Recently in General Category

I decided to post here again,so feel free to check it out.

Do you have wings? I like to think that I do. By the way, this is an old meme, but I don`t actually know what my readers`Myers-Briggs types are. I wonder if there are more I`s than E`s that read my words, and the details of those I`s and E`s. Why don`t you take a Myers-Briggs test and find out, then tell me here? I, of course, am an ENTP. I think.

I would also encourage you to read this. Just how emotionally mature are you? I would say that I am just to the right of the middle of the pack, although the last year has pushed me further to the right (assuming that emotionally mature is on the right side of the scale, and emotionally immature is on the left).

And my God, this is beautiful. I have never heard this story before.

Tea is a big part of our lives (Julie and I, that is) and to that end we decided to take 5 hours of our lives and go to the seminars offered by premier tea provider and salon Camellia Sinensis last weekend. It was incredibly fun! We got to taste 19 different teas! Delicious, I must say. Definitely an experience even for those that don't know much about tea. For example:

Pu-erh teas are the only tea that does not degrade over time; in fact it gets better and better with age. For this reason, they are classified by year and region just like vintage wine. They often look and taste similar to a strong black tea to the novice, even though there is a green tea aspect to it. One of the owners of Camellia Sinensis was allowed (after a grueling question-and-answer session by some local tea cultivators and sellers in China) to enter what I would call a shrine to Pu-erh tea. In this room was millions of dollars of tea stored in individual cakes. One such cake dating from 1930 (and there were many, even much older ones) and weighing roughly 350 grams cost about $10 000. Using the consumption of Julie and I as a reference* it would cost us about $30 per cup of tea. $30. Per CUP. If you wanted to try our tea, we'd have to charge you.

Welcome to summer. Spring, we hardly knew ye.

When Kevin, my lead tester, was working as a regular tester under this guy called Marc, Marc treated Kevin and everyone around him like shit. So much so, that Kevin had to file an official complaint about him. The QA company that he works for (and we outsource to) hires people to test games and software, and stations them at various customer sites.

One day, Marc started acting the same way with his superiors, because he got a new job as a QA manager at IBM. He started bragging about it. During the whole 2-4 weeks towards the end of his job, he treated everyone around him worse than before. Then he left.

And found out that IBM cancelled the job.

So he crawled back to his first company to try to get his old job back. They told him to go fuck himself.

Then he tried to get a job at another major company as a test manager. He was almost hired. But then some of his former employees saw him there, and immediately went to management. They told him that if they were to hire Marc, that they would quit. They will never work for this guy again.

So they didn't hire him. Then the exact same thing happened at another nearby company.

Now he's applying to my company. Kevin found out and told my former boss not to hire him. He has made sure that the decision makers are aware of Marc's history with people.
It looks as though Marc may never work in Montreal again. That's a near-perfect retribution.

He wasn't smart enough to understand that this industry, it's a small circle as in media or publishing. Or maybe he just didn't care. He really thought that these testers getting paid $8 an hour and just out of high school were no better than rats in the street. But they develop and become more, and they find jobs around in the same market. Marc didn't think so, and he got what was coming to him.

It is nice when things work out the way they are supposed to.

I have so much to say, yet I don't really say it. I wonder why that is. Laziness, perhaps? I have a lot to say about diversity and depiction in video games, social structures, assumptions, hegemony and power groups, representation in writing, voice acting, and so on. But it's not getting said. I have to change this.

In fact, I bet that most of us feel that way quite a bit, even though we blog. What are you sitting on that should be shared with the world?

Bad news: In order to have chemotherapy, you need to take a blood test two days prior to treatment to test for various things, not least of which is your white blood cell count. When I had my TCF treatment, they knew that I would possibly become neutropenic, and accordingly put me on 10 days of Neupogen to boost my counts. It works extremely well. However, on FOLFIRI, I was never put on Neupogen after treatment. What they expected was that since the treatment is much less adverse and that I am still relatively young (I think I have white hairs because of chemo, and not age) that I would not need any Neupogen. It's a pretty expensive drug, after all. I was originally supposed to have my second treatment on Wednesday, March 5 nearly a week ago. I failed the test (they don't like it when I put it that way, but it IS a failure), and had to push back treatment by one week.

And today, I learned that I failed the white blood cell test again. This means that treatment will be delayed by at least a week, probably happening on March 20. I am not happy about having treatment on a Thursday, but them's the breaks. Basically, the doctor made the wrong call in my treatment, and this is the result. My PET scan will need to be pushed back, and I may have to do a seventh treatment to make up for the month that I didn't have any. This also screws up my plans for summer school, sports, travel and pretty much anything I wanted to do in the spring.

Good news: I can now pretty much guarantee that I will make it out for Sunday with no problems whatsoever. For those that do not know, my tradition is to get to Hurley's at 9 am the day of the parade, eat the breakfast provided, drink the Irish coffee included, drink a couple of pints, go to the parade at noon and hang out on the south side of Crescent and Ste-Catherine (drinking), then go to some other bar or two and drink until around 7:30 pm. Of course I am not alone; I am with some core people, and I always either make new friends for the day, or encounter old ones. If you are interested, please let me know and we can make room for you at our table.

The girls (that is, Julie, formerly known as Rose, and her daughter) and I went to the Children's Montreal Movie Festival yesterday to watch Papillons (Butterfly in English, Pirret in the native Swedish), a Swedish movie about a girl that learns to fly under certain conditions. I found it to be all right, but the little girl didn't seem all that interesting as an actress. I know I am probably being overly critical, since she's probably about five years old, but the fact is that it would have been better with a better actress, and I think that they exist, even at that age.

Before this film were two short films. The creator, producer and director of the first one sat beside me. Her name is Carla Coma, and she gets asked about her non-existent connection to Massive Attack all the time. Dubbed, the Taxidermy Princess, she works with stuffed animals (not the plushy kind) and animates them to make cute films. Her film from yesterday, L'écureuil d'à côté (The Squirrel Next Door), was so bizarrely cute I had to include it below. It's only one minute and 24 seconds long and worth a watch.

I love it when I get to talk to directors, producers and other creators of art that I like. It brings me outside of regular reality more than experiencing the actual art that they create.

You know what people around here call the funny bone? If they call it anything, they say "le funny bone". I think that's a little funny. Here's something that's a little fucked. Try translating this at Reverso.net and see what you get.

Aux francophones et francophiles: Avez-vous déjà entendu cette "expression", ou est-ce que Reverso.net est juste "fucké"?

Another skin product for white people and misguided racial minorities. I mean, really, why do this unless you're in porn? (I'm just assuming the porn people do this, but I have no idea.)