Tag: retrospect

Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Mediums, Genres, and Making Choices

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Going to the Steam on Queen Fair on Saturday made me think about some things. And despite the adage that if there aren’t photos it didn’t happen, I was there. There were booths with various things: including a squid-headed cane (which I still insist was Cthulhu without his batwings), a decoration of a spider made out of metal parts, some vintage-looking ray guns, and so on.

What really got me–though–were the costumes. Some people really got into the spirit of the thing in an insane way: with women in elaborate bodice-dresses, hats and coiffed hair, men in suits, and people even wearing turn of the twentieth century summer dresses, bowler hats and suits that looked more at home in the Prince Edward Island of Anne of Green Gables and Road to Avonlea than twenty-first century Toronto. Add some clock-work props and Steampunk aesthetics and you pretty much see what you get. It was like going into a time-warp.

The event took place at the Campbell House off Osgoode Station and it was like being in a shady verdant bubble of alternate Steam Age reality while being surrounded by a busy and summery contemporary world. The inside of the house had various Steampunk exhibits: one drawing room looking like a makeshift Victorian workshop and laboratory while outside were singers and even a bawdy dance or two. But one group of people that really caught my interest were two women sitting on a blanket in the grass dressed as though they came from Avonlea: The Lost Ladies of Zion Schoolhouse.

These lovely and adorable ladies–having found themselves lost from 1910–are on a quest to find their way back to it again. They also represent the Gibson House Museum and Zion Schoolhouse which hosts birthdays, historic dinners and special theatre events using said “costumed” interpreters to immerse people into a Victorian-Edwardian frame of mind.

But after going to this Fair, I started thinking about Steampunk: as well as more pesky considerations of how to view a medium’s growing complexity. Steampunk is a science-fictional genre–with consequent costume aesthetics–that generally operates from an alternate nineteenth to early twentieth century that utilizes the power of Steam in its day-to-day technology. Yet I have always felt it was more than that. I always believed that Steampunk hearkens back to that old Victorian utopian mindset of Science being a power of benevolence and constant progress. You can see it in a lot of Victorian literature and media of that time. Yes, in the genre there are people who use Science and Steam Age technology for evil, but they are always countered by “the good guys.” There is swashbuckling, an ideal of honour, and a lot of anachronistic versions of modern technology powered by steam and sometimes–if it is very special–there is still magic and the supernatural coexisting alongside all of this as well.

It seems a sunnier world, doesn’t it, or at least the conception I’m talking about. I have a friend who thinks Steampunk is all about the costumes now and a certain kind of elitism: which I think is hilarious seeing where it derives itself from historically and culturally. But on Saturday, all I saw was people having fun and one can never get tired of seeing that. I also think that Steampunk is our time’s way of creating a genre–a sort of retroactive genre–of an alternate form of progress where Science and Adventure are still seen as these great forces with good intentions.

Because of course you have Steampunk’s alternate: Cyberpunk. If Steampunk is an attempt at utopian fiction, Cyberpunk is dystopian. It is a world where generally technology and science have invaded the lives of its people to an insane degree. These worlds are generally polluted and corruption is everywhere and no one of authority can be trusted. There generally aren’t “good guys” in the traditional sense, but there are definitely survivors. I think that for a time we leaned more towards Cyberpunk because it was exemplifying just what our world was turning into. I also think Steampunk was a reaction to that dark mindset: because while Cyberpunk seems to talk about where we are heading, Steampunk seems to be a deceptively nostalgic genre that talks about what could have been … and yet by doing so, it encourages what could be too.

These are both obviously generalizations. It is tempting to get caught up in them. For instance, there are some historians that say that the Western world’s general optimism about Science and progress was ultimately destroyed at the advent of World War I: when that same knowledge that should have helped people was used to destroy and degrade them instead. It is tempting–at least for me–to wonder if there would have been a World War in an alternate Steam Age. Of course, there could have been: just with different tools because human beings do not change that much with different technology.

But I sometimes wonder what our world would have been like without World War I. What would have happened if those generations of young soldiers hadn’t died? Or what would have happened if the Holocaust had never occurred? Who would they have become? What would our world have been like?

You see how tempting those lines of thought are. I guess you could say: “Okay Matthew, maybe you should write a book or story about that or something instead making these suppositions,” and I’d say sure: when I am more qualified or there is an angle that catches my mind and I can build on with the knowledge that I have.

I’m also tempted to talk about Dieselpunk: about a genre (some say a sub-genre of Cyberpunk) that has 1950s technology and a 1920s or 30s culture. You can definitely find influences from Steampunk and Cyberpunk: save that it is a genre that centres around the internal combustion engine, diesel fuel, and the discovery of nuclear power while computers and the Internet are not quite there yet. I believe it is still a contested or developing genre and subgenre and I find it amazing just what can actually be classified under it. It is a genre I am really interested in and I think I can relate to a lot more because it is closer to our world and time-line in a less nostalgic way. Of course, there are a lot of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon moments in this genre as well: as exemplified by Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Hell, you can even say that Captain America and the Hulk are some examples of Dieselpunk superheroes if you’d like: with the retro-50s aesthetics, science-fiction serial feel, mentality as well.

And here I go on a tangent again. As I was thinking about all of this, I started thinking back to what I said about video games–about how mediums can turn into genres–and I began to ask myself this question: what does it mean when a medium can turn into a genre? What does that mean? And I think that if I had to give a one-word answer, it would be choice.

I think that when you can choose to go beyond the technical and ideological aspects of a medium–of what you can materially and creatively do–then you can create a genre or something that defies genre entirely. When you have the options, or make the options to do something different with a familiar convention, when can choose to do so, that is the moment when everything changes and variances can be made. It’s about there being an option and therefore being able to make a creative choice.

Because, in the end, that is what being creative is about. It’s about making choices and knowing that we can always do so: whether you want to dress like a grease-monkey, wear a soldier’s uniform with a clock-work eye, look like a hacker, draw it, or write about all of it.

I think I’m going to let the “Lost Ladies” end this entry off. Though I imagine it to be somewhat frightfully inconvenient to become lost from your own time period, there is just something encouraging to see them making do with their picnic basket and afternoon tea. If only getting lost in time were that convenient and pleasant. Say your hellos, ladies and gentlemen.

Fire Emblem Blazing Sword, Games as Silent Dramas, and the Tragedy of Kishuna

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

During the last years of my Undergrad, I bought two used games (and no, this is not the beginnings of a creepypasta): Final Fantasy I and II and Fire Emblem. I got through the first part of Final Fantasy pretty easily and then the until part held no more interest for me. It was too simplified and hadn’t yet reached that point of complex plots, captivating character development, and entertaining gameplay. So then I started playing Fire Emblem Blazing Sword.

I have to say: I was astounded. Up until that point I’d never found a strategy RPG more captivating, more fun, more incredibly frustrating to the point of me throwing it across the room than Fire Emblem. Up until this point I’d thought that there were no other games aside from Final Fantasy that had that combination of complex characters and fun gameplay. But it was the characters and the extra content that intrigued me the most.

And so today, I am going to talk about a character that doesn’t get mentioned a lot in the game or anywhere outside of the Fire Emblem Wiki site. I am going to talk about Kishuna.

Who is Kishuna? And this where we get into a bit of spoiler territory. When you first run into Kishuna in Fire Emblem, he comes unannounced and unexpected. He is a red-robed being whose very thin and pale face is covered by a hood. Kishuna is accompanied by a group of very immensely powerful Morphs–mystically artificial beings that you encounter more and more as the game progresses–and they are hard to kill. Another thing you need to know about Kishuna himself is that he doesn’t attack you. No. But his mere presence–his aura–is powerful enough to neutralize all of your offensive and healing magic. So as long as you are in the blocks affected by his red aura, you can’t use your magic at all. He is called a “Magic Seal” for that reason.

So Kishuna–who is an enemy–arrives to mess up another enemy’s plans: the enemy you have to defeat. I can only conjecture that he is there out of pure spite: because he pretty much hates everyone for what happened to him. So, you can kill him with conventional weapons: however, he is very hard to hit and your speed and accuracy has to be exceptional to do so. If you do manage to kill him after some considerable effort in the protagonist Eliwood’s Chapter, he dies and that is the end of him. But if you are playing Hector’s Chapter, that is a whole other story: a whole other story indeed.

I won’t go into any more particulars about game-play requirements to do all of this. You can find all of this stuff pretty much here. As you come to the Nabata Desert, you see Kishuna again in an underground complex. The screen transitions into a flashback of a blurred naked spindly pale being in a magic circle standing in front of Nergal: the main antagonist of this game. Nergal created Kishuna as an experiment to see if he could make an alchemical being with emotions. The screen transitions back to Kishuna–surrounded by an army of his elite Morphs–and his only dialogue just as it was in the previous time you met him is, “…”

When you come to him here, you sense a lot of hostility and anger. But then if you beat him he seems to die again. If you are doing things properly, towards the end of the game you will encounter Kishuna one more time. He is in another set of underground ruins and he is having a flashback of Nergal coldly and callously rejecting him: telling him he was a mistake and that he should go and rot somewhere for all he cares. All Kishuna ever says as the flashback transitions away is, “…”

As you go towards him, you have a character in your group–the same one who sensed him earlier–who detects him again but also feels from him loneliness and intense sadness. After you kill his Morphs–and I always wondered where he got those Morphs from since he was a reject: I assume he either made them himself or they were more rejected Morphs from Nergal that he just gathered together in silent, resentful company beneath the bowels of the world–you have to kill him.

Your characters never learn Kishuna’s name or even know what he is. He never speaks. And at the end, when you finally kill him, it’s almost like he has just given up. It’s as though the failed Morph wants to die.

I don’t think I ever felt so … sorry for a fictional non-player character until this point. Imagine a being who was made as an experiment–with feelings–who is abandoned and then meditates on his creator’s abandonment of him for what seems to be centuries. Each flashback and transition shows this sprite meditating on the futility and loneliness of his existence. But that is only one aspect of the tragedy of Kishuna.

You see, assuming you did everything right game mechanics-wise, by encountering Kishuna in these ways you also unlock Nergal’s back story. You find out more about the Dark Druid: that he really had been a good man once and the road to hell for him had been paved with good intentions. In that first flashback with him and Kishuna, Nergal seems less hostile towards his creation–having just made him then–and seems more intrigued by his existence. He says something to the effect of, “It is said that man was sculpted by the hands of the gods. If so, then you, who was sculpted by these, my hands …And I, whose labours gave you breath and life… What are we then? What does that make us? In your fabricated heart, which I gave unto you, what is it you believe Kishuna?”

It is almost as though Nergal made him to appeal and examine feelings he cannot–or will not–examine in himself anymore. But I think what is even more telling than his creation of Kishuna is his violent renunciation of him. When he calls Kishuna–one of his earliest experiments–weak, a pale imitation, and worthless he isn’t so much calling Kishuna that as he is referring to the last of his lost humanity. And I think that is the saddest thing of all: that the tragedy of Kishuna isn’t just his existence, but how he represents Nergal’s double: as the dregs of humanity that the Dark Druid ultimately rejects. When Nergal talks to Kishuna–like any artist or creator–he is really talking to himself.

Some people might say to me that I’m reading too much into this: that this is just a video game and has no more value beyond simple entertainment. But a video game is a medium for storytelling. In many ways, video games–such as role-playing games–are a lot like interactive silent movies with dialogue and mimed movements of characters. The fact that with these sprites and words the creators of this game managed to convey such nuance and depth of emotion and character is a tremendous feat of creativity.

I’ll also tell you something a little more personal. I started playing–and continued to play–Fire Emblem in my last years of Undergrad because I’d had a really difficult breakup: my first one. So I engrossed myself into this game. I immersed myself into that world that wasn’t my own. I got attached to characters and situations there. In some ways I felt like I was doing more in that world than in mine. I know how that sounds, but that is also how–to some extent–it was.

What I really liked about this game is that it makes you into a character. You are a tactician and you can name yourself. Your characters refer to you and ask you for advice. When I first met Lyn, the Sacae plains-woman and master swordswoman, she–to an extent–began to feel like the friends I felt I didn’t have in reality anymore. But when I ran into Nergal, he reminded me of all the mistakes I made and just how far from my goal I became. And with Kishuna, I emphasized with what it felt like to feel abandoned and left filled with rage and sorrow.

If a game can do that, it is a good game and–as far as I am concerned–an excellent art-form. So here is my tribute to Fire Emblem and Kishuna: perhaps an under-appreciated but an ultimately very important and human character.

Ice-Nine Mornings and Vonnegut Nights

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

I’d only heard his name in passing as I read other works of fiction and science-fiction. I’m not even sure how my girlfriend got me to start reading Kurt Vonnegut: what the precise details of that moment were like but I remember other details.

It was summer of last year. I was still in the process of (procrastinating) writing my Master’s Thesis and driving myself crazy. I’d finished reading Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game–or Magister Ludi if you’d like–and I found that once I did I wasn’t really interested in reading anything else of his. But I was starving for reading material: so much so I didn’t even know that I was.

I don’t exactly remember when my girlfriend and I started talking about Cat’s Cradle, but we did and I really wanted to read it. But as I write this I remember that it had to do with her introducing me to Vonnegut’s made-up religion of Bokononism–of the concept of a karass as a strange unification of people under God or divine influence, and especially a granfalloon: the creation of a forced or “false” group of people who really have nothing in common whatsoever but–again–something forced or artificial. I’d had some personal experiences with both–and it is hilarious and fitting just how fictional concepts make human nature and interaction easier to understand–and I wanted to know more about the book from where it all came from.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find her copy. So I gave in and borrowed it from York’s library. As I was reading it and making commentary on the way as I usually do, all my girlfriend really told me at the time was that she found it “cute” that I thought I could predict how a Kurt Vonnegut novel would end or even continue.

She was right.

What can I tell you? That summer, Kurt Vonnegut–or “Grandpa” as my girlfriend likes to call him–exposed me to a world of black, black humour and rendered spectacularly the banal frailty and stupidity of the human race in such a way that was immensely entertaining. His “what-the-fuck” moments were plenty and awfully true to the strangeness of life. I started Cat’s Cradle slow. It was a deceptive little bugger: with each chapter little more than a few pages for the most part. Then as I got towards the middle I consumed each page with voraciousness and a notable lack of mercy or pity.

After that there was an old, tattered, and well-loved copy of Mother Night for my consideration: where what we consider war crimes and human atrocity, stupidity, and uniqueness essentially and cunningly “fuck you the fuck up” and your preconceptions too. The best lesson I got out of the thing that I read as I took the bus to school, lay in our bed, and even rode with my friends to a table-top role-playing game session with Lego is to be careful of what you pretend to be, because you might become it.

I remember mornings where my girlfriend forced me to go meet my friends for gaming weekends and those books accompanied me with lunch. I didn’t think about my looming school project, but I learned from Grandpa Vonnegut instead–my cynical, grumpy, literary grandfather–about life. I don’t remember the last Vonnegut book I read. It was about a man who was a former soldier and he taught at a college close to a prison. I never got farther than the chapter with him and his class looking at old and failed perpetual motion machines found in an attic.

I remember that part well. I was riding by myself back down two buses from York Region back downtown from said gaming session and the serious work around it  :). It was the bus I took on Bloor in the late warm summer night: under the amber artificial lighting of the bus, the ambiance of the passing streetlights outside, the fading blue darkness in the sky. and a metal framed red-purple seat. I put that book on hold to read A Song of Ice and Fire–based on my friends’ constant pestering that I needed to–and I never picked it up again. I wish I had.

My Vonnegut education is not complete. I didn’t finish that book and my girlfriend doesn’t have Slaughterhouse Five. I hear Vonnegut likes to break the fourth wall so much after a while that he just gets fed up and it is less a spectacle and more a matter of a “I don’t give a damn” course. I can sympathize with that. I think I will be a grumpy old man like that when I’m old. I’m already half-way there with the grumpy part. Or maybe that’s crazy I’m thinking about.

I do think that you need to have time between readings of Vonnegut: just like you don’t want to eat bitter-sweet chocolate all the time: just occasionally and when the summer times come, and when you have a long bus ride far past two in the morning and you need some black therapeutic entertainment on the TTC … all the way home.

Now I am the Master

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Eventually, I will get tired of saying that.

One day, I am going to look back at the events of my Convocation yesterday and laugh, or use it to make someone else feel better about their own or other embarrassing experiences, or–really–just to remember the time fondly.

The title of this post is the exact opposite to what I felt yesterday. My family and I arrived at the Rexall Centre with seemingly little time to spare for me to figure out where to get my robe and hood. It was raining outside. In order to get to the robe and hood fitting section, the graduates had to walk through said rain up various stair and enclosures to get to a room and stand in a line for a while. If there is one thing that York is good at being, it is definitely being labyrinthine and liking its lines a lot.

The line went relatively quickly and we managed to find our sections. There was a very nice volunteer there that helped us put on the white and red hoods on our robes properly. And we waited there for over an hour and a half. I talked with some people I never met before about what they did in their Programs. I feel a little of two minds on that subject. I mean, I can understand getting really sick of people asking you what you do in your Program and what your work was. I mean, you spent all that time on it and energy–perhaps even sacrificed a fair amount–and your Graduation comes and you just want to think about that and then get on with life. You can get sick of it really fast. On the other hand, you did spend a lot of time on your Graduate work presumably because you were interested in it–perhaps even believe in it–and when you’re in a line for a really long time with people that have done similar or different studies in what is a relatively solitary understanding, you do get curious and it can definitely make for good conversation.

We were finally led in and I was hoping that now the hard part was over and the rest would just be sitting back, listening to speeches, then shaking hands, photographs, and then the end.

Of course, that was not what happened: at least not for me.

In the meantime, there was the other side of the equation: my girlfriend and my family. I had only been allowed to pre-order three guest tickets, so if they wanted any more they would have to basically wait outside directly before the ceremony to get more. My aunt wanted to attend along with my grandmother and her helper. To compound matters my Dad misplaced his cellphone before we left and needed to use my Mom’s. They had also meet my girlfriend who was making her own way to the Centre.

All that apparently went well. They even got a special guest status for my grandmother who needed it for her and her helper. But then something happened. The ceremony apparently started earlier than was advertised and people were not allowed back into the guest tent. This included my family who were in the process of doing the telemetry to have everyone there. They were told that they couldn’t come back in and were obviously rather pissed off about that: and they were not the only ones.

However, they told me later that at intermission they were let back in and hadn’t missed anything. Someone very nice apparently realized just how angry people locked out of their own loved ones’ Convocation ceremony might be and dealt with it.

For my own part, I couldn’t see any of them from where I was sitting: though I did manage to see the resigned and chagrined expression on my face as the big screen in the tent caught me and my fellow graduates. It had been an interesting procession to the tent. Actual bagpipes were being played along the way and the sun came out. As a result of course, it had become quite hot and muggy and I was wearing a sweatshirt under my robes. But the tent had air-conditioning.

So we were sitting on stage and listened to a few speeches. The one that stood out for me the most was by the Honoris Causa recipient and the host of CBC’s Radio One Sunday Edition  Michael Enright. He essentially addressed us directly and offered many words of advice: including learning how to drive a motorcycle.

All was relatively fine and underway until the Dean’s speech. And I had to go to the restroom.

Yeah.

That was fun. I have to tell you: moving those robes around after they are perfectly fitted–especially the hood–is a whole other kind of fun that it is not: especially when you consider that the zipper on my robes came apart and I had to adjust it.

But that was all right. I managed to get out and then back into the ceremony. I remembered my Undergrad Convocation we were lined up in Vari Hall and I had to go to the restroom: only to come back and find out that they had all left without me. This time though was even better because, of course, it wasn’t that long after I decided to leave that my row had been called up to the Chancellor, President, and Dean.

Essentially, I missed going on stage, and almost missed my whole Convocation.

I came back and found that my seat had been taken and I sat at the end of the row fiddling around with the paper I was supposed to present to the announcer, watching the Undergraduates go onto the stage and thinking about how my family would not get to see me on stage, how I’d not get my photograph taken, how I’d wasted a whole load of money just to miss my own Convocation, wondering if I should just leave at that point, wondering why I even bothered to come here, and overall feeling a tremendous amount of despair. Not one of my best moments.

Luckily, after an agonizing long time of watching the upper rows of Undergraduates come down, I managed to show an organizer my paper (while not getting anyone’s attention which is no mean feat considering how I was on a stage with people filming us like the perfect paragons of educational virtue we were supposed to look like) and–being the very nice lady that she was–fit me in at the very end. I was also very pleased that throughout all this ridiculous stress that my stomach had not decided to betray me again.

My family tells me that I managed to get all the applause, being the last person on the stage, but I barely even noticed. I was tired, hot, most likely dehydrated, and I just wanted this spectacle over with. At the same time, it felt nice to stride on there and tell Michael Enright that he made an excellent speech: to which replied something to the effect of “this your day” or “you made it.” I don’t actually remember, but he was nice. Then I shook hands with the Chancellor (I got to actually greet someone as “Chancellor,” which is a favourite word of mine for various reasons), the President of the University, and the Dean and I got my picture taken and then eventually we all left in a procession in which we were lead in circles throughout the building and then abandoned outside the guest pavilion for everything to become a barely organized chaos of parents, families, and camera-taking everywhere.

It took me a long time to find everyone: what with my Dad not having his phone and waiting for my Mom and my girlfriend to text me back. I finally went into the guest tent: wanting at this point to just go the hell home, as it were. Everyone wondered why I was the last person to be called and almost everyone found the very anticlimactic reason behind it pretty damned funny.

My Dad had to take my grandmother and my aunt back, so after going through another winding journey I gave back my sweaty robes and got my piece of cardboard with the excellent words “Magisteriate of Arts” below my name. At some point my girlfriend realized that I hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day and got me some iced tea, and she and my Mom–when we found each other yet again (getting lost was a running theme for this Convocation, yes that was an unintentional pun) we were going to wait for my Dad to pick us up in an insane spot that used to be the place where we were all dropped off to begin with. It was filled with more cars and buses for the next ceremony.

At that point, my Dad managed to gain access to a phone and I had a plan. I decided we were going to go for a walk: from the Rexall Centre all the way to Vanier College. It would be far less crowded there and easier for my Dad to come in. I also recognized the area we were at: having lived close-by back when I was on residence.

So my Mom, my girlfriend, and I walked for twenty minutes through the sun, past Tate Mackenzie, past the Office building all the way to McLaughlin and then finally Vanier. As we passed, I saw people playing tennis, walking around, even measuring a tree, and just talking and walking. It was just another day at York for them. I suspect a few were even summer school students. By the time we came to Vanier, I was thinking of all the times I had and didn’t have at York. I was thinking of how beautiful the campus became in the summer and of all the clubs and friends here that would meet throughout the year.

And then it occurred to me. This is one of the last times I’m going to be here. Again, I thought all the things happened and didn’t happen to me on this campus and I thought about my Graduation earlier on that day and how it isn’t every day that one graduates from their first Master’s Program: from their only one. I realized it was a special day and one I would not see again. I’m not going try for another Master’s or PhD–at least not for a long time–and so much has already changed in my life these past four years. What should have supposedly been a one or two year program became a four year odyssey. Sometimes it felt lonely and empty. Many times I wondered why I did this to myself. The sun felt just as bright and warm as it did when I got my first apartment at York, like when the Sakura trees began to blossom after my Japanese class ended in song, and all the adventures I had downtown.

That sun would be that way for someone else now, and maybe it had been for someone else: just like it will for the future me. I don’t think these thoughts are really unexpected or even unwarranted given the event of significance that happened yesterday. It was an exhausting, sometimes very frustrating day but it also had its grace, its moments of good karma, and its place of transformation. I remember sitting on a bench outside Vanier and thinking to myself that once I’d skipped a class to write a paper on Children’s Literature there: back when I wrote papers by hand.

You know, despite or because of all the events that happened yesterday, I’m glad I went to my Convocation. I’m glad I had my moment. And as for what happens after, as many people have been asking me incessantly, I don’t know. But I do know that I have–and I will–be facing it.

As a Master.

Thanks, The Last Fat Lady Sang, I’ll Be Wearing Robes Tomorrow, and Other Tales

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

First of all, let me thank everyone from yesterday and today who “liked” and liked my articles on horror. It was the most “Likes” I’d ever gotten on here–in one day and ever–and I more than appreciate it and the new readers that I have Following me. I just love writing about subject matters as though I am some kind of expert, though I tend to expand on just a few thoughts I have rolling around in my head and fill in the blanks with Internet and whatever books or other people I have access to. I also notice that there are some topics and themes that can really strike at the heart of the matter when you write about them or when they are even seen: some human universals if you’d like and I woud definitely like to write about more of them. But let me thank you all again: you are all awesome and I hope to make many more things here that will be worthy of further entertainment.

Well, I didn’t make it to the Finalists on ENO’s Mini-Opera Contest, however they are all pretty bad ass from what little I’ve skimmed through. I’m not surprised I didn’t make it–what with it being my first attempt and being done more or less at the last minute–however, it left me with quite a few ideas that I want to work on in other ways, shapes, and forms. And I also get to say that I dabbled briefly with librettos at one time too. For those of you just tuning in now, you can find my works through my “mini-operas” tag because linking to them apparently makes WordPress believe that I am actually commenting on the post directly and that just plain feels weird.

But speaking of standing ovations and conclusions, I’m going to be Graduating tomorrow. It is my Convocation Ceremony at York University at the Rexall Centre at 10:30 in the morning (I do wish my section had been given the afternoon time-slot and was closer to campus–I’m not used to as early mornings these days though I am working on it). Of course, I will have to be there much earler to wear a bunch of rental robes and then help my guests get their seats and all the fun that entails because I was only able to get three tickets in advance: again making something that should have been simple into rocket-science. So I want to get some writing of various kinds today while my time is still my own. I am kind of nervous, but it is one day and I will get through it. And I get to wear robes and a strange hat legitimately too.

What else can I tell you? I am very proud of finally getting my Master’s. But I also very proud of the Master’s Thesis that got to this point: a paper that used Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Herodotus, and their works as its basis. I finished off my first year of Undergrad reading American Gods for the first time and there is some symmetry in ending my Graduate Program with a paper on a good portion of my favourite author’s work as well. There is something really satisfying in that that I can’t explain except to say it is. I think of all the books and articles I used as old friends or collaborators. We all came together, sometimes procrastinating, sometimes arguing, and constantly moving around to make this paper. We’ve been together for a long time, some of us, but we really worked together for two and half years: perhaps even longer. Now some of them are back in the libraries, others still roaming on the Internet and quite a few more back on their respective shelves having said goodbye to one another. We don’t know when we will meet again, but I know that even if I don’t always hold them in my hands, they will always be with me: them and the work that I did.

It’s been a long ride and I am glad I got to tell a little of the story.