Posts Tagged 9to5 blog

4 results.

A Letter to Montreal, Cheer Up Beautiful – Winter Isn’t That Bad

by on March 10, 2015 at 8:43 am
Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Keith, Perspicacious Geek
coffee

Delicious “coffee” at Nuit Blanche and marshmallows. What’s not to love? The coffee might be beer.

Hey Montreal,

How have you been?

I hear you complaining a lot about how cold it is. Like, you’ve been really complaining. An awful lot. It’s kind of getting me down. I mean, nobody likes it when it’s -20 and the windchill makes it feel like -30 or even -40.

Are you really sure you should be complaining so much?

I mean, sure it’s been cold for the past two months or so, but before that it really wasn’t so bad. Remember how warm it was in November? It was mostly in the positives, there was no snow. November 24 had a high of 18 degrees. You weren’t complaining then, were you? Or December? It got a little bit colder (with a few overnight lows of around -12) but we still had some pretty nice days. Heck, Christmas day it nearly 8 degrees. It was windy, but plus 8 on Christmas is nothing to complain about either.

Then the cold happened. Basically since the beginning January we’ve had lows of -20 before the windchill factor. It was pretty shitty. Looking at the forecast now though, it seems like the worst is behind us and the forecast is telling us that Spring is trying to push its way into our city. So what are you really complaining about? It’s March 10th today. So all that complaining has been about 2 months of harsh Winter.

I mean, it’s had its upsides, right?

Let’s talk about snowfall. This year we’ve had about 185.8 cm of snow. The average snowfall for Montreal is 210 cm. As far as I remember there were very few giant snowstorms either. In fact, the biggest snow storms we had this year brought in only about 20 cm of snow in a single day. Do you remember that time in December 2013 where you got nearly 90 cm in a single day? That sucked pretty bad. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Running My First RPG, Session 1 of Space Puncher – The Perspicacious Geek

by on November 25, 2014 at 11:51 am
Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

RPG1So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m running my first ever tabletop RPG for a few friends. I chose Gamma World for the system, but tweaked the setting a little for my own designs (I included the general setting email I sent the players at the bottom of the article). The plan is to run a 5 to 6 game story arch that is open ended enough that if people want to keep going I can do it again. I am very inspired by comic-book story structure, where smaller adventures with a beginning, middle and end potentially make up a bigger storyline. I guess we’ll see. I’m trying not to be overly ambitious after only a single session.

Let’s do a quick roundup of the players and their characters for reference (obviously keeping anything secret about their characters out of it since let’s face it, they’ll probably read this):

  • Jon (from 9ES): Playing Navison, a robot who has some information on a job for the other characters.
  • Sarah: Playing Mr. Gordo, a psychic monkey who makes a living as hired muscle.
  • Pat: Playing Mr. Salvatore, a nightmarish swarm of insects who makes a living as a spy and sometimes hit man.
  • Eric: Playing Skraw, a wheeled hawkoid who is a sort of eco-freedom fighter, willing to do anything to make money to save the beloved forests of his home world.
  • Ève: Playing Lee Ken, a mythic plant who resembles an elf who is also the sworn protector of said forest, looking to do anything she can to save living creatures and make money to keep her operation going.

Both Ève and Sarah have never played a tabletop RPG before, but both have some experience with some more complex board games (Arkham Horror to name the big one). Jon DMs my regular D&D game and Eric and Pat play in it. The other caveat was that Sarah and Ève both only agreed to play one session to give it a shot. If I didn’t win them over I would be inviting two new players to the next session. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Fighting on the Internet is More Stupid Than You Think – Perspicacious Geek

by on September 23, 2014 at 8:06 am
Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Keith, Perspicacious Geek
Fuck that website

Fuck that website

So, this is a geeky website. We talk about video games, horror movies, wrestling and comic books (among other things). Most of us have worked in tech support at one point, we work on a webcomic together, hell, we’ve all pretended to be vampires for fun on numerous occasions. There are all manner of geeks but there is one thing that is true of almost all of them: we spend a lot of time on the internet. A lot of time.

It makes a ton of sense when you think about it. Geek culture is (or was) by its nature niche. There wasn’t a bunch of people in any one place who were passionate about this one geeky thing so when a global network allowed us to all connect with one another, we were all up on that shit. Do you like to knit Dr. Who stuff? You can find like minded people easily. Seriously, I just assumed that that existed and a quick Google search totally proved me right. Basically, no matter what you’re into, if you’re a geek, you’re probably a pretty well traveled internet user.

Quid pro quo you’ve been in (or at least been witness to) an argument on the internet over something that in the big scheme of things is probably insignificant. In some cases it will be an argumentative clash of opinions between people who feel strongly about opposite sides of a story, in other cases only one will really care and the other will be trolling, sometimes, both will be trolling. Two people pretending to really care about something just to argue and try to get under the skin of the other one? We live in a wonderful world.

An interesting thing happens on the internet. People are way more likely to pick a fight and start an argument than they probably would out in the “real” world. Why? Well, depending on the situation there might be a degree of anonymity. Almost always there’s a sense of safety from sitting in your own home instead of being in someone’s face. Plus, it’s easy to dehumanize the person you’re arguing with. After all, you don’t know them. They’re just words on the screen that disagree with you. Fuck those words. Fuck that person. They probably stand against everything you’ve ever held true and believe in. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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The Perspicacious Geek – An Introduction

by on September 2, 2014 at 4:04 pm
Posted In: Blogs, Homepage, Keith, Perspicacious Geek

geek2A little while ago I started (and subsequently abandoned) the mission of revisiting a lot of the geek milestones that Ernie Cline touched on in his (amazing) ode to 80s geekdom “Ready Player One”. Cline’s story was almost directly responsible for one of the most talked about (in my friend circle) occurrences of 2013: that time we played the original Tomb of Horrors like idiots. The whole experience got me to thinking that I wanted to write a regular column about stuff that I had experienced. Sort of like a 1960s Playboy columnist but writing about geek shit. Or regular shit. Ok, I just want to have a column where I tell you about things you should be doing and consuming, or about current events.

I regretted almost immediately my decision to call this stuff “The Perspicacious Geek” for a number of reasons.

1)      I have only had to write the word “perspicacious” twice (thrice if you count this sentence) and I have mangled it all three times. I like to challenge myself physically when it comes to typing.
2)      It is super pretentious sounding; this is a double edged sword. I like sounding pretentious since I think there’s a certain contingent of the internet who will be like “what a pretentious cocksucker, I will read this article to see how wrong and stupid he is”. And let’s face it, readers are readers, gotta get ‘dem clicks, holla! However, in the world where I pretend to be humble (whatever world that is, I don’t think “humble” would be on anyone’s list of adjectives that describe me) I am in no way extremely perspicacious (nailed the spelling first time). Sometimes people have to explain things to me like a hundred times and when I “get it” I’m still just nodding along blindly hoping the conversation moves on to something else.
3)      In reality, I’m really into terrible movies and watch a lot of pro-wrestling, this is pretty much the opposite of perspicacious.
4)      If I didn’t know the definition of the word, I would think that it is somehow related to perspiration. So if you’re bad with English you might think this article is about a sweaty geek. Which is like, the exact opposite of the intention. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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