joy of success to get us over the next mountain. If you disregard what you’ve accomplished, then every further challenge will be a source of despair, one more reason to be miserable.

        That’s the way I see my life when I look back. With every challenge I’ve overcome, I’ve become a better, stronger person. In the face of every challenge to come, I’ll take what I’ve learned and I’ll work until I succeed. Forward motion. Constant progress. I’m not looking for a grand reward at the end of the road to validate my efforts. The results are validation enough. It’s just a question of how you measure progress. Every little step is worth something, even if you need to take a thousand more. Don’t stop moving just because you aren’t there yet. Run faster if you’re that anxious to arrive.

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        Hey there kids! Are you really tired of writing, and completely forget the point you were originally trying to make? Don’t worry about it! Here’s a fool-proof guide to making nice fluffy arguments that barely form a cohesive thesis but give you an opportunity to mention all kinds of neato things.

1. Think of something that, in some small way, relate whatever your last paragraph was about.

2. Mix far too many metaphors and sound fancy without being completely clear what you mean. Don’t worry, nobody will notice except your english teacher.

3. Repeat steps one and two until you run out of neato things to bring in.

4. Repeat yourself, either with the same or different metaphors, and maybe add something personal. Just to make sure people reading the rest of what you wrote think of the things you wanted them to think about. Also, if you get a little lost yourself while writing this part, that’s ok. It’s all about the personal discovery they have reading what you’ve written. Let them draw their own conclusions! It’s like Writing 2.0 - involve your readers!

        I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again, because I start writing late or I just get frustrated with what I’ve written but plow ahead because I want to get it out. I’m not going to rewrite this, and I totally want to plug Choas;Head, and I’ve acknowledged the failure so now it’s a learning experience for everyone. Also, plan your essays. Having a thesis is important. Having supporting points is a nice touch.

        Now it’s time for the bonus quote, yay! From Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson, the ninth book of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It’s a completely ridiculous series, and not for the faint of heart. I started when book 6 was new, and they only get longer. I think the entire series reaches my hip or higher now. I wouldn’t know, because I donated them to my high school library because I knew I wouldn’t have enough space to take them with me to Ottawa. Sad, because now I don’t know what to do with this book and the next, which will be the final volume. I can’t just keep volumes 9 and 10 on the shelf, but who could I ever give them to? They’re basically useless on their own T.T

        Also as for the quote specifically I absolutely love it and it was like the most amazing thing ever to read and it makes so much sense in context and the reference is obvious (in the book I mean) but it still makes me think of a badass person going around fixing everything and knowing the world is horrible and they can’t change that, but doing their own small part rather than giving up. Kinda like Scott Shelby in Heavy Rain appearing out of nowhere to solve problems and then just disappearing without needing any thanks. Kinda like what I aspire to be too. I want a fist full of tears T.T

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Somewhere, out there, you will find the purest essence of that philosophy. Perhaps in one person, perhaps in ten thousand. Looking to no other entity, no other force, no other will. Bound solely in comradeship, in loyalty honed absolute. Yet devoid of all arrogance. Wise in humility. And that one, or ten thousand, is on a path. Unerring, it readies itself, not to shake a fist at the heavens. But to lift a lone hand, a hand filled with tears. You want a faith? You want someone or something to believe in? No, do not worship the one or the ten thousand. Worship the sacrifice they will make, for they make it in the name of compassion - the only cause worth fighting and dying for.

I remember the other thing I’d noticed about Ottawa now. Air conditioning. In PEI, nobody has air conditioning in their homes. Businesses have it to at least keep things at a decent temperature. Here, everything is COLD. Way, way too much AC. Everywhere. Houses, hotels, everything is air conditioned to death. It’s terrible.

Also, slight correction: the burka is just the kind that completely covers the face. I haven’t seen any of those. Sorry for my failure at Islam.

Now that I’ve been here for something like 30 hours, there are a few things I’ve noticed about Ottawa that are different from Summerside, Prince Edward Island. They aren’t exactly pros and cons, they’re just things that have stood out since I’ve been here. Not so much culture shock, as I’ve spent a week here and a week in Toronto before now, and there are things I knew to expect. Just interesting things to note.

• There are bike lanes on most of the large streets I’ve seen so far. Without exception, there have been people walking, running, and biking literally everywhere. No one is worried about their safety, they’re just out for some exercise. There are also paths set aside for walking and such, in parks, near an experimental farm nearby.
• In any public place, chances are pretty good that at least one conversation in both french and chinese will be happening withing hearing range of you. I’ve also seen several women in burkas. Here’s the thing - where I grew up, there were fewer non-white people than there are individual cultures in Ottawa. Like, we had, perhaps, twenty to thirty non-white people in our city of 14,000. That’s not to be rude, or racist, or anything like that. That’s just how it was. Here, there are people from likely every country in the world. It was rare to hear a conversation purely in french in Summerside. Generally it was tourists.
• It’s very clean, and certainly extremely modern. Again, this should be no surprise, but the difference from what I’m used to is pretty striking. We passed a building dedicated to “geophysics,” which previously was something I didn’t know even existed. It’s just a change from places where nobody paid much attention to looking shiny and new because it’s not like they had competitors lololol. If you offered a service, it was probably just you unless they wanted to go out of their way. You just did what you had to do for the most part.

Ok I had more to say but I forgot because I started trying to plan stuff out. We found a comic book/board games/card games shop nearby, and an anime shop in the same little plaza thing. That’s pretty cool. I purchased All You Need Is Kill which is about a guy fighting an impossible battle against an alien swarm, but being reborn repeatedly and slowly getting better and better each time. I also purchased Harmony (I think that was the title) about some future Utopia in which no one wants or needs for anything and some people try to kill themselves by starvation and simply aren’t allowed to do so. It seems really awesome and interesting and when I’m done reading it I’ll recommend it if it’s worth reading.