works of wanderlust

Month: June 2025

  • on writing absurdity

    How does one write for absurdity?  After all, what is the absurd. The unexpectedly humourous. The weird confluence of ideas, people, situations and object that don’t normally belong together? Or more than that, shouldn’t belong together.  Things that clash in their purpose. How does one pull from a rational brain ideas that align with the notion of absurdity, might be the bigger and more important question?

    An example might help.

    That is to say, here I’m sitting at a Starbucks and writing out on the patio. Nothing about that situation is absurd. In fact it is quite mundane. Coffee. Patio table. Sunshine. People gathered and enjoying their drinks. Me with a keyboard.  That is a situation that is in itself complete mundane.

    What would make this situation absurd?  How many elements of it would need to change to create a humourous contrast. Changing something might make it just silly or funny, say. For example, a cafe like this where the barista is a dog is silly. Or  maybe patio where there were preposterously small tables might lean towards the absurd, but it is mostly again just silly and impractical.

    I think there is an aspect of the absurd where the end result of the situation is, yes, important, but also the logic behind how we got to that point that makes it go beyond the silly and drift more into absurdity.  Cause and effect. We see the effect and then are captivated by the odd sort of logic that brought us there.

    So again, back to the silly examples. A barista who is a dog is silly. A barista who is a dog because the dog isn’t really a dog but a shapeshifting robot who is stuck in the form of a dog is kind of strange. A shapeshifting robot barista stuck in the form of a dog because a software update sent out from a megacorporation who misread and misinterpretted a sarcastic customer review and decided by committee that what all customers wanted was baristas who looked liked dogs—that is starting to become absurd.  It’s baked into the explanation.  

    Likewise, a cafe patio with small tables is akward, but if those tables are small because of some middling store manager who beleives that small tables are fashionable and kind of trendy, that’s silly. If the manager is also bad at math and then orders tables that are ridiculously small, to the point that they are essentially barely wide enough to hold a single cup of coffee balanced on the end of a thin table leg and that he has ordered these at great expense and unmasked embarassment but cannot get rid of them because he would need to admit his error, risk losing his job and thinks he would look a worse fool than he already does, so everyone is forced to pretend and justify that these useless tables are deliberate and great—that starts to get absurd.

    Absurdity is an elusive thing, I think.  One of my great role models, Douglas Adams was seemingly great at the absurd, but one immediately assumes that his greatest examples of absurdity were accidents or rolled effortlessly onto the page. In fact, one can kind of tell that he was building absurdity into his everyday experience, picking out weirdness from the mundane by just asking “what if—“

    What if this was slightly and weirdly different, why would that have happened, and what if people tried to pretend it was a completely normal thing to have happened?

  • war of the ants

    I really do hate using my entymology powers for evil.

    Yet, I have been waging a war out my front door on an ant colony as they wreck havoc upon a beautiful and otherwise-thriving plum tree I’ve been trying to grow in my front yard.

    Let’s back up.

    We’ve been in our house for twenty years, and one would assume that roughly nineteen years since completing the landscaping around that new-build home we should have had time to grow a maginificent tree of some sort in the front yard.

    Most of our neighbours have trees that tower as tall as or much taller than their roof lines, granting shade and a sense of maturity to the property.

    My tree is only about two meters tall, spindly and could use another decade before I consider it a success. Why? Because it is the third tree I’ve attempted to grow in that spot. The previous two perished because of, frankly and humbly, my presumptions about my own ability to thwart the climate in which I live—and too, that Home Depot is an asshoel for selling trees to people who don’t check closely enough these things in their local nurseries that are not rated for our climate zone.

    On about six year cycles I’ve had to replant, tend, try to rescue, and eventually remove the two previous attempts at a front yard tree. And most recently, in 2020 (I remember this because it was in the peak of the pandemic’s first summer) I found a plum tree in a pot, ready for transplant, similar if not identical to the one thriving in my neighbours backyard, rated for our climate zone, and I bought it and planted it in the hole from which I’d just dug the remains of the last stump.

    Fast forward to twenty-twenty five and past four bitter winters and a couple years of light but successful plum harvests from this young tree… and to me noticing that a lot of the leaves were curling up this year and—oh shit—the ants, I suspect a species likely lasius neoniger, had infested it and had built some kind of critter farm filled with hungry little insects and webby, silky, munching aphids turning entire branches into a tree apocalypse affecting about a third of the host organism. They were killing my third tree. 

    Here we go again.

    Or…

    My last week has been spent trying to rout the invasion.

    Diatomacious earth powdered upon the ground.

    Insecticides on the leaves to curb the livestock explosion.

    Bait traps seeded around the colony in hopes of poisoning the queen.

    And, most rudimentary, spirals of sticky tape twisted around the trunk face out to capture hundreds of drone workers and glue them to their doom. 

    I studied entomology in university. I often tell people it was an unofficial minor in my science degree—unofficial because I never took the time to declare it—and I could have, should have gone on to do something with that because I love insects, particularly the eusocial ones like ants who I used to rave to anyone who would listen about the fascinating properties of ants who did agriculture. 

    I mean, I just don’t want it in my tree, in my front yard, wrecking my stuff. A bit nimby of me, sure, but I’ve got property values to think of, right? And, I mean, what a waste.

    So I sit here writing this, drinking my coffee, and thinking with the backburner thoughts of a guy preoccupied by a problem what my next move in the battle is going to be.

    Those ants outnumber me for sure, but I won’t let them outsmart me.

  • media: andor, season one

    Oh, just what the internet ordered: some more commentary on Star Wars.

    To be honest, my relationship with this franchise is certifiably bipolar. Up, down, deep, shallow, love it, hate it, roll my eyes at the wonderful blur of a galaxy far, far away. I mean, if there was some kind of independent adjudication of fan-ness in the Star Wars media landscape I wouldn’t be anywhere near the top, but I’d probably have a ranking.

    I am told in a tale perhaps apocryphal, that I attended a screening of the original in 1977 at a drive in movie theatre, asleep as an infant in the back of the car.

    I have watched the films, read the books, played the games, absorbed the lore, studied the history, run the themed race, ridden the rides, toured the studio, bought the merch, and drank the star wars kool-aid in big gulps.

    But ever since Disney bought the whole thing… I get it. You’ve heard this story before. Everyone complains: Disney borked it, right? Yeah… no… maybe… kinda… sorta… what does that even mean?

    I remember walking through the queue to Star Tours in Disneyland last summer and feeling this sense of vague disconcert. There was this sense that as fun as the ride was, as immersive as the queue was built, that there was a vibe that whoever had built this thing, well, they just didn’t get it.

    Here’s my point and I’ll move onto the review: you’re in the queue to Star Tours, boarding a fictional vacation trip, and one of the destinations advertised is Tatooine. This is the case because you’re supposed to be excited about visiting something from the universe of Star Wars, but if you were in the world of Star Wars, as a character with agency and thought and free will, you would avoid Tatooine at all costs. It is a truck stop in a backwater in the middle of lawless nowhere. You would never in a million years book a vacation there. That’s the whole point. It’s like seeing an advertisement for the industrial area behind the airport suggesting you could go visit the shitty bar by the gas station and bet on the dog fights in the back alley. Why the hell, in universe, would there be a tourist cruise headed there?

    Because. Simply. Tatooine is intellectual property and most people legitimately don’t look beyond the “gee whiz I saw that on thuh teevee…” so it sells just fine in Disneyland.

    And that vibe is where my frustration with modern Disney-owned Star Wars has tended to exist for the last few years: it’s all just intellectual property being shuffled into disconcerting new recipes that make no real sense and have no real sense of the stakes of this universe. It’s all pretty much been a low-thought, gee whiz theme park ride, particularly a lot of the new limited run series on Disney Plus.

    In other words, it took a great deal of contrary information suggesting that Andor was something that rose above this dreck, or at least aspired to lift itself out of the gee whiz-ness of the intellectual property churn factory built by Disney over the last decade to make me want to actually commit about ten hours to watch it.

    But we did.

    We finished watching the first season this past weekend… and I will suggest that if nothing else it has tried and almost certainly done a reasonably good job of building something fresh from the universe, adding to the story rather than blithely churning intellectual property and recycling the old pulp of the films. Sure, it leverages and contributes to the structure of the broader story, but it risked something bigger, created stakes, incited emotion and felt more real than the manufactured backstories that have populated my overpriced streaming subscription lately. It wasn’t perfect. There was some inconsistencies and a few tourist glances towards Star Wars Land TM. Yet, it was compelling and we wanted to keep watching, to see what happened, and you started to care about all the characters, even some of the terrible evil ones. No, not perfect, but pretty good.

    And if nothing else, it hardly ever felt like a sightseeing tourist vacation to a truck stop by the airport.

  • game: civilization seven

    Would you say that I got this game for free?

    I mean, I didn’t pay for it. I ordered it using points. AirMiles(TM). So it wasn’t strictly free because, I mean, those points have a kind of real and tangible value, but they are not money in the sense that I could buy anything but whatever random crap is listed on their catalog on any given day. I didn’t pay for the game, I guess is what I’m saying, and using points made it feel like something I got for free (even though I didn’t really, I suppose) and I mention it because I’m still very torn on how I feel about this latest insallment in the Civilization series inasmuch as I’m feeling pretty smug about not having spent real cash on the game.

    I’ve been playing Civilization VII.

    And shortly before that I had been playing Civilization 6, which was both a mature game which had been tweaked and refined and bug-squashed long since, and which I picked up up for literally a few bucks on a big digital sale lowering the stakes dramatically for what turned out to be an excellent purchase and investment of my gaming time.

    And? Before that I’ve played every other installment of this game going back to the original in the 90s. 

    All this is just me setting the stage and suggesting my bonafides when it comes to a player of this particular game series and type.

    If you’ve never played a “Civ” game let me elaborate as best as I can bring it down: It’s like a big game of Risk on a huge interactive video game map of a randomly generated world—except rather than just rolling dice and moving armies you need to build the cities and grow the economies to raise and support those armies, ensure that they have resources to fight, negotiate diplomacy with other societies, fend off natural disasters, counter religious uprisings, research and build new technologies and so on and on and on into a kind of complexity that is hard to explain in a single paragraph.

    Look up 4X games which stands for eXplore, eXpland, eXploit, and eXterminate, and which in a vague sort of way truly summarizes the core of the gameplay.

    I play Civilization and have played it for pretty much my entire adult gaming life as a kind of slow, serious, strategic gamer’s pursuit. Civilization is like the chess of the video game world: that is to say a lot of people take it serious as f. 

    So it is a big deal when a new installment ships. Civilization VII shipped just a few months ago in early 2025 and generally—well—people hate it, frankly.

    Personally I’m torn.

    Here’s the thing about that. I play it with seriousness, but I am not serious about the game. I just dabble in seriousness, and in saying that my stake in the game is not about the fine-tuned mechanics of a elaborate and complex simulator leveraging the raw strategy of a well-honed plan of tactical gamers pursuit vibes. I’m just playing to go with the flow. I don’t just click and click and click some more. I think about my moves, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that on a scale of hard-core Civ-ness, I’m like a 4 out of 10.

    I’ve played three games of Civilization VII since I got it for not-exactly-free from my reward points, such a middle aged dad thing to do by the way, ordering video games on a physical disc using your airline rewards, and three games in I’m like… hmm… uh… yeah. It’s… okay. I mean, I like the innovative thinking. I like that game companies are trying new things. I like that this is more than just an updated graphics engine smeared over the old engine. It is a new approach, and that is a awesome and we should all celebrate risk taken in the name of advancing new ideas and updates.

    But there is a hitch—and an itch I can’t quite scratch.

    The game is—I dunno—bumbling. 

    There is just something about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s as if the game is simultaneously too complex for its own good and yet insufficiently rigourous in allowing the player to control all that complexity. There is stuff that happens, automatically, behind the curtain, out of sight, that I just simply don’t understand as I’m playing. And I write this not as a good veil-of-war kind of sense where such secrecy promotes strategic play: I say in the sense of it sometimes feels, just feels, like the game is playing itself and that I am reduced to little more than button mashing the turn meter forward. It just bumbles along, tap, tap, tap, bumble, tap, tap, tap, bumble—and I’m left thinking, like, am I playing this or watching it play?  And that is the type of game that leaves you with a kind of vague emptiness when you’ve progressed far enough along.

    It likely doesn’t help that I’m playing this on Playstation, to be honest. On a desktop I assume I’d do more mouse-hovering and poking around the UI to see what I was missing, read the help tips, or something. So is it a UI issue or a game issue or a hand-holding issue or—I don’t even know what is bugging me. But as it stands, I got the PS5 version with points not the other one, so that’s what I have been playing.

    Or should I say watching?

    And even though I write all this I still want it to be good. Maybe I write all this because I want it to be good. This is a beloved franchise. This is a piece of my gaming persona.  This is my chess. 

    I’m just torn on if I like it or not—and actually a little bit glad I didn’t really pay for it, either.

  • weekend wrap seven

    There was a taste of smoke in the air all weekend. It has been hot and dry and the province is burning all over the place. You could barely open the window without catching a whiff of char outside. 

    This past weekend looked something like…

    Fridey evening we multi-car-tripped over to the high school for the Kid’s final improv club home show. It was sparsely attended because of the hockey playoffs, but the parents who were there were definitely lamenting the end of an era in our offspring’s theatre careers. 

    The Kid herself bundled up in a van with a few of her friends right from the high school parking lot and dashed off to the wilderness for a weekend of post-graduation camping and river tubing, leaving her poor parents with a taste of imminent empty nest syndrome.

    We filled our Saturday with some errands, making one of our rare trips over to West Edmonton Mall for some light shopping and then down to Burbon Street and into an excellent taco restaurant for lunch. The made-table-side guac  was divine.

    Somewhere in the mix we walked over to the local cafe for chai lattes, but mostly we chilled and napped and chilled some more for the rest of the day—and wrapped up season one of a show we’ve been watching before basically falling asleep on the couch.

    Sunday morning I joined the usual run routine, logging not quite eight klicks in the fire smokey air, and joining the crew for coffee afterwards.

    I did a bit of yard work, watered a few things after a week of rainless skies, and set up in my chair in the shade to read for about an hour.

    Then we dodged off to a local pizza place. Annually on June 8 we celebrate the move-in anniversary to our house—a day on which we ate our first meal of a communal pizza delivered there with all the folks who helped us move in—by eating pizza. Sunday was the twentieth anniversary of that move-in, so we got some classy pizza at the place over in the strip mall by the grocery store.

    I spent the rest of the evening fighting ants that have laid claim to the plum tree in my front yard and who are starting to do actually noticable damage. It might be a losing battle, but I know better than to give up on day one—even though the flower bed fought back and gave me a splinter in my heel. Serves me right, I suppose, for going to war in bare feet.