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Mentally I am in my dad’s basement playing Mario Golf and listening to legendary Canadian jazz flautist Moe Koffman. Physically I am also there. Tonight on As It Happens, I am very bad at golf

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I don’t really draw anymore, but as a kid I used to draw a lot. Anyway, I found that I once had the foresight to have a page of a notebook where I tracked how I drew myself starting in 2009 and I just added to it for 2025

Anyway I recommend this because as much as I don’t think of myself as an artist, it’s cool to see that I have indeed gotten better in 16 years

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About halfway through enterprise and we love it so far, Trip is my favorite by far

Posted to Instagram February 2 2025

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Inspired by a conversation in the Stargate Discord

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I’ve always kind of thought the stories of “I left the gas stove on overnight but I woke up with a weird feeling and turned it off just in time, it must have been a guardian angel” were a little weird but likely had some rational explanation. Now that I have experienced prolonged carbon monoxide poisoning though, I am confident I have a grasp on the science of what’s going on. Granted this is anecdotal, but if there’s a difference in atmospheric pressures, humans can typically sense it, even if you don’t really know what it is or why you have the feeling. Going down a mountain for example, your ears pop to acclimatize to the difference in pressures, but I know people who get migraines when storms are rolling or their joints start to act up. It doesn’t really matter how a person detects pressure changes, the point is that is uncomfortable enough that you notice.

What carbon monoxide poisoning feels like in the early stages is that pressure in your head just before your ears are ready to pop, almost like having a head cold. That’s a feeling you notice, and any light sleepers out there probably know the feeling of waking up on a plane as it’s landing. How can you tell it’s landing? Your ears go funny. That’s exactly why I would argue that there are no guardian angels at play when a person wakes up while being carbon monoxide’d or otherwise attacked by toxic gasses. Fundamentally we are upright apes who needed to be able to detect anything hinky going on for the sake of survival; loud noises can wake us up, light can wake us up, pain can wake us up, so I don’t see it as much of a stretch that a difference in pressure can wake us up too. I’m not even trying to be an edgy atheist by saying this, I just think it’s so incredibly cool that our self preservation instincts can wake us up and subconsciously go through a flow chart of possible reasons for increased pressure in our heads, determine none of the expected instances are happening, and then make the decision in a heartbeat to get the hell out of dodge.

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I’m sorry to all the old men who watch construction work happening I was wrong to make fun of you I just watched an excavator move sludge around a harbour for 2.5 hours and I was captivated the entire time. I will be telling my children about this. Literally how was that free? How did it stumble on this? I am so happy right now I feel like I just saw green day or something like it was electric.

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I’m obsessed with the Cole Harbour sign like for those who haven’t seen it irl they have this beautiful carved welcome sign with “home of Sidney Crosby” carved into it and then they have a plastic sign nailed to the bottom of it that congratulates Nathan MacKinnon and the Avs on winning the Stanley cup

Here’s the sign it’s literally just like oh yeah him too with grass growing over it I am losing my mind

Same energy tbh

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My dad was in the military and all but he fucking hated it when people thanked him for his service because “no one thanked me for my service when I was a line cook and I served the public more with that job” so his response to thank you for your service is “well what is it you do?” And when they answer he sincerely thanks them for their service. Naturally I’ve started doing this, and by that I mean when people tell me their job I make sure to thank them for their service too.

The craziest instance of this was when I was talking to a tourist for upwards of an hour because he was waiting for his wife and I’ll just listen to anyone. He ended up being responsible for the safety of like every train track in Canada and, specifically, he was on the scene at the trestle derailment just outside of the military base I grew up on and was also regularly involved with fixing the railway crossing I took every day. Just as he was about to leave after one of the best conversations I’ve ever had, I hit him with the thank you for your service and he teared up a bit and told me no one’s ever told him that before. In response, I told him that he saved more lives than I can imagine, my own included.

Anyway, thank normal people for their service, I promise you, it is always the move.

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I love the idea of Spock being super queer, highly expressive and very emotional from a Vulcan view point. Like...

What humans see:

What Vulcans see:

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Mcdonalds drive-thru: do you want the meal or just the sandwich?

Data: uuuuuh hold on

*fishes something out of his pocket*

Data: Tasha what do i do?

Data's Tasha Yar posthumous hologram: get the fries. youll need the energy in the coming days

*stuffs it back in his pocket*

Data: yes please, the meal would be great

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Alan Alda has a reputation for writing/directing some of the best yet completely gut wrenching episodes in the whole series. Early on in the life of the series, a lot of the actors started developing their characters on their own time to make them feel more real, and Alan Alda took it to the extreme a lot of the time and tortured his own character in unspeakable ways (including however not limited to the notoriously heartbreaking finale that he co-wrote).

In general, the show takes you by the scruff of the neck and swings you around from being goofy and funny to making you cry your eyes out in the span of seconds which was done on purpose to articulate what life in the military/a hospital can actually be like. While I don’t have any experience, my dad has told me about his time playing ping pong in hangars after hurriedly getting an aircraft on the taxiway in time to rescue casualties of a tragedy. MASH in general is a masterclass of the emotional rollercoaster and Alan Alda took that to the next level. I highly recommend the show even though it has emotionally damaged me since I was ten

When the Written and Directed by Alan Alda hits and you watch the episode and it is absolutely Written and Directed by Alan Alda

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Well, I tried to doodle the team. And Thor and [insert any goa'uld here, they're all just wormies]

Drawing actors is scary

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So called free thinkers when the door opens at urgent care and the nurse with the clipboard is about to call a name

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stargate atlantis rewatch: critical mass (2x13)

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RIP pope Francis here are all the insane things that happened in my French Catholic school in rural Alberta

Grade 5

My teacher gave birth on Christmas and when we came back from Christmas break we found out that no one had arranged for a sub to cover her mat leave so we had a revolving door of parents coming in to babysit us and we were encouraged to bring our DS or something for entertainment

We finally got a permanent sub after March break who was a staunch atheist. He would give us reading comprehension packets at the beginning of the week and then play FarmVille for the rest of the week. On surface level he was pretty cool but I always had a bad feeling about him

We had gotten used to Pokemon time so we negotiated for Fridays to be Pokemon time during his classes.

He showed us his own film that he made about his life teaching in Nunavut and made us do an assignment on it

During recess I had a Pokemon gambling ring and ran multiple businesses like selling stolen pencils or Halloween candy

When Pokemon was banned, I switched to poker for my gambling ring which was somehow never banned

The only religious thing I remember happening that year was a rabbi coming to our school and we all sat in the office (it was pretty big) to hear him talk

Oh and we had a lockdown drill but in order to add realism, the school enlisted a bunch of army guys from the base to yell in the halls, bang on the doors and windows, yank on the doors, etc, and the only thing that stopped us all from panicking and crying was one girl in my class recognizing her dad’s voice

I brought my gerbil (his name was Paul) to school and I was charging people a dollar or two to hold him but I got cocky and kept Paul in my desk and my teacher came over and accused me of having a mouse in my desk (I didn’t) and anyway after I denied it he made me empty my desk and he was mad that I denied it but I glibly told him it was a gerbil and he got so pissed that he called in the principal and the school secretary to deal with me. At which time I pointed out the lack of any school rules that indicated a ban on pets at school and cited my friend bringing his potbelly pig into school a month or so prior and they couldn’t really do anything about it so they just called my (very confused) mom to pick up Paul and snuck a clause into the school rules banning pets

At the end of the year our substitute teacher disappeared before any of us could even say goodbye and we didn’t find out why until grade 8

Grade 6

My school was made up of two buildings and they tried to use this fact to separate us kind of by age but it changed every year based on class sizes since our school population fluctuated between 70-100 students from pre-k to 12. For whatever reason, my class was put in the high school building (it was made up of a rudimentary gym and a few portables squished together to make a small lunch room, a class room and the music room)

We would go between buildings based on which class we had and it was all very confusing especially since we were a 6/7 split class but the grade 7s got to stay inside at recess and lunch but the grade 6s had to go outside which led to a grade 6 rebellion that I’ll get to in a minute

This year we actually had religion class and we started having prayers said over the PA system once a week that were selected from student work and one time mine got picked when I was knee deep into my Monk hyperfixation and I prayed for detectives to find the right criminals in murder investigations and they thought I wrote it out of the goodness of my heart but it was basically Monk fan fiction

Secondary to this point I ran a small PI business to find lost or missing items after my friend was falsely accused of stealing our gym teacher’s glasses and I found his glasses in his desk. I gained notoriety from this and charged five bucks per mystery

The grade 6 rebellion where we built a snow fort in an alcove beside the gym side of the school out front because we refused to go on the playground at recess out of spite. We decorated it with juice boxes and one kid had the bright idea to chuck jello at it but it missed so there was a splat of frozen green jello on the siding of the school for months

That same kid started the apocalypse chant in religion class because we wanted to read from that book in the Bible for some reason?

During the grade 6 rebellion, we actively bullied two guys in grade 10 and 11 to a point where there was intervention from adults. Idek why we bullied them I think it was just for sport

My brother and his best friend started pirating N64 games and playing them in a fort they had built in the music room during lunch hour

I don’t remember what year it was but they also played baseball with a pudding cup and a crowbar that year and no one knew where they got the crowbar

Mass was called like a snap election after that which was how it usually went. That was the admin’s trump card for disciplining us

We went to Edmonton to a school that was in the basement of a seniors home to meet a French author and I don’t remember who it was

Our school gym’s equipment room was a kitchen and when we started doing home ec, all the equipment for gym was moved onto the pool table next to the hockey net

We had a mezzanine in the gym over the entry way that we used to set up a crash mat underneath so we could climb up a stack of smaller mats to the mezzanine to jump into the crash mat while the gym teacher graded social studies work from the older kids

The science teacher dressed as a clown one time because my brother did all his homework for science class within a certain amount of time and my parents (card carrying clowns) kitted her out with full clown garb

Grade 7

Arguably the most normal year

We were back on the elementary school side with our original grade 5 teacher (the one who went on mat leave)

For personal reasons I was absent for the first semester pretty much

My class waged war with our gym teacher this year for some reason and we eventually made him retire

Our war was basically fought by asking if we could go golfing every single day we had gym class because he one time said in passing that golf wasn’t a real sport

The only way to appease us was by either letting us jump off the mezzanine or letting us play hockey

We got our entire school banned from the curling rink because we all hated curling and purposely broke the rules of the curling rink

We would have done similar with the Squash courts except we liked that the weight room across from the squash courts played Much Music so anyone who wasn’t currently in play got to watch music videos

For religion class the only thing I remember is doing was writing, directing, and scripting a Bible themed Wendy Williams style talk show called the Magic Bible that was highly controversial because the only genuine church-going catholic in the school aka my English teacher who was in the middle of her divorce-related villain arc thought it was blasphemous

It went ahead but filming happened during my grandma’s funeral on the Vancouver Island shortly after my birthday so my understudy had to play Bartholomew

I also missed our field trip to the west Edmonton mall that I didn’t really want to go to anyway but my teacher felt really bad cuz my grandma died on my birthday and I had to miss a school trip and the filming of the Magic Bible (to which I wrote the theme song and came up with the name) to go to her funeral so I was credited as the executive producer of the Magic Bible and she organized a bunch of class trips around town on the last week of school specifically to places I wanted to go like the local radio station (I got to announce a song) and the train museum

On the trip to the model train museum there was one single adult who tagged along on the tour with us cuz he was short on time or something so me my friend decided to talk to him about trains while we walked between the different train cars in the museum and I remember bonding over all of us liking Top Gear??

We were only well behaved that year because our teacher made a video game style behavioural chart where we got to pick out jpgs of fantasy characters that we got to move along a map to get privileges and she gave us in-game currency that we could use at the last day of school at an auction. We ended up gambling with the in-game currency but it was seen as better than us gambling with real money, so it was allowed

Grade 8

We were back on the high school side and for once we had the same class as the year before so we had bonded as a group

Our homeroom teacher was the art teacher whom we loved and she was also our new gym teacher after we forced our old gym teacher into an early retirement the year before

Radio-Canada came in and did a story about our inadequate facilities for our school and they came into our lunch room to get b-roll for the story but it was unfortunately not used due to a chair related fight involving myself and a guy I didn’t like

Anytime we spoke English at lunch hour, we used to have to write “Je parle Français pendant l’heur de dînner” on the whiteboard like Bart Simpson because our English teacher was our lunch monitor and she was fully in her villain arc at that point because her husband (who had been teaching ESL in China for two years) had left her for another woman and was getting a divorce

We knew it pissed her off so we all spoke in English constantly because she’d eventually run out of whiteboards in the lunch room and we would have to go to the classroom to write on the whiteboard which was ideal since we had a stereo with an aux cord in the classroom

Our English teacher also used to photo copy books for novel study hilariously she did that the whole way through but I just remembered it.

When the school said she couldn’t do it anymore, she would just painstakingly take pictures of the book pages and project the pictures on the board so we could follow along and then the person who was reading out loud had the actual book

In the fall of grade 8 we all got randomly loaded on a bus and taken to a defunct ski lodge owned by our town’s Bagpipe Guy who lived in a treehouse where nuns showed up and played Cajun music and taught a lot of us how to juggle and none of our parents remember signing a permission slip for this event but it was considered the high watermark for the year

At one point one of our classmates was moving so we had a potluck to say goodbye to her, then we had a potluck a week after she left for some reason and it became just a monthly thing that we would have a breakfast potluck where we would watch movies that one of us pirated and wear pajamas to school and it was just a normal fucking occurrence??

Our English teacher was also now our French, home economics and religion teacher and between her being fully evil now and seeing her so many times a day, my class waged war against her so much that we had bets on how long it would take before she kicked someone out of the classroom and we made a game of seeing how many people she would kick out of the class before she eventually gave up and called in the really scary school secretary to yell at us

At one point to encouraged speaking French, all the teachers had lap counters to count instances where we spoke English but there was no real reward if that number was lower so we eventually started seeing how long it would take for the lap counters to roll over

For whatever reason one time we had the scary school secretary as our lunch monitor and we found out that she was actually a certified diva who knew all the hot gossip and would straight up tell us if we asked which was how we found out that our English teacher got left for another woman. Anyway we asked her about the guy who cover the mat leave in grade five and found out that he had been under investigation for having a baby with an underage girl in Nunavut and he had to leave because he needed to go to his court date and he ended up going to prison (though I later found out that he was released on a technicality)

It was also this year that we found out that only three teachers in the entire school had education degrees and the rest of them were effectively just random french people who could pass a criminal record check (though they failed to look into that one guy for some reason?)

I eventually had a mental breakdown in May of that year that resulted in violence against my English teacher so as punishment and without my parents’ knowledge I was put in internal suspension for a few weeks until I finally told my parents what had been going on and aired out every piece of dirty laundry I knew about the school and I was both expelled and withdrawn from the school on the same day and I’m not sure to this day which happened first but it’s funnier to say that I got expelled

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One time I bitched to my dad about how my pizza got cold while I was looking for something good to watch on YouTube. He just stared blankly at me and said that in 1987 he would get home from his evening shift towing helicopters at work with a pizza, flick through his like 6 channels and hope there was something good on TV. On a good day it was a M*A*S*H rerun or Letterman. On a bad day, he was watching coronation street or “something equally shit”. Now every time I go to get a slice and can’t find something on YouTube, I just pull up an old Kurtis Connor video and pretend I’m sitting in a dark bachelor apartment in 1987 and I found a channel playing a M*A*S*H rerun. Occasionally I put on Coronation Street highlights so I can understand the suffering my ancestors went through when they got a piping hot pizza pie and had to watch shitty TV. It’s like LARPing.