Thought for the Day
Cornel West reminds us that justice is what love looks like in public.
Trying to have a different conversation about trans people
I like that this video critiques media portrayals of trans folk.
The Mayor of Here
Rob Ford’s latest drunken stupor.
Zo li mache
Did I mention that I broke my hand?
Walking into the office on January 2nd, first day back after the office holiday closure, I was looking to the side when I stepped on a very smooth, very snow-covered maintenance hole cover. Wham, and I was on the ground. I landed on my left side and my left pinky hurt as I got up.
It happened so fast, I didn’t quite see everything. I felt like my pinky went out of alignment with my hand, and I was a bit worried that I broke the finger. But I felt it very carefully, trying to feel for breaks, and concluded that it was fine. But it hurt. I bound my pinky to my ring finger for a few hours and went on with life.
After the first day, I didn’t really feel any pain, but the hand became pretty swollen for about a week, and it was after the swelling went down that I noticed that the metacarpal bone didn’t feel right. That was when I started to worry that I’d broken it (spoiler alert: I’d broken it!)
Thought for the Day
I am what you designed me to be. I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt”
— Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Houles of Dover Township
I’ve lost a few more hours of my life looking up Houles. Here are the descendants of Pierre Houle (who is, I believe, the first Houle to arrive in Dover Township). The chart’s not complete, by any means, but there are a coupl’a interesting aspects to it.
Manga Studio FTW?
I’ve been experimenting with Manga Studio recently. There’s some stuff about it that I like (vectors and raster on the same drawing!), but every once in a while, I’m gobsmacked by the dumb. Like this:
If you turn on the canvas rulers, it marks out the measurements in whatever unit your canvas uses — I tend to go with inches. But it doesn’t give you, say, eighth-of-an-inch increments. It’s whole inches. Yargh.
Sure, I can switch over to cm or pixels, but why?
2013 in Film
2013 was a bit of a strange year for film, from my perspective. Whenever I think back on films I saw in a particular year, I’m always struggling with the knowledge that my movie-watching habits are skewed by the fact that I don’t tend to see much of anything in cinemas any more. So, for me, “films I saw this year” usually includes a handful of films that many people saw the year prior. And this year, a number of my top 5 come from the last quarter of 2012. Oh well.
Here are my top five favourite films:
Number 5: Looper (Rian Johnson). Yup, it suffered from wibbly-wobbly time stuff that makes no sense when you think about it. But it was surprisingly strong. I really enjoyed the vision of the future it created (clearly devastated by economic depression) — it felt like a fresher future and more interesting worldbuilding than I’d seen in a long time. The ending of the film came as a surprise (so many time travel tales are bogged down with the weight of oppressive inevitability), and the scene where Emily Blunt gets in the safe was such a wonderfully constructed scene.
Poor, misunderstood cop has suffered enough for beating someone
A Toronto police officer convicted of assaulting a protester during the G20 summit has been sentenced to 45 days in prison.
Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was convicted in September of assault with a weapon for using excessive force during the arrest of a protester on June 26, 2010.
[…]
Andalib-Goortani’s lawyer, Harry Black, had asked for the officer to receive an absolute discharge.
Black said his client had suffered enough already, adding he has post-traumatic stress disorder, his psychological state is fragile and his marriage has fallen apart.
— “G20 assault: Babak Andalib-Goortani gets 45-day sentence”, CBC.ca
