Back to work on the game world.

Monday,  July 11th, 2016.

Cute Ottarian Woman.

“Nikki”

One of Doug’s Builder characters had a problem and vanished. When he tried to re-roll her ( he thought she looked more like somebody – a real person – in his life than that actual person does ) He couldn’t get the new version of her right, so he changed the hair colour and messed with the racial morphing sliders and came up with  Nikki – a ‘terminally cute’ Ottarian ( Many Ottarians believe they descended from intelligent Otters. ) ( Others will give that theory ‘lip service’ and look at you like you have to be a moron to believe in such things. )

Close up screen shot of Nikki.

Close up screen shot of Nikki.

Here she is, looking a lot more innocent and sweet than she might really be – Ottarians ( in the game world ) are ‘young spirits’, a lot more intelligent than ‘wise’ very inquisitive – Parents seem to have as much fun as their children while they’re playing together – & They are communal, acquisitive – can’t understand the concept of ‘currency’ – they are fantastic swimmers who love to play in the water for hours – have large families and are Nurturing toward each other and children of all kinds.

— I was very impressed with Doug’s latest ‘creation’ – and spent too many hours trying to get the “speed trees” application to work for me. It crashed on take off too many times.

~~~~~ Jim

Monday, July 11th, 2016

Monday, July 11th, 2016 — 12°C / 52°F – damp and grey outside @ 6:51 am in Atlantic Canada —

Paris from an interesting angle.

Not the colour sky I remember, but this is striking. [ copied & pasted from twitter ]

I haven’t been to Paris in this life time. Many of the photos I see of Paris have either a grey sky, or are shot at night to show off the lights – This shot is interesting.

 

— 24°C / 75°F with the sun still bright in the sky — a lot fewer clouds than this morning — @ 8:06pm —

— Walking the dog this evening. He was a lot more lively than he has been these last couple weeks. But we still had our “Flop & I ain’t goin nowhere!” moments.

Cathi and Jassper up the street.

Cathi and Jassper up the street.

This is Jassper, taking one of his breaks during our exercise walk. I had to come back home to check on something and this is what I saw on my way back to them. They hadn’t gotten far.

Cute little dog with his head through balcony uprights.

“Scamp” – This little guy is the same age as Jassper, and he barks his head off at Jassper whenever he sees him.

Scamp thought I looked like fun, as long as he didn’t have to protect his owner from big, scary looking Jassper. His owner yelled after him, “I keep telling you don’t go near the street!” So I patted his head a couple times and led him back to the small side porch here, where his ‘daddy’ was sitting, enjoying the warm, but not too hot – evening.

Dog sitting near the curb. Cathi trying to encourage him to get up and walk the rest of the way home.

On the way home.

This is Jassper’s idea of a fun walk lately, whether it’s the pain or fatigue, or just plain obstinacy – He plants his bum on the road, or in somebody’s lawn – and doesn’t move until he’s ready. Cathi tried to get a couple photos while he was rolling in someone’s grass with all four legs in the air, looking a lot like horses when they perform similar actions.

Looking toward Canada Street while the sun is thinking about setting.

This is looking down the street toward Canada Street – the kind of shot you take when you’re bored with trying to get the dog to move and think – “hmmm – that just might make an interesting photo —“

And, just to show you how much progress we make when we’re trying to encourage the dog not to stop and smell the roses – um, there aren’t any roses – we have no idea what he wants to stop and sniff at. :

Dog sitting in the road. Cathi giving up trying to motivate him.

This might be ten steps farther down the road on our way home than the previous ‘sit down’.

But – Today Jassper was more energetic than he has been lately. And if only one of us is out walking him, he’s a bear, and often – after we finally convince him to get up and move – he’ll take two steps and flop on the ground and look a combination of ‘tired’ and ‘defiant’.

That’s not our whole day, we sat and twiddled our thumbs waiting for somebody who said he was going to come look at the Jeep and probably buy it – but he never showed up. Maybe Cathi scared him away when she told him her spouse [ me ] thinks we should both be there when he comes.

— sigh? –,

~~~~~ Jim

#BlackLivesMatter

Friday, July 8th, 2016 — 15°C / 59°F – Very Grey & Cloudy — ‘It’ rained earlier in Atlantic Canada @ 12:38 pm — It’s Alex’s Birthday 🙂 —

Very Young Smoke Tree Sapling.

Our happy little Smoke Tree – this morning at about 11:30 Atlantic Time.

If the above “Smoke Tree” sapling was the only ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ in our lives lately we’d probably be a lot more happier and a lot more relaxed.

— I made the mistake of listening to the news last night before I went to bed and tried to sleep.

— After 2 days of young black men being shot and killed by policemen in the country I was born in and grew up in [ one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana – The other in Minnesota ( Just in case you’re reading this in some distant future or purposefully cut yourself off from ‘main stream media’ and never heard of this before right now this minute – ) ] A peaceful demonstration in Dallas, Texas was winding down and people were heading home when at least two ‘snipers’ opened fire and killed at least 5 policemen, wounded at least 6 others and also wounded a couple of civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. One shooter, ‘heavily armed with an assault-type rifle’ & barricaded on the second floor of a parking garage, shouted at police that the end was near and he wanted ‘to kill as many white people as he could, especially cops’. He also told them there were bombs planted all around the building he was in and all around Dallas. So the police tried to talk to him. I believe this ended when an ‘armed robot’ ‘neutralized’ the ‘target’.

— Before I saw video of apprehensive police trying to remain behind cover while they were peering into the parking garage, I saw a very amateur cell phone video of another shooter – this shooter was on the street, standing against a square pillar beneath an overhanging part of another building – at least I don’t think it was the parking garage – This guy knew what he was doing, I believe one commentator said he obviously had combat training. He sprayed a couple bursts of bullets around and then checked his back and looked around, and when he had the attention of several policemen, he began aiming more carefully. We have to take the photographer’s word for the rest of this paragraph – He did not get this on camera: One policeman came up behind the shooter, behind another pillar, moved to where he had a good shot and shot three times, hit the shooter once in the back. The unphased shooter turned and moved. I don’t know whether he feigned in one direction and moved in the other, but he got behind the officer on his blind side and shot him, then stood over the fallen policeman and shot him ‘3 or 4 times’ “Execution Style” And escaped around the corner. He was reportedly captured alive a little later.

— One of the demonstrators who was walking around in ‘camo’ shirt and pants (& I didn’t see his feet) and had what looked like an assault rifle slung over his shoulder, pointed straight down at the sidewalk – had his photo circulated by the Dallas Police as a ‘Person Of Interest’. He reportedly ‘turned himself in’ [ why does no one say, ‘He voluntarily went to the police station’? ] — & The last I heard about him was that he was not a suspect. He was probably a law-abiding citizen, exercising his rights to “Open Carry” – a relatively new law in Texas. I never heard the arguments for and/or against that law before it passed, I am still up here in Canada. – My best guess would be that the Texas Legislature came to the conclusion that law-abiding citizens with ‘Open Carry’ firearms permits would more likely discourage violent criminals from attacking somewhere or someone they most likely believed would be an easy target, someone who could not defend themselves with ‘deadly force’.

— People up here in Canada argue along the lines that they believe they are safer living in a country where it is not very easy for anyone to get a firearm – where almost nobody would be walking around armed and ready to shoot ‘at the drop of a hat’. One person commented, that the shooter who was on the sidewalk and ‘executed the police officer’ most likely was wearing really good body armor – “Yeah, wow, see? Everybody should have access to that kind of stuff – ”  implying, “Then nobody would ever be safe anywhere.”

— This morning I heard on a talk show that originated in Toronto, Ontario, Canada – That a lot of celebrity black people were posting and tweeting #BlackLivesMatter material, some of them short and quick, others longer and with obvious deep thought and level-headed feeling behind them. One commentator wondered why there weren’t a lot of white people talking, posting, tweeting and in other ways communicating that they agree with the idea that “Black Lives Matter”. Canada is not perfect, but it is quite a bit more open-minded about race relations, and doesn’t have the same level of deep undercurrents of white supremacy and racial hatred that I saw, heard and felt, even in New England, where I spent most of my life before I fell in love with a Canadian and moved up here.

— But let me go on record as a ‘white guy’ who believes that Black Lives Matter, as a matter of fact, I believe that All Lives Matter – And I thought that would include everybody – Red, Yellow, Black, Brown, and White humans –  And any grey or green or other colours of the rainbow any human like races we haven’t seen or known about officially and/or unofficially here on planet Earth. & I also firmly believe that non human lives matter too: plants, animals – anything else that might be alive whether we recognize their sentience or not. I might never be able to convince a cat to become a vegetarian, or prove to an alligator that it might be more fun to make friends with any animal (or human?) it sees as a potential lunch than eat it – but I’m serious. All lives matter. This opinion never makes me the most popular person in any group of friends, but I don’t run around screaming or pontificating that I believe that everybody and every thing has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I think I would like to wake up in a universe where everybody has just realized that life would be a lot better for everybody if we all realized that those who believe a different philosophy, are attracted to people and ideas and emotions that ‘we’ can’t understand, embrace or endorse, belong to a religion ‘we’ don’t follow, belong to a race ‘we’ do not belong to, live in a country whose politics seem to be opposite those of ‘our’ country’s — are not a threat to us. — Everybody out there has something to offer that you would probably value if you could see a little deeper beneath the surface of things.

— Right now I’m thinking that if some string pulling, manipulating, evil master mind wanted to create a race war, he [ most likely ‘he’ – or a group of nasty, like-minded ‘he’s ] is moving his plan along rather well this week. Ya think?

— “Love Anyway – “

~~~~~ Jim

And We’re still getting stuff done –

Sunday, July 12th, 2015 -(24˚C / 75˚F – Sunny & Pleasant in the shade, but hot in the sun @ 9:23 am in Atlantic Canada )-

Cathi with a hammer when we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy - err - build next.

Cathi clowning with a hammer Thursday after we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy – err – build next.

— We got a few things done on Friday – I woke up early and felt like doing stuff with our pallets – but I thought the neighbours might not appreciate me banging things apart or swearing at nails that would not let go at 5 am, so I waited for the clock to tick itself into a more reasonable hour.

— Then I discovered that my graphics/workhorse computer was blowing up faster and/or earlier than it was on Thursday. Every little thing I tried to do with blogging or surfing earned me a “Firefox is Not Responding” message. And I’ve got this annoying problem-solving mentality – I have to try o fix things, or at least understand what is going wrong when they’re breaking down. Too many times lately I’m coming to the conclusion that accelerated planned obsolescence is at the bottom of things. (“Grrrrrrrrr-“)

— And Cathi, when she got up, said she was determined to go swimming at least once on her week off, so I finished what should have taken 5 minutes in just under half an hour and we went out, stopped off at a pharmacy with lots of other good things for sale and got an 18 & 1/2 litre jug of spring water for our cooler/dispenser – then went to the Lake, where an awful lot of other people had the same idea Cathi did – She jumped in and out of the lake, swam around a bit, smiled, and decided that under the crowded conditions, that was enough. We stopped off at a hardware store and a dollar store on the way home, got a couple small things and I went back into fix-it mode until I nearly made myself sick not getting anywhere. So I conked out for a couple hours.

— & When I got up again I decided that, instead of making myself sick over the computer’s distress, I’d wander around in a daze trying to un-clutter the ‘office’ here. I found a couple things, like needle-nosed pliers that have been hiding from me for a couple months, lost the bottle of windex about a dozen times and felt like I was getting somewhere.

pallets

This is a ‘Before’ shot, from – I think – last Monday – the 6th – On Thursday we took apart the three-tiered pallet shelving thing, that was probably used for selling plants during the spring -get-your-garden-going- season. What we have in its place are three pallets and some interesting ‘one by somethings’ that would make interesting paneling, or something like that-

— Saturday. I woke up early again and twiddled my thumbs and de-cluttered until around ten a.m., then zoomed off to my favourite hardware & building supply store, bought one 4x4x8 piece of lumber to change a bit of the configuration of the desk I am typing on right now – I’m using my MacBook to write this as the workhorse is still not feeling well. But, anyway – Cathi had been up all night writing and listening to Coast to Coast AM, so I did not make a lot of noise with my power miter saw and let her sleep. And by the time she got up I was falling asleep at the keyboards here, not typing anything worth writing home about, but –  So I needed a nap, and when I opened my eyes it was after 10 pm And there was a nice bowl of spaghetti in the micro wave waiting for me, and it was still almost hot. 🙂

— And then I went down into the basement and cut my pretty new 4×4 into 3 nice, solid legs for this desk here. 🙂 – Worried the cat, I think every time I start building things he’s afraid I’m going to build him a cat prison, or even worse, put up a couple doors where they shouldn’t be, because everybody knows, a closed door is just not acceptable to any cat on this planet.

— I needed Cathi’s help to remove the (temporary for almost 2 years) rolling printer stand out from under the end of the desk while I placed the three new 4×4 legs and let the desktop down to rest on them – &, because the desktop became slightly warped (to match my personality?) (no- because the rolling printer stand was an inch too high) I went and found a piece of thick, healthy cardboard to ‘shim’ one corner of the desk until it warps back into shape.

— And, when the desk was looking better I had to drive Cathi into a worried state as I moved stuff around in the ‘office’ and had to wheel a couple things out and around the corner into the bedroom. She was afraid I wouldn’t get the un-cluttering clutter out of the bedroom before it was time for her to rest and recharge her beautiful self. 🙂 But I somehow, even though I was in the depths of mind numbing what-do-I-do-next syndrome complicated by everywhere-I-look-there’s-something-else-I-should-be-dealing-with syndrome – got things done, and cleared the stuff I had to move into the bedroom for a couple hours out of there amd back into here. So I don’t know – I might have uncluttered about one fourth of this room, at least below the height of five feet – some of the shelves might still be in distress – and I have a lot more to do, like, what the bleep am I going to do with all the books and stuff that should be within reach but this room isn’t big enough??? — Shrug — I took a ‘before’ and a couple ‘during’ snapshots, but we’re not finished, so I can’t post an ‘after’ shot yet –

Dog in a crate in a van whose seats were hiding.

Jassper, deliriously happy, even if he is in a crate, on September 12th, 2013 – When we went to pick him up at the kennel where he had to stay for a couple days while we were moving. Poor dog thought we were sick of him and he would have to spend the rest of his life in a dog jail, unwanted and abandoned. 🙁 – Oh, There was a heck of a downpour just before we went out to pick up the animals. But we couldn’t let that stop us.

So, yeah, the ‘office’ is starting to look like I might yet whip it into shape, even if there is a new obstacle course between me and the door – And I had to deal with pets who were afraid they’d starve to death if I was a couple minutes late in feeding them this morning, so it is now, 11:43 am – 2 hours and twenty minutes after I started this. & It will probably take a couple more minutes to check the spelling and do a bit of proof reading, so, have a wonderful Sunday, both you people who will probably read most of this. 😉

~~~~~ Jim

We Got Stuff Done Yesterday-

Friday, July 10th, 2015 -( 26°C / 79°F with another weather station in town reporting 32°C which would be more like 89.6°F- Sunny and oppresive here in Atlantic Canada @ 3:30 pm )-

Woman posing with hammer and cordless power screwdiver near a project she just saw completed.

Cathi was going to screw four pallets together to build her fenced in compost heap, but the power screwdriver quickly ran out of juice. I came to the rescue with a hammer and some nails, but she deserves credit for this- we had to trim back at least two pallets to get the shorter heights to match, but she found out about people using throw away pallets for all kinds of beautiful and wonderful things. 🙂

Pallets hiding behind steel shed.

We’ve grabbed a few pallets -with the blessings of local businesses- to begin Cathi’s ambitious projects with, not enough to suit me, but enough to worry her that the neighbours might complain about the mess in our yard here. we try to hide most of it behind the steel shed.

— And the internet is giving me doo doo today, so I will keep this short. We got things done and Cathi was happy about that. We have more to do, and today she wants to go jump in a lake. If the 32°C /90°F thermometer is right, she probably has the right idea. 🙂

Woman cleaning up after a bit of work.

We are making progress with taking apart multi pallet units and getting ready to build things.

Rethinking Internet Games

Thursday, July 9th, 2015 -( 18°C / 64°F & Clear & Sunny @ 10:30 am in Atlantic Canada )-

— I’ve been rethinking the value and potential of internet games. Role playing games especially. First Person Shooters never did float my boat.

Cute blond in modest apparel.

Elise, one of the ‘builder’ characters in our game world.

— Back in 1987 or 8, I got my first look at interactive text-based games on GEnie. A close friend was raving about a game she was playing and wanted to show me what it was all about. She went through the process of showing me how to ‘roll’ a character and pick his or her stats, occupation or ‘class’ in a fantasy world that in a text game was entirely in your imagination. Her character popped into that world and an ice hole player with a strong character came along and killed her brand new character with two punches. She was logged out, she didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of the ice hole ( or Troll, as we call them in discussion groups etc, the morons who just want to jump in and stir up trouble and try to make everybody feel like a third or fourth class citizen in a universe ruled by ice holes and jerks who want to dance around and sing ‘I’m number one- you ain’t doo doo-‘.) My friend groaned, “They’re not supposed to do that, they know they’re not supposed to do that. I just might report him, get him barred from the game.” I wasn’t impressed with on-line gaming after that.

— A couple years later, after I had moved back closer to my parents, with my father ailing, then wheel-chair bound – my mother at her wits end from trying to deal with that, and my father’s always abrasive personality – He watched ‘all in the family’ that he called the Archie Bunker Show, and took notes – mental notes – and picked up a lot of put down words and nasty things to call people to their faces and thought that was cool. The same friend who had tried to interest me in playing on-line computer games – when they cost six bucks an hour to play in ‘other than prime time’ – they cost 18 bucks an hour during prime time – drove 250 miles from an inland university town to be around friendly people and interact with somebody she knew wouldn’t try to humiliate her or in any way make her feel uncomfortable about herself in a world where even good-looking young women like her can feel like they’d been born with targets on their hearts and souls and minds, and clouds over their heads radiating “Humiliate me- Make me more miserable than I already am – PLEASE!”

— I don’t think I should go into an explanation that we’d both come from – ‘not quite fully functional’ – families, had one parent each who was at least border line alcoholic – and relatives who would go way out of their way to make us feel less than human any chance they got. But I should say that she was at least as intelligent, imaginative, sensitive and creative as I am, I was really impressed by the way she could sit down, sigh, wrinkle her forehead and gasp through several worried looks as she thought her way through something, gasp or sigh one more time, write out an outline, smile, then go sit down at her computer and write a work of fiction with engaging, believable and likeable characters, follow that outline and get it done. All the time I’d be writing my brains out, not having any idea where my characters were leading me, and having no clue at all whether anybody else in creation would ever want to spend time reading about my characters and the crazy situations they got themselves into.

— And while she was in my old home town, she asked if she could use my computer to check her email a couple of times and came back with an “Oh shit!” To which, of course I replied, “What’s the matter?” And she said, “Roxy’s gonna have her baby tonight and since I’m one of the characters who can’t attack or be attacked by other player’s characters I’m supposed to be there and be on guard against things that go bump in the night-” -or something quite close to that. After I said, “Huh?” She replied, “Oh- this is Dragons Gate- the new game I told you about a couple of times, the one that is so much more fun than that other one I was playing.”

— I think I felt like Steve McQueen in a movie I once saw, who has just heard an explanation for something that could never make any sense to anyone, but he nodded, and said, “Okay, I’ll do it-” And I nodded and said, “I have a modem- you know your account stuff and your password?”

— And my friend was in seventh heaven, I never saw her so animated and full of bliss and ready to party- I mean, she was like a kid at her own birthday party. We got set up with her at my clunky old apple IIe – she was used to a less clunky Mac- and I sat back, somewhat puzzled and a little bit amazed at her transformation, maybe a little bit bedazzled by the power of a computer game.

— I showed her how to start recording everything that happened onto my ridiculous $795.00 – ten megabyte hard drive. She was as animated as a lot of university students might be, if they were watching a really good movie with a room full of friends, maybe slurping down legal or illegal beverages and forgetting their inhibitions bouncing up and down in the chair and going ‘hoot hoot!’ as she typed faster than I ever could.

— She laughed and blushed and beamed and tried to explain everything about every character who was there for this on-line gaming event. She had anecdotes about every character, and each character’s player. She’d been in touch with all of them, some of them over the phone. I think she’d even met one or two in person. And then they got into wandering around the virtual landscape that was all in our imaginations, trying to find just the right spot for Roxy to do her birthing dance. – Roxy’s player was one of the artists who -worked for the brat- behind the scenes at “The Simpsons” and she was fun. She had two other characters who were quite busy in the game and you never could have guessed she played all three. So Roxy found a nice tree or pole to hold on to and do her dance with my friend’s Forest Elf character standing guard and then – “Wooosh!” -A dark cloud, something from a spell came over everything. Nobody could see anything at all – but they could hear Roxy’s voice calling frantically as an impression of dark wings flapped and her voice got further and further away- and when the darkness lifted, Roxy was gone. Everybody there, and in a very short time it seemed that everybody who was playing the game that night, became involved in running all around the known game world, looking for Roxy, Yelling her name- wondering what happened to her. They found her, wounded and delirious in a darkened alley near the centre of town – and no longer pregnant. It felt to me like I’d fallen into a very engaging world where the players drove the story lines and suddenly, the potential here had no limits.

— A couple months later I went to stay with her for a weekend. As we drove around on things no more complicated than me accompanying her on grocery shopping we talked about the game world and the different races the characters could be part of. I jokingly came up with a cat person character named Purcival Alleyscourge. She got a good chuckle, but then later, that evening, she deleted one of her characters that she’d become bored with and rolled up Purrcival Alleyscourge. She was surprised at some high ‘stats’ and chose the recommended ‘Class’ or occupation of ‘Thief’. Still later, when she was tired and I was still much too wide awake, she suggested I get on her computer and wander around the game world as Purrcival. I did. I encountered an evil NPC rogue who jumped out of nowhere and nearly beat Purrcival to death, yelled ‘help’ when a passerby wandered by and that character stepped in and saved Purrcy’s hide. I found out my friend secretly had two accounts, one based on the west coast, where she came from, and one on the east coast, where she was going to school. For the next couple weeks she let me sign in to one account while she was on the other, and we interacted. About a month later she asked me to house sit her apartment while she went to visit her parents for a week and I spent more time as Purrcival and after she came back east I went home and activated my own account at GEnie and rolled up a character or two, and she deleted Purrcival and I rolled him up on my account. Purrcival changed occupations, as some of the cat people he hung out with did not approve of thieves. He made good friends quickly, even fell in love with one character who proposed marriage to him. Since I could not afford to be playing the game during prime time at eighteen bucks an hour, I wrote stories about the characters. And when GEnie held a story writing contest to promote their money-making games, I submitted a couple and won a second and a third prize. The friends I made there back then were very creative types, many of them went on to become paid elders in the game and concocted some of the scenarios – plots that drove the game, one plotted and created a haunted house, wrote all the room descriptions, sent them to the game’s owners and they liked his ideas, ‘built’ the haunted house, and gave him a ‘position’- I’m not sure whether he immediately became one of the paid members of the staff, or got to play for free as long as he contributed designs and plots for scenarios.

— One of the fun things that would happen is when several of us would sign on as soon as the price dropped on the east coast and met in the town square and the ‘psychic’ characters would give those of us whose characters were not psychic the gift of ESP so we could communicate on the PSI channel and not drive the more serious gamers crazy. We could send messages directly from our character to theirs, or broadcast to anyone who had ESP in the game. I jokingly sent silly suggestions to the elders and, one night one of the elders contacted me through the ‘psi-net’ and asked what was happening tonight. I shrugged in real life and said, “Oh- it feels like grumble bunny from hell night around here- but I have to go- catchya later-” & after signing off, I got a call long distance from my friend who could barely contain her laughter, saying that the elders had whipped up a bunch of wimpy characters, with little or no ‘treasure’, called them ‘Grumble Bunnies’ and there was a mass invasion of the town square of these weird creatures whose annoying attacks would cause minor damage, nothing life threatening, but enough to encourage the players characters in the town square to clear the town square of the annoying grumble bunnies. I sent email to the game owners with suggested buildings, suggested new races, and got positive encouragement from the head owner, who said he was looking at giving me some kind of a ‘position’ that might be a free account or even a paid one. So I wandered all around the game, captured every description of every ‘room’ I could. When the elders asked for ‘sign painters’ to paint signs for a number of places around the town square I jumped in, sent them at least sixteen suggestions and was promised a really nifty in-game object with magical abilities attached to it. Then I got laid off from a job I had and couldn’t afford to play any more. And the owner told me that someone he’d given a free account to had ‘burned him’ by playing all the time and did not contribute half of what had been expected of him, so he, the owner, wasn’t going to be giving away any free accounts for a while.

— And now let me get to some kind of point here. Playing that game back then, when it was still in its early development stage, was fun and gave me insights into what kind of on-line games appealed to people. There were more or less two groups of players. There were the finesse players who wanted to develop characters who were unique and had definite personalities, quirks, idiosyncracies, tastes, and in general, gave that world a lot of character and culture. Characters gathered in the town square and told jokes, pretended to get drunk, enjoyed each other’s company- more than two couples I know of met in real life after playing in the game and got married. I know at least one couple is still married.

— Then there were the rabid hackers and slashers. The kind of players who enjoy first person shooters and want to kill everything and everyone in sight. The finesse players would spend hours, weeks, and months developing their characters and the hack and slash trolls would come along and attack and made life so miserable for my friends that they stopped playing that game.

— I remember complaining about something over the ‘Psi-net’ one evening and got the immediate response: “If this game is driving you nuts, why don’t you write your own game?” I was stunned. I started plotting and planning my own game. My rocky experience with employment had me either too exhausted to try to seriously get down and develop my own game or just broke enough so I couldn’t afford whatever new bit of software was required to put something together that anybody else would want to play.

— I wrote a text game in applesoft basic when the program limit was 32k- I could write a character rolling program, link it to an area with six ‘rooms’ give the characters healing skills to heal wounded npcs and sword fighting skills to defend themselves. I could link programs so the characters could go off and defend the world from maintenance robots that some evil genius had programmed to kill anything living, & when ‘killed’- the robots exploded and left something on the ground worth picking up, carrying to the local merchant program where their treasures were sold for silver and gold & and they could buy better weapons. If they wanted, they could go off into six-room wilderness area where they could search for herbs. Good herbs would improve their stats. Bad herbs would reduce them. They had to learn the difference. Or they could go to a one room area where they could become blacksmiths and hammer out weapons with random success, and keep their weapons or sell them to a merchant would appear each time they finished a weapon and offer them something for it. Silver or gold. My nephews, who were six and ten years old at the time loved it. They didn’t realize they were moving from program to program when they moved from one ‘area’ to another.

— Then I learned to program in “C” and instead of 32k programs linked together, I could write 1 Meg programs and link them together. The long version of the character rolling program was 5 programs long, but explained everything about each race they thought they wanted to roll.

— And every time I thought I had something worth showing somebody – The ‘industry’ raised the bar on me to just beyond my reach. One 3D world engine that would work on a Mac or a PC cost $138.00 to buy, and I could mess around with it, but I couldn’t get it to save anything that would consistently work when I tried to open it next time. That company announced their new and improved version, it went on sale for $250.00 when I couldn’t afford that much, and the next time I had two hundred and fifty bucks the price had gone up to $1,000.

— Another game engine was advertised on the web, I went and looked at it, viewed the video propaganda and noticed the price wasn’t listed anywhere. I sent email and a company executive asked me what my budget was like and wouldn’t answer my ‘how much does this cost?’ until I told him I’d been looking at the $1,000 program and he informed me that his company’s game engine cost six figures.

— Then a game engine in a ‘cloud’ came along, got my email address from somewhere and recruited me with a free account because they needed to know how many games could be developed in each server without blowing that server up and causing it to crash. I got busy creating my world, watched it change from my original idea into what their game engine could produce, and I was doing pretty well, until I reached a conclusion that the help I needed from other developers would not be  coming and I couldn’t go any further unless the universe dropped several thousand dollars in my lap.

Builder Character smiling down at us.

“Xyreana”, shown here, is the one builder character / Experiment with facial morphing etc. – who came through the process looking happy. She’s wearing a Bard woman’s bodice and a Wizard’s short skirt, so she looks like any lonely computer nerd’s vision of the woman he might meet in a game who will of course throw herself at him, take him as he is and demand nothing but wild and passionate love from him. But, because I still have to figure out how and why she came out so smilingly happy, I kept her around, anyway.

— And now, in the last couple weeks, the spiffy HP computer I bought specifically to develop the game, because it was fast, had a great graphics card and a poop load of RAM- started crashing whenever I was trying to do anything with graphics – the computer doesn’t care if I write my brains out in Open Office or Word Press – & I can surf ad nauseam, but as soon as I try to do anything that’s heavy into graphics the card has a melt down and the monitors go black and say they are receiving no signal. boom – crash – dead.

— But then, last night – Wednesday Night/Thursday Morning – on Coast to Coast AM they interviewed a guy named Gordon Asher Davidson, who talked about the battle between good and not so good aliens over the future of this planet, Earth – and his take – whether it is poetically true or actual fact-based – was quite uplifting. The evil idjits who have been trying to manipulate us for centuries, if not millenniae – who were responsible for 9-11-2001 and world war two and every divide and conquer manipulation including the re-writing of the Christian Bible to fit into the Romans’ view of how they wished to rule the world- etc. have been removed from power. They still have their human agents in place who are trying their damnedest to hit us with false flag operations, but have not been able to pull off anything really big since the twin towers attack which gave them the atmosphere of terror they wanted in order to convince good old Americans to gleefully surrender loads of constitutional rights and all that under the Homeland Security (Bull Chips!) Banner – And every day more and more of the dark minded bad guys’ shenanigans are being dragged into the light and pretty soon the banksters will be strung up by their private parts in public and stripped of their ill-gotten gains, with – for instance – all the money and resources and basically anything of value that the IMF is trying to steal from everybody, everywhere on the planet, will be going back to the people it was stolen from. The US Government will have to pay back everybody they fleeced with their student loan scams, Banksters will either wake up in jail or in an alternate reality, believing they’re still in control here, until the fruit of their labours turns that reality to a wasteland – Anybody who will not be able to stand the atmosphere of Love and Forgiveness, Peace, Love, Harmony, Evolutionary Giant Steps and all that, will just not be here. So of course somebody who’s been duped by the re-written parts of the Bible had to call up and accuse Gordon of being a liar and an agent of the devil because everybody knows, it will be the good Christians who will be raptured off the planet, not the evil ones who will wake up somewhere else and not know they’re not here, messing with us any more.

— Um, I didn’t get much sleep last night, after a short sleep and a curious dream that my mother fell asleep while my sister, Sharon, and I were doing something together for Mom’s benefit- And then I had to get up, thought about trying something a bit different with my spiffy graphics computer, watched it blow up and crash more quickly than ever, so I sighed and cleaned a little bit of clutter away while I was waiting for the spiffy computer to come back up from its self checking after a crash routines.

— I really felt good about the future. Everything that guy said was resonating as “True” and passing through my not quite perfect B.S. filter – and I went back and thought about everything I’d been trying to do with creating with the goal of running an MMO-RPG world that lived up to the highest of my pretty high standards –  which would mean that the hackers and slashers would have their own island where they could drive each other crazy, and wouldn’t have much fun in the areas where the finesse players wanted to hang out. I built the original game so my nephews could play something they were interested in and didn’t have to kill everything in sight to thrive and advance. I’d ‘created’ wounded Non-Player-Characters who would be nearly dead on a battlefield, where healing characters could come along, heal the wounded, get loads of experience, and when the wounded characters reached an acceptable (to them) level of health, they would sit up, thank the healer, and give them a random weapon or halfway valuable item that the healer could either keep or cash in next time they went to the market or came across a wandering merchant. Several players I talked to loved that idea. The couple of game owners I talked to didn’t want to be bothered, they said they would have to create a whole new class of NPC’s and that would be a pain in the butt. -B.S.-

— But as I thought more about my ideas for that game, the more I felt like I was contributing more to the light side of things than to the dark, and I began to remember the psychics I had met through my job as a video producer for a cable teevee outfit, and how they’d looked like they wanted to roll their eyes and get away from me when I told them I’d been trying to create my interactive computer game – and then they’d look astounded, like they were getting a message from somewhere and turn to me with a new light in their eyes and say, “Yes- that game of yours can be successful, but only if you stick to your original ideas and don’t let anybody talk you into doing it the old ‘tried and tested’ way, which would destroy your basic concept and drag that game down and contribute to the dark side of things.

— So, If the light side of things, the Freedom of Choice and the aliens in the Federation of Light – or whatever – want to help me with this, they know where I am. And if this is something that angels of light and all those agents of God who want to help us silly humans manifest Heaven on Earth – believe is worth completing – a wonderful new computer or a spiffy new (working) video card will almost magically appear here in my slowly becoming uncluttered office.

🙂 — 🙂

~~~~~Jim

 

Both Sides of the Rainbow

Saturday, June 27th, 2015 -( 10°C / 50°F – Sunny & bright with last night’s rain drops evaporating from the fences in our little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 7:00 am )-

— Big news yesterday – The U.S Supreme Court’s decision made gay marriages legal all over the U.S.A.  It’s about time. -No, it’s way past time. Way past time that a critical mass of us saw past the brain-freezing labels and recognized the living, breathing, feeling, loving human beings that some people who want to maintain their delusional power over us have been doing their damnedest to convince us were God-hating monsters, or at the very least, mind numbing statistics.

— I believe I was about twenty one years old when one of my friends sat in my car as I was driving him somewhere and painfully unburdened himself of the fact that he’d realized he was gay. I went into shock. My first reaction was to wonder how the hell I would ever be able to relate to him again. Yup, the rock and roll soundtrack of my life and times was singing, “Oh, my mind keeps going through them changes-” and I spent two or three days with all sorts of thoughts and feelings spinning around and my whole world view went on a roller coaster ride. Then, somehow, I woke up one morning and realized that the universe was still an unimagineably beautiful place. Cool morning breezes could still raise my spirits without warning. My friend had not grown horns and a tail and begun spitting deadly acid or breathing fire on everything that mattered to me. He was still the same person I had grown to like, who could read something I wrote and tell me why it stunk, or just smile and say, “It’s times like this when I know why you’re my favourite writer-” and make me feel like my life actually meant something positive to this world. And basically, maybe most importantly, I knew who I was, and who I lusted after, I knew he wasn’t about to hit me on the head with something and rape me while I was helpless, and I knew I wasn’t going to catch his condition from him. The next time I saw him neither one of us had to spend more than the first minute or two worried that our friendship had imploded. He told me that he chose to ‘come out’ to me first, because he was pretty sure I wouldn’t snap into a psychotic frenzy and kick the living cement out of him or unleash my lightning wit and rip his struggling self-esteem to bits of smouldering cinders with a few deadly words. And he was just the first.

— When I was revamping the web site for friends in the Connecticut Green Party, one ‘heterosexual as all hell’ type activist invited members of a group called “Love makes a family” to one of the local meetings. A couple very normal looking- maybe more attractive than ‘average’- women with no obvious neurotic fear of admitting who they were told us they were lobbying to get the Connecticut Legislature to make it a law that gay and lesbian couples could adopt children, or ‘win’ the custody of children that were biologically theirs from a heterosexual marriage. The green party guy who had invited them to speak to us was a typically messed up victim of PTSD and the US Armed Services, and the VA hospital ‘system’, and his politics were left leaning and he was an outspoken activist for all kinds of human rights, and he was stunned almost speechless when, at the next local meeting, the executive board like members of the green party announced that they had decided that they didn’t want to be seen as hitching their wagon to such a possibly unpopular cause. He gasped, stared at the floor for the rest of the meeting and later looked at me and said, “Well- I actually thought that would be a no-brainer- Ya know – with everything this party stands for-?” and walked away shaking his head and talking to himself.

— And then, we’ll jump forward in time. I had a few health issues, my father, who’d been so healthy as a child that he thought we were faking it when we came down with the measles for crying out loud- who’d been suffering so badly with asthma that he probably developed as a fireman when he pulled dead kids out of burning buildings and dead workers out of toxic chemical pools at the local factory that made brake shoes and donated landfill that the town happily accepted and then bragged that they had the only ‘fire-proof’ streets they knew of- began going downhill faster and faster, his doctors couldn’t take him down off his steroids to give his body the break it needed, and after twenty years of this his heart started failing. He had two heart attacks in three years. The first one earned him a pace maker. The second one killed him. (No, he wasn’t gay, he admitted there was a time when he thought that I might be- which would have shocked the bleep out of me if he’d said anything at the time. He did joke every once in a while that, no, he didn’t want to have anything to do any ‘Homoes’ – and grinned, “Thursday is my day for guys-” ) But after his death, and a couple other shocking deaths. -And a couple of world-view rattling ‘events’ like the attack on the twin towers, which happened fifty miles from my parents’ home, and then the mounting evidence that ‘nine-eleven’ might not have been caused solely by jets flown by terrorists who probably could never have steered the damned jets that accurately at that speed – and then more news about the Oklahoma City, Murrah Federal Building, bombing, where a close family friend’s father’s job took him in and out of that building all day, most days and we held our breath as she kept trying to get through to anybody in Oklahoma City to find out if her father was still alive- or in the hospital with life threatening injuries, or what?- And we found out that -One- nurses in Oklahoma City had treated burn victims, -US Armed Services special forces guys- who had gone into the Murrah Building and removed remote control detonators that hadn’t gone off like they were supposed to, and a few of those did go off, in the soldiers’ hands- And -Two- the US Air Force did a lot of testing with Fertilizer bombs like the one that was supposed to have blown that building apart, and discovered that a fertilizer bomb in a truck out in front of a building could not possibly do the kind of damage that had we saw- And one guy said that Timothy McVeigh, the self-confessed bomber, might not actually have been executed to death. The guy said McVeigh was convinced that his ‘execution’ would be a show, that he’d be revived later and shipped off to somewhere where he would continue to work in covert operations with a real celebrity status and enjoy the hell out of the rest of his life free to blow things up and kill lots of people for fun and profit. — & I have a cousin who lives in Littleton, Colorado, whose two step daughters were high school aged and matched the names of two friends that one hysterical young woman in the first reports we got was screaming might be still inside the school and might be dead- she didn’t know. — We did get through to my cousin right away that day, we got the news almost as fast as they did out there. And the two step daughters went to the other high school in town. — And now there’s speculation that some potential mass killers are given psycho active drugs and deliberately manipulated into their rampages by ‘rogue elements’ connected with government security agencies that want total control over us, and have been working on it since they brought Nazi scientists and devious fascist puppet master types into this ‘great country of ours’ after we ‘won’ world war two. I can’t say that the last ‘scenario’ is as plausible as insiders bringing down the twin towers and blaming it on inept terrorists, and the buildings falling straight down in a manner that seemed impossible – And how about that other building? And where the hell is the evidence that they shipped out of town in a big hurry, and why did they do that, instead of standing there with the ‘smouldering’ gun type evidence? And I can believe that a truck full of fertilizer bombs couldn’t possibly blow the hell out of a building it was parked next to- And the point of this paragraph has nothing to do with equal marriage rights for all – I just want to let you know that the last twenty years rattled my soul with all the power of a psychic atomic bomb going off inside my head.

— But I found Love. Real Love. With a real live human woman, and went through all the hell of becoming a permanent resident and then citizen of Canada to be with her. Compared to the other doo doo I’d been through, the hoops I had to jump through and the -every time we turn around, they want more money, while they won’t let me work, in fact, if they catch me working- they’ll deport me- compared to the conspiracies bringing down buildings and getting draconian laws passed with my freedom loving countrymen not only surrendering their freedom and privacy, but accusing anybody who squawked, or complained that something was not quite above board with that- of being a bleep bleeped terrorist sympathiser – hey, the hoops I had to jump through to live in Canada were a piece of cake.

— But-! The wild and crazy love of my life needed a medical test that needed a trip to a special office in Toronto. And I went with her for moral support- While we were sitting together in the waiting room, waiting for her turn, we were approached by someone we thought had to be another patient, who looked like she could have been either homeless or one step away from something like that. She looked at us and asked, “Are you Christian?” -Trying not to wince, and having a ‘thing’ about telling the truth- I said, “Yes.” This woman nodded and said she was part of some church and she just wanted us to know that all good Christians should be worried that if ‘they’ made gay marriages legal, then the devil will win, we knew that- didn’t we? – But her church was having a campaign and wanted to invite as many good devil hating Christians to come to their meetings as they could – (and she didn’t say a word about trying to get us to voluntarily give up lots of whatever income we might have, but I could imagine that would happen if we’d ever been stupid enough to go to any of their meetings) and she smiled and told us, that (then U.S. President) George W Bush was going to save us, he was on ‘our side’, but they still need as many good Christians to come along and make our voices heard- and she kept smiling a very weird smile, and kept nodding her head, and I got the really creepy feeling that she might have been an actual marionette, with some even creepier ‘individual’ pulling her strings, and the animatronics guys had almost made her look perfectly human and perfectly reasonable.

——— And now, today, with lots of people around the world believing that the U.S. Supreme Court has just made a giant step forward toward world sanity- I can’t get the image of that poor woman out of my mind. Propaganda specialists had worked overtime to convince her that fire-breathing devils would jump up out of the ground and run around stabbing people with pitchforks if ‘the free world’ ever allowed gay marriages to become legal.

——— And that’s just one more weapon in ‘their’ divide and conquer bag of tricks.

— I remember hearing about the ‘Tribulations’ that evangelicals screamed were coming at us. There would be wars and rumors of wars. Best friends would be turning on each other. There’d be earthquakes and starvation and people dying of thirst everywhere. I just never thought that any U.S. Government agency, or its -plausible deniability- ‘rogue agents’ would be behind it.

— So- now what? A lot of good people are celebrating. They have a right to. They’ve always had that God-given right. Now their government agrees with that. But I’m wondering about the poor, manipulated, terrified people whose only ‘crime’ is that they believed what their preachers told them- Are these poor people sitting in a corner? Shaking in their boots? -Terrified, and ready to jump when the wrong person gets up with the wrong message and tries to move them to some kind of insane action?

— How many ‘other shoes are about to drop’?

— Sigh.

— Very soon after I came to Canada, originally as a visitor, my friends in the ‘states’ began telling me that I was in the right place, that things down there were getting crazier all the time. The last couple times we went down there on a visit, we could feel the tension mounting almost as soon as we crossed the border. We have spiritual friends who tell us they can’t watch television news any more if they want to hang onto any measure of peace of mind.

— And in other news, yesterday. They reported that ISIS (which began as a puppet group/spin-off of Al-Qaeda, which was created and guided by the US Central Intelligence Agency —) was probably behind three suicide bombing attacks on three continents. I later thought that maybe I’d missed something because two of those attacks took place in Africa. Maybe somebody blew something up in Asia? or Somewhere else?

——— But at least I can feel good for the people I know and care about who are waving rainbow flags and enjoying a bright moment right now.

———And I’m wondering just how big a stick Teddy Roosevelt would think I should carry around with me.

~~~~~ Jim

 

The University of Dreams

Tuesday, June 23, 2015 -( 11°C / 52°F & ‘overcast’/ kind of grey outside – promising rain? @ 6:10 am in our little corner of this planet, in Atlantic Canada )-

"Alaskan Bush People"

Billy & Ami Brown -center- and family, are the ‘stars’ of a ‘reality’ teevee show on the Discovery Channel.

— I watched two episodes of ‘Alaskan Bush People / Off The Grid’ last night on the discovery channel and thought, “hey, they’re my kind of people.” The program ‘follows’ the family of Billy and Ami Brown, who live on a wilderness island in southern Alaska. The episodes I saw last night were probably from the first year, Matt, the oldest son, was 32 years old, the youngest daughter was twelve years old. In those two episodes they had just built a real house, and were moving into it. The mother, Ami, had contacted an Alaskan Matchmaker – The two oldest sons went out hunting for deer and three other children in their twenties, took a boat ride three hours each way to meet another family and barter for egg laying chickens. The son who calls himself ‘Bear’ met someone and went on the first date he’d ever been on after talking with the woman on the phone and admitting he could count the times he’d talked on a phone on one hand. He kind of freaked his date out by climbing a tree and inviting her to join him. The brother who shot the deer goes by the name of ‘Bam Bam’. Yes they’re ‘quirky’, but my sister, my mother and a couple nephews live in North Pole, Alaska, I spent three months up there, and the Brown family look like people who would fit right in up there. I thought they came across as genuine.

— Overnight, I dreamed I was attending classes in a school for adult writers, & another adult writer wanted to go and have coffee somewhere and talk about writing. I woke up wanting to jump right into writing before I lost details of the dream et cetera.

— This morning I went looking for information about the television program, discovered that law enforcement types are going after them for something. The photo above is from that article, which I found at { Link —> } http://www.rantlifestyle.com/2014/10/23/stars-of-alaskan-bush-people-back-on-grid-after-grand-jury-indictment/. There is a bit of name calling and posturing by people in a blog responding to the short article linked above. I’m reserving judgment, and will be trying to connect with the article’s author on twitter when I finish here.

~~~~~ Jim

Children’s Rights

Children’s Bill Of Rights and Privileges?  — Rough Draft? —

— Um, should this be part one in a many part declaration? —

1. All Children should have the right not to be bullied, brow beaten, tortured or humiliated at school, anywhere in public and in the supposed safety and privacy of their own home. They should not face physical, psychological, emotional, social or any other form of harm at the hands of their classmates, teachers, parents, religious ‘leaders’, political groups, sports teams or organizations, coaches, or anyone else for that matter. This might be tough to enforce. Parents might always believe they have the right to punish their children and they might not realize that what they believe in is not right for their children, or that what might be perfectly good for one child might not be good at all for another. We have to bring personality theory and other extenuating factors into this. Like, what if Albert Einstein’s father had him beaten half to death every other day because the father wanted his son to be a good little military soldier and never have an original thought in his life?

~~~~~ Jim

Optimism will not be dashed by a little bit of Rain –

Friday, June 19, 2015 -( 12°C / 54°F & raining @ 8:09 am in our little corner of Atlantic Canada && I think today might be my ex-next door neighbor Kyle’s birthday, and maybe Rachel, who lived behind both of us’s birthday too? )-

Jassper in his younger days.

Jassper le Boof at the gate we put up to keep him from running downstairs and disturbing Domino in the place we lived in before we moved here. He was probably between six months and a year old in this photo, still a bit gangly. But he was practicing his sensitive look.

— Okay, it’s a rainy morning. The cat had a lot to complain about in fairly long sentences, something like, “Arra mungah rungah wungah muhng muh!” And if I ever figure out what that means, I’ll be the first to tell you.

— It took almost all afternoon yesterday to back up and update one instance of WordPress here. But I backed up one whole site in the process and it might take considerably less time to update the three or four others.

— And once again, the Troggs are singing in my head, they’ve gotten a couple verses I didn’t hear yesterday or the day before into the mix.

— Canada is moving toward a Federal election which will happen sometime between now and October 19th? Unlike the USA, they don’t always know when the next election might be up here, could be anything from a month to five years after the previous federal election. And the Prime Minister does not run separately from everybody else. The leader of the party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons becomes the Prime Minister. If the winning party does not have 51% plus seats in the House of Commons they will call that a Minority Government. They do not need to form coalition governments to achieve the 51% plus mark. But- If one party wins, say, 34% of the seats and two others win 30% each with maybe the Green Party and the Parti Quebequois and some Weird Obscure Party winning the remaining seats, the two parties that make up 60% of the seats between them can form a coalition government and ‘rule’ together until things fall apart and they dissolve Parliament and call an election in about 30 days from the day that Parliament dissolves. I thought this would be the case more often than not before I came up here, I believe that’s the model in many European countries — somebody has to form a coalition that includes 50% + 1 of the seats in any given Parliament or it’s back to the polling booths? Nope, not here. If the gang with 34% in the above example gets away with it, they form what is called a ‘Minority Government’ and they have to tip toe around their rivals and play nice or face a ‘No Confidence Vote’ and if they loose, it’s time to dissolve Parliament and set elections for 30 days or so. That’s pretty confusing for somebody who was used to seeing everyone in the House of Representatives And 1/3 of the Senate up for election every two years and the President and Vice President running on the same ticket together joining them every 4 years. Senators in the USA have 6 year terms with roughly a third of them running for re-election every two years.

— Okay, so if you’re not confused enough, let me go on here- In Canada, the Senate, which is supposedly the upper ‘House of Sober Thought’ if full of people who never ran for that office. Senators are appointed by the Prime Minister. So what they’ve got now is a highly partisan wrangling committee and screaming society with those aligned with the current Prime Minister fiercely clinging to party lines and trying to out shout and out manipulate the opposition. Right now there are quite a few Senators who were appointed by the ‘sitting’ Conservatives and several others who were appointed by the Liberals, who were in charge before the Conservatives began winning minority governments and then a majority government. Those Liberals have been disenfranchised by the current head of the Liberal Party. The Conservatives ran with ‘Getting Rid of the Senate’ as part of their platform for years, until they were in the majority, and then padded the Senate with as many ‘Yes Men & Women’ as they could, and the fit hit the shan and they’re trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. The New Democratic Party (‘NDP’) is now saying they should do away with the Senate altogether. The trouble is, all the Provinces would have to agree 100% with that idea and they’d have to rewrite at least part of the Constitution to do that.

— Some voices in Canadian Politix are saying that it might be more likely that they might somehow find a way to change the Senate, to try to get it back to being what it was supposed to be and what it might actually have been, sometime in the past, the upper house of sober second thought. I remember learning about checks and balances in high school and junior high school and I think I believe that a Senate that has to agree with a lower house to approve any bill that might make it into a law of the land is probably a much better idea than having a lower house full of puppets pushing everything through that the sitting Prime Minister wants and the Prime Minister smiling and claiming to the world that he has a mandate to push his agenda down the throats of everybody in ‘his’ (or her?) land- whether they voted for his party or not, whether that law is a good idea for the greater good of everybody involved, or as is happening these days with a micro-managing manipulative slimy ice hole as Prime Minister – serves the greater good of the 1% richest ice-holes in the land and pushes everybody else closer and closer to economic and social slavery.

— Schnarr!

— And of course there are a few details that I didn’t have time to add to this confusion, but you’re already rolling your eyes and thinking it would much more fun to go get drunk or high and find somebody to have a nice sexual encounter with, so I’ll end this here.

— Congratulations, you’ve made it through another one of my Posts here. [ Insert weird smiley face of your choice in this space, you deserve it. ]

~~~~~ Jim