The Elusive Fish — Creative Services

So I’ve been tagged with the ‘8 things’ meme. This one’s particularly hard as there’s few aspects of my life that haven’t been shared one way or another. Odds are, if you know me at all you know a few of these. But here goes…

1. I wait in line an inordinate amount of time to see movies
   Well, actually only for one particular set of movies. In 1999 I was a part of a two-week-long lineup to see Star Wars at the York cinemas in Toronto. I found the group online and began by posting to their forum that they were nuts, that the idea was ludicrous and crazy. Within a week I was one of the organizers. The event can also be said to be my first major fling with social media as the whole deal was planned out and pulled together online.

   The line was like a big ol’ geeked out street party. An absolutely incredible sense of community formed amongst the group. Most of us came to the line as complete strangers but everyone walked away with dozens of new friends. During the line, I met a beautiful geek gal, fell in love with her and have been married five years now.

2. I’m patiently awaiting the rapture for nerds
   

   I’m totally a transhumanist and anxiously awaiting the Kurzweil vision of a singularity. The sooner I can upgrade, or upload from this chunk of meat into redundant files on multiple servers, the better.

3. I’m a great dancer in SecondLife
   

   Been a resident for going onto two years. I had great plans to build, to learn the Linden Scripting Language and code away, to set up a little virtual empire… but instead I end up tripping the light fantastic whilst dishing out some dreadfully awful puns.

   Originally delving into SecondLife to estimate its potential as a marketing and communications platform, I’ve instead found it to be a wonderful tool for self-discovery. Behind the thin veneer of anonymity there’s freedom to explore aspects of yourself and how you relate to others. To totally recreate yourself, quite literally minute to minute.

   In real life, I’m shy, extremely reserved and non-confrontational. My SecondLife avatar is an extrovert, dialed up to 11. Whatever mental roadblock keeps me a quiet wallflower in real life doesn’t exist for me when I step into my avatar. I’m starting to figure out how to switch over to that headspace in real life and get past my hangups in group situations. Well worth the time invested.

4. I’m squeemish, yet I’m a gorehound
   

   What can I say, I’m a man of dichotomies. I can’t stand the site of blood and yet I’m a connoisseur of horror films and scary stories. The thing is, a scary story is likely the hardest tale to tell. So when I find a good one, it’s truly a work of art to behold. At one point in my teens, I had what I termed ‘The Wall o’ Doom’ with select images snipped from the pages of Fangoria, Gorezone and Toxic Shock taped into a massive collage of viscera that plastered every inch of my bedroom wall. My parents were likely freaked by it, wondering if they could look forward to their son’s bio being “He was a quiet fella, kept to himself mostly”. For me the wall was a constant terror and fascination. Playing arm-chair psychiatrist, looking back at it, I’d say it was me facing my own mortality head on. Trying to reconcile myself to just how fragile and flimsy these meat bag bodies of ours are (which I’ve not quite achieved … which brings us back to point 2. I want my indestructible robot body dammit!).

5. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn is the only movie I’ve ever walked out on
   

   On the subject of squeemishness, the moment that sluggy buggy thing crawled into Chekov’s ear is the moment I was on my way out the door. My mom finally coaxed me out of the lobby and back into the theatre just in time for the sluggy buggy thing’s return. She didn’t get me back until the Enterprise and Reliant were blasting one another in the nebula. To date, this is the one and only movie I’ve ever walked out of.

   Oh - and of course I’ve seen Wrath of Kahn since then. It’s by far the best of the Trek films and a favourite film of mine, even with the sluggy buggy thing.

6. I was big in Germany, then I drew on napkins, now my scribblings reside in bits and bytes
   

   Back in the early nineties I was a comic book artist, self-publishing a book. One of our regular senders of fan-mail was Andreas out of Germany. North American comic book stores, at the time, were primarily dominated by super-hero tales from Marvel, D.C. and Image. Getting shelf space for anything outside of the super-hero genre, let alone those three companies was a tricky thing to achieve. For a while it was actually more likely you’d be able to find a copy of our book in a German comic book store than one in Canada.

   Then the entire North American comic book industry imploded and the cash-flow of the book dried up. My comics making was relegated to the back of napkins at ‘geek dinners’ amongst the comics crowd.

   A few years ago, I got my handy-dandy Wacom tablet and a copy of Corel Painter and I’ve hardly touched pen and paper since. I’ve posted some of my work here, but more of my scribblings can be found at tragicladtheatre.com

7. My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer III.
   

   128k RAM with an 8-bit processor clocked at 2Mhz. My subscription to Rainbow magazine supplied me with dozens of new programs I could try in Disk Extended Color BASIC and then save to tape cassette for later use. Eventually I would obtain a floppy disk drive which would allow me to get more ambitious in the size and scope of my coding. I even saved up and bought a copy of OS9 to expand my skills, but I believe one of the disks was faulty as I could never get any of my OS9 code to work right.

8. I almost became a cook
   

   Shortly after I moved out of Toronto to live with my lady love, the games company I worked for folded still owing me a half-dozen paycheques. I ended up working a temp job in Scotiabank’s car loan finance department. This was the office equivalent to assembly work. Pull the crank, turn the valve, and away down the conveyor belt goes the file. Pull the crank, turn the valve, and on to the next file. Pull the crank, turn the valve. Pull the crank, turn the valve. Mind numbing work that was made worse by hostile coworkers and petty office politics. I was pretty down on office life, and was giving some serious thought to signing up for courses at the culinary school I passed on my way to work each day.

   I’ve always enjoyed cooking and have amassed a small collection of cook books over the years. Cooking would at least be work I could enjoy, work that I could pour a bit of myself into, work that at the end of the day I’d known I’d accomplished something. There’s always a demand for people who can cook well.

   But the contract at Scotiabank ended, and I found myself in a much more challenging and fulfilling position. Thoughts of running away to culinary school soon faded and cooking remains a simple side pleasure.

And there we go. You’ve read it. You can’t unread it. Eight things. This and a google search will tell ya pretty much everything you could possibly ever know about me. Now it’s time to spread this meme along by tagging new coworker Colin Carmichael, but I’m going to move this meme out of the social media/PR circles and throw it over to my lady love, Debs, Stephen Geigen-Miller and Sandwich Boy. oh - and I’m gonna tag Jelly Mold Salad as well (HA! - now you have to start a blog. The ancient laws of the interwebs demand it).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under News and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.