More Relatives

Saturday consisted of a trip down to Eaton Centre, where we temporarily left the In Laws to their own devices while we ran an errand to check out a rare book shop for a friend in Singapore. The rest of the day was spent visiting the Wife’s Aunt with the In Laws before staggering back in at the truly awesome hour of some time past midnight.

In Law Visitation Continues

A visit to Kensington was followed by Chinatown, then I plugged my sister-in-law into Guitar Hero for a few hours (she plays piano, so she jumped straight into medium and stayed there comfortably until Cream’s Crossroads wiped the floor with her) and then pizza was consumed at the neighborhood Magic Oven. The verdict from the father in law; “I think that’s the best pizza I’ve ever had.”

Very tired. Must veg out.

In Laws

They arrived late this afternoon, having gotten used to the sedate, rural charm of Calais, Maine and got thrown into the maelstrom of the automotive grid lock that is the 401 coming into Toronto. We walked to Bloor, we had Korean food. I am going to bed. That’s a pretty big jump, going from a “city” with a population of 3000 to the 5 million plus of the Greater Toronto Area…

The Night Before

The In-Laws officially arrive some time tomorrow and we are now going to bed at a reasonable hour of the night, just like most sane people. It looks like we’re going to go down to the Paradise Comic-Con on Sunday (thus missing out on the Gail Simone talk) because a) a group of editors from DC will be looking at portfolio submissions on that day, and b) the Wife’s family leaves on Sunday. This does, however, mean that we will be inundated with Cos Players galore since people that dress up on Sunday will get free admission. For those of you that don’t know, Cos Play is a Japanese term for people that dress up in costumes of favorite anime/manga/comic/TV characters, as evinced by the video below of some of the more successful–and cute–attempts that craft.

Finally

For the first time in several days, I’m actually going to bed when it’s dark outside. Whoo. It’s the small accomplishments that make me happy.

Almost Normal

Things are slooooooooowly beginning to start feeling normal again. Woke up at 3 am, pottered around the house, and then walked through the neighborhood and a little up north to keep the Wife company as she picked up some canvas someone was selling online. Turns out the woman who was selling them had bought them during an intense oil painting phase, and now that the phase had passed, knew that she wasn’t going to put the canvas to use anymore.

Other than that, more Grim Fandango was played, a walk down to Bloor got us more coffee, art supplies and continuing episodes of Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, Excel Saga and now FLCL, as well as more coffee.

Bed time was actually sometime after 9 pm, so it was a weird, long day in that my body was desperately trying to grab back onto a daylight cycle wakefulness and actually managed some success since we spent the majority of our waking ours up during the day.

Exploring Spadina

The march towards sleeping at a reasonable hour in time for the In-Laws’ arrival continues. We actually were up around midnight messed around at home for a while and then early in the morning, we headed down south to check out The Other big market in Toronto, Kensington Market. This was kind of weird for me since I actually remember seeing portions of this place on TV as a kid when the Canadian sit-com “The King of Kensington” was being broadcast. If St. Lawrence Market is a collection of two buildings that represents the historical capitalist aspect of Toronto, then Kensington is the sub/cultural side of things. It’s a few streets (one of them being Kensington, obviously) that have rows and rows of stores and cafes. The same could be said for our usual haunt of Bloor but it has a distinctively different vibe; where Bloor feels very much like a hip, student hang-out, Kensington has traditionally played host to first immigrants and now the various subcultures of Toronto. A walk down its streets reveals full-on punks, hippies, Rastafarians, Goths and various other groups who come down to enjoy the broader “cultural climate” of the place, compared to Yorkville, which is a Yuppie conclave, or Queen Street West which is where the cutting edge trendsetter/fashionista types go to see and be seen.

The more laid back, “Hey, man, we’re all brothers and sisters aren’t we,” Haight-Ashbury feel for the place is only reinforced by the fact that you can visit, shop and, yes, smoke, in cannabis cafes like the Roach O’ Rama, which has a BYOP policy, but sells pretty much everything else, including seeds. You’ve even got folks like Bob Snider, a Canadian folk-singer, who comes out on Saturdays and just drops his case on the the street, whips out the guitar and starts singing away. Or you can just click on that picture of him there and see his take on the place. We also wandered down Spadina Avenue proper, which is really just the formal way of saying “Chinatown” since that’s what takes up the majority of the street until you travel south far enough to hit the previously mentioned Queen Street West area.

Chinatown made the Wife extremely happy. If you want to see some of it yourself, just click here or on the picture.

It was really bizarre just how much the vibe changed in one split second, crossing over from Kensington to Chinatown. The change was made more dramatic by the fact that it feels intensely familiar if you’ve lived in Aisa before. Suddenly, going into stores, people don’t make eye contact, salespeople don’t come up to you ask how you are and if they can help you with anything, and buying stuff results in a kind of quiet, annoyed grumbling that gives you the distinct impression these people wished you were dead for interrupting whatever it was they were doing, and just want you to hand over the money and go away. In short, I felt like I was back in Singapore.

But aside from that general familiar feeling in the air, the other part, the part that made the Wife nearly faint with the joy, was the sudden influx of familiar logos and brandnames I had just spent the last decade seeing in Singapore stores. Khong Guan cookie tins, Ayam curry, Skyflake Crackers and Hainanese Chicken Rice stock lined the shelves. I was amazed at how much of this stuff I recognized and even more surprised to actually find these Asian brands both familiar AND comforting. I may not have been born in Singapore, but for over ten years, it was home, and there was a weird twinge of nostalgia looking at some of this stuff and thinking, “Oh my God, white rabbit candy! I remember this stuff, it’s CRAP!” Previous to this, the Wife had been getting her fix of Asian goods by shopping at a grocery store in Koreatown, which is what Bloor turns into if you walk down the street westwards. However, I think that grocery store has now been completely discplaced in the Wife’s head by the grocery store we found in Chinatown. She had the same glazed look in her eye and trembling hands that is normally reserved for me in a videogame store. It goes without saying that we made off with a bunch of stuff that has put the Wife in a very good mood since she now has a few of the familiar products of home, and Kensington and Chinatown are now officially added to our list of Neat Places To Visit For Shopping.

The food, however, is not quite up to snuff. That’s probably not fair, since we only sampled one restaurant, but Singapore, in an attempt to make up for its almost total lack of substance, has an almost homicidal obsession with food. As a result, especially for Asian fare, it’s pretty hard not to find a Really Good Restaurant anywhere within cat-swinging distance. We found a dumpling restaurant, called the Dumpling House, and, having memories of the quaint little restaurant we’d walk down to on East Coast road, run by a former Chinese National Team basketball player, we went in. The dumplings and beef noodles there were amazing. This dumpling restaurant didn’t match up, but that’s not to say the food was bad. I was caught off guard by how large the servings were and had to remind myself “Oh yeah, right, this is Canada,” and the flavors were reasonably good, but it wasn’t quite that same experience of popping one a’ them little Northern Chinese pan fried dumplings in your mouth and suddenly saying “DAMN, THAT’S TASTY!” the way I was used to.

We were both surprised when, as we were finishing our meal, we noticed that there was a huge line up to get into the place. The quality of food, while not bad at all, hardly seemed to justify the piles of people that were trying to get in. I think though that this is another one of those few aspects where I have to give it to Singapore; if you’re a lover of Asian food, the place is one of the best pieces of real estate on the planet to live. Those folks getting in the line may have thought the dumplings were tasty, but then they’d probably never had the Real Deal out in Asi
a itself.

Time Is Funny

When your anchor to it has been cut off. Woke up before midnight today after going to bed some time in the middle of the afternoon. There is a weird–though not actually unpleasant–feeling of drifting through the day in a disconnected sort of way. It’s kind of like that feeling you get just after waking up, or after you’ve been a up a really, really long time, though without the feelings of drowsiness, just that sense of things happening at a remove from you.

The morning was one of those rare times where we were not only conscious, but actually did something. We went down to Front Street with the neighbor to do some shopping at St. Lawrence Market, which, I am amazed to realize, has been kicking around in that same spot since 1803. It’s a big ol‘ place, divided into two buildings. The more recent, northern building is the Farmer’s Market where some of the most colorful vegetables I’ve ever seen in my life are sold by farm girls that are as buxom as they overly made up. This is strictly a weekend market, opening way early in the morning and closing in the early afternoon. The south market, which is St. Lawrence proper, has coffee, fish, meat and all kinds of other things in a big, bustling building that has played both jail house and city hall over the course of its life. Many fixin’s were purchased during this run.

However, after that, we did something very uncharacteristic for us. Since the neighbor mentioned that an affluent neighborhood just to the north of our home was having a massive, coordinated yard sale, we took her up on her invitation to wander it. Taking place in the Austin Crescent area. Going there was kind of like walking into the middle of every Hollywood movie that ever featured a “typical, suburban neighborhood” in that the houses–though not mansions–were gorgeous, the inhabitants were affluent, and even the dogs smelled like perfume. It kind of reminded me of what I’d always imagined the rest of Ferris Bueller’s neighborhood would look like.

I did, however, make a couple of surprising finds. It would seem that one of the guys living in the neighborhood is a gamer who has more or less fixated on the Real Time Strategy game Command & Conquer and was saying goodbye to other games he no longer played. I went nuts and immediately picked up these two when I saw them:

Homeworld: Game of the Year Edition

Man, was I ever amazed when I saw this. I first saw this game in Singapore and thought it would make a good gift for a friend of mine over there, so I picked it up and gave it to him for his birthday. We sat, hunkered in his little closet/computer room, smoking cigarettes and thinking, “Hm, not bad graphics,” until the full enormity of the game’s brilliance suddenly hit us with the force of a hammer.

Homeworld is an important game in many ways. It was the first truly beautiful looking Real Time Strategy game ever released, but beyond the graphics, it innovated the genre in many ways, embracing science fiction, taking things to space and actually allowing Z-Axis movement (as in players could send ships north, south, east, west, UP and DOWN), and doing the one thing that Sci-Fi nerds had been clamoring for for years; giving the ability to participate in massive space battles using mixed units of big, hulking capital ships, nimble squads of one man fighters, and throwing in the mix of mid-sized units like frigates and light cruisers. It also did something incredibly brilliant in terms of story-telling; it made you give a damn without ever showing a single face. The plot is pretty interesting; on a small, deserted, hostile world, the inhabitants, coming into technology similar to our own, find something on their satellites buried in their world’s great desert. Going there reveals a vast starship and technology beyond their wildest imaginings, except that it’s all in an ancient language that is the root of their own. They finally realize that they are not native to this world, and use the technology to advance their culture and build a ship capable of traversing star systems and finding their true home. Unfortunately, doing this violates certain conditions of surrender established millennia ago and as payback, their entire planet is purged, leaving only their new mothership, a some thousands of people in cryogenic suspension and boundless rage. The game plays out entirely through the communication exchange between the fleet, and somehow, those faceless characters convey more determination, loss and fear than you’ll normally see in 90% of the games released today. It’s particularly cool that your fleet from mission to mission continues to grow from your existing resources, meaning that if you had one particular cruiser you built at the beginning, that same cruiser–at least if you’re careful–will fight for and with you right to the bitter end. Amazing stuff. A real landmark in the genre.

This particular addition includes a strategy guide and, the happiest of bonuses for me, the soundtrack on CD. And the cost? Five bucks. MAN…

And then there’s this:

When you talk to fans of the Adventure Game genre, there is an argument, akin to Sci-Fi film/TV fans, that will ensue as soon as you try to talk about the best of the best. In SF, this is usually the tired old Star Wars versus Star Trek argument (though anyone remotely sane will tell you this battle has already thoroughly won by Battlestar Galactica) and in Adventure Games, it’s The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango.

This one of those games
I’ve been meaning to play for YEARS. Not only is one of the very best the genre has to offer, it is, with no room for debate, flat out the funniest. Tim Schafer was the man who created this game, though console gamers will probably know him better as the guy that made Psychonauts. This, however, is Schafer at his prime. You play Manny Calavera, one of many “reapers” who’s duty is to visit the newly dead and sell them “travel packages” that can speed their way to their final after-life reward depending on how good they’ve been in life. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long 4 year hike, and the more really killer packages Manny sells (the best being a bullet train that reduces the trip to 9 minutes) the faster he can work of a massive karmic debt he has accrued that prevents him from beginning his own journey.

This is Schafer at his prime. The writing is so smart, so funny and so constant you’d never understand why more wasn’t done with this property. The only downside to finding this game is the fact that it was hell to get up and running because it was designed to run on Windows 95 and Windows XP… did not like it so much. The Wife had to play tech support for a couple of hours tweaking things in Safe Mode and MS-DOS windows to finally get the thing to even install and run properly. But it is a great, GREAT game, and a must own for anybody that thinks games can’t be well written. And the price? Again, five bucks. CAN’T. GO. WRONG.

Damn. Didn’t See That One Coming.

I am now well and truly in full on vampire mode, having gotten out of bed as the sun was almost completely set.

I am also now amazed and somewhat bummed out over the fact that Ron Moore has announced that Battlestar Galactica will–as Edward Olmos hinted–be ending as of the fourth season. This is a bit weird for me since I love the show, but am only half-way done, since I watch the DVD collections rather than the actual broadcast episodes. On the other hand, this is a pretty logical progression since–in novel-like fashion–Moore has been advancing the characters and stories with irreparable changes and the whole “we’re looking for Earth” thing kind of needs to be addressed. Still, better to end it with people loving the show than just let the momentum run out and turn your fans against you, a la the X-Files back in the day. It’s a gutsy move, and I’m really curious to see how this will go, since I had thought they wouldn’t be able to tell the entire tale in four seasons and would need at least a fifth to pull it off.

In other news, the second story for the Liquid City anthology has been done, sent off to the artist and he says he’s going to start on his roughs within a week. What was supposed to be my “easy” 10 page story once again ballooned into something 17 pages in length, but with the artist looking it over, there may be room to cut things down. Man, I remember there was a time when I could actually tell a story in less than 8,000 words, and now I’ve gotten to the point where it’s nearly impossible. How the hell did that happen?

There’s also a little bit of work to be done for IGN, as the editor I was previously in contact with has moved on, and after pitching an idea to the New Guy, he decided to run with it, so I’ve got to start doing some prep work on that. And the last of the articles for GameAxis needs to be put away for the month, so I guess I’d better start tidying that up as well.