Then it was 2008. 2008 is a lot like 2007, only with a lot more potential. Potential to lose one's liberties in airports and border crossings. Potential to finish a Master's degree, incredulously, on the topic of Video Games R Awesome. Potential to write some more blog entries.

We are creeping ever closer to 2010 which, like 2000, carries the seductive promise of sex robots and flying cars and nanotechnology that will undo the world molecule by molecule. Somehow I think we'll just get more intricate ways to distract ourselves, more elaborate labyrinths of entertainment. Nested layers of virtual reality where you are the virtual reality, whatever that means. Virtual minigolf. Virtual versions of things which are, in themselves, distractions. We are getting awfully good at this. I still have a billion and one TV shows to catch up on.

Scutt has returned from her Middle Eastern journey a little more racist and a little more itchy for something that is not an anchor. It happens to everybody but you can't really explain it properly to somebody who doesn't understand. A logical fallacy for travellers, a paradox reflecting the weaknesses of language. I, myself, have maintained the itch vicariously through her and through others (chadSLASHjen) who have done amazing things in the way of transporting their physical bodies to unexpected locales. Meanwhile my own body has been busy injuring itself with the kick-drum pedal provided by those evil masochists over at Harmonix, purveyors of the dark produkt Rock Band. I hope to switch circumstances eventually. Maybe that's what 2009 can be all about.

In front of the ROM (Royal Ontario Muzzizzium) an impossibly dense crowd formed by nine o'clock. They wore Darth Vader plastic masks and tinfoil robot hats. Many had brought their own lightsabres, the $200 dollar deals that make 'authentic' Lucasfilm goobering sounds when they clash and slash together. Skinny kids were up on obese shoulders. Hearty rounds of the Imperial Death March rose, impromptu, from the collective. Police lined the street, perhaps fearing for the safety of automobile traffic in the unlikely event of a violent Sith uprising. Nerds from all walks of life were boxed in, compounded, eager faces lifted to the night sky and to the neon hum of the black lights that poked gingerly above the crowd here and there.

We ducked our heads, every once in a while, to awkwardly spill our remaining beers towards an approximation of our mouths. Street cops. "It doesn't even matter, man," one nearby kid said. "STAR WARS!" As if Star Wars trumps Open Liquor. What Star Wars did give us, however, was a crowd so tightly packed that anybody looking to forcibly frown on our drinking would be thwarted by the complex path-making algorithms necessary to weave, shove and slide through such dense humanity. Still, poor policing.

So here we are, a game studies theorist (me) and a hyper-realist (Laura) and a whole shitload of people who are spouting off one-liners from a twenty-year-old movie. And we are all thirsty for each others' blood. We are the select subsection of superfans, the several thousand who choose to waste their Friday nights on an imaginary duel. Justyna (experientialism of blackout drunkenness) shows up and the battle is ON! Or would be, if Newmindspace had got things started on time.

In theory they were going to give everyone a cardboard tube, painted in some garishly fluorescent colour - just like in the movies! - and our mission was essentially to kick the shit out of each other en masse. Why? Because we're 'reclaiming public space'. In reality the public space to be reclaimed was far too small for the number of eager reclaimers present, and any lightsabre fights were seemingly to take place in extremely close quarters: with elbows, headbutts and snarls of Force-powered rage. The crush towards the distributed lightsabres/cardboard tubes was akin to that of an aid distribution centre in Rwanda, or a mid-sized metal show, or a frenzied mob looking to tear a fallen dictator apart with their bare hands. It was a masterful cross-section of twenty-first century living: we fought, tooth and nail, for a cardboard tube.

In the end I lost all my friends in the crush, shared a joint with some businessman-looking guy (poor policing), and helped organize a Red Army of Dignified Communists to make a run down the unguarded left flank towards the cardboard munitions. The sabres were all gone by the time we made it there, but as the carnage began tubes flew everywhere in various stages of unravellings and disrepair. I, for one, got hold of a half-sabre (lightdagger?) and got to work shanking people in the ribs.

As far as legitimate art or newsworthy goings-ons in Toronto are concerned, this wasn't 'it' in my opinion. This was some unorganized, imperative madness. But I suppose there is something to be said for a city that allows its citizens to peaceably gather... for the purpose of hyper-realized violence lovingly guided and inspired by Jesus-like Space Movies. That's benevolence. That's free speech. That's some real fucking indulgence.

They say Jedi shows up enough on census religion surveys to form a legitimate claim to legal deification: what I saw this weekend was a little less hardcore than eating the flesh of a god-child, but a little more hardcore than eating a piece of bread and pretending you're a cannibal. I think Star Wars would do very well as a fundamentalist religion: you've got more than enough zealots out there already. I'm still agnostic.

To give you an idea of the mind-wrenching decisions I have to make every day, I will now inventory the contents of the Billy Bragg Black Backpack. Yes, bloggity, we have reached an all new low... but at least you're still on life support. The plug is only inches away, you son of a gun!

-one (1) super-heavy course pack: Communications and International Development. The closest thing I have to anti-theft defense.

-one (1) hackeysack. The closest thing I have to athletics.

-five (5) pens. This is too many pens.

-one (1) office-sized stapler. York has free printing but no staplers... what a bunch of fingerpainting wanksters.

-one (1) hastily-written treatise on the ideology of white privilege that still needs to be marked.

-one (1) half-empty mickey of Canadian Club. Useful for treating gashes and other wounds. Apply to afflicted area, or to the mouth-hole.

-one (1) belt. Thought you could hide from me forever, eh belt?!? I'm going to wear you RIGHT NOW.

-one (1) bottle of Heinz-brand relish. Where did you come from?

-one (1) copy of Maclean's. Another provocative cover story about George W. Bush! This time they are comparing him to a baked bean (sexually).

While it is dreadful genocide to be living far from the downtown core, being fully prepared for a day estranged from the comforts of home is important. No, the Guitar Hero guitar will not fit. No, the Silver God is far too heavy and awesomely big to be a portable laptop. It is a 'home' laptop, that stays at home. Yes, remember to bring your USB key. And bring a bow tie, just in case you run into an old friend on the street and they invite you to the opera because their date was run over by a subway train. Bring kleenex. Stuff that backpack full.

I am contemplating turning you into a robot-teen-disco sex fetish site.

I also have another conference bag to add to the collection. Every conference packs up this heap of shit that they give you when you register. Usually it's a totebag full of pamphlets and information about the host city, a conference schedule and some other neat, yet ultimately useless, knick-knacks. The Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education gave me a waterproof poncho, for example. AoIR kept it simple and gave me a wallet-slash-nametag-slash-change purse. It is well understood by all parties involved that these things will never be used beyond the confines of the conference in question, but dammit we paid $250 for something. It's akin to the mentality behind buying computer software and feeling vindicated because it comes wrapped in ten billion manuals and layers of plastic wrap: you feel happy that there's something tangible there, even if it's just garbage. Bang for the buck.

The conference itself was worthwhile, I don't mind saying. Henry Jenkins. danah boyd. Ian Bogost. These are the big, sexy, academic names that I didn't talk to. I did, however, drink ten billion cups of coffee (bang for the buck!) and jitter though presentation after presentation on World of Warcraft and Second Life, two places I don't think I ever want to visit. Interesting people milled and chatted and said deep things, and I don't think I've ever thought so much about Facebook, blogs and Web 2.0. Well not from a critical perspective, anyway. My brain literally ached at the end of each day, rattled about inside my skull with a nonstop barrage of theoretical bullets and "Yes that's interesting, but what if..."s. I met scholars whose names I forget but whose articles I've read before, somewhere, off in a library or a grad lounge. They came from Sweden and MIT and South Korea, linked worldwide by this crazy little Internet thing. They gave me buttons and business cards, and I gave them pieces of lint from my jacket pocket and refilled their coffees for them.

The Internet is a wonky-ass place, full of bizarre idiosyncrasies and there are plenty of people nerdy enough to study them. I am one of those people. There is a lot of mind-time wasted on topics which really don't deserve much thought. Conclusions are reached through multi-million dollar studies which any half-sane person could've deduced from five minutes of simple observation. Things are picked apart down to their barest bones before someone wisely (and inevitably) suggests that a "holistic, multi-disciplinary approach to further study is needed." But there are also a lot of people who are out there talking to users, to industry, to critics. They're poking and prodding at problems which genuinely have some bearing on our lives and culture. The real challenge seems to be figuring out which is which; what's drek and what's advancement in thought.

Someone should Wikipedia that.

This is the only picture I have from Waterloo's wunderbar Oktoberfest. Sometimes it's cool to be different.

We went to a hall nobody had ever heard of, because everywhere else was sold out. We watched cougars slink and prowl through the path of (annoyed) security staff, and learned surprising secrets about who's jerked off a horse and who hasn't. And we rode a crowded bus full of ready-to-puke saucepots back to the apartment, where teenaged nerdowells were waiting behind the ice rink for a snowball fight. Oh we gave 'em one, and saved the spirit of Oktober for yet another year.

And that's that.

Hans.

If you are a rather rich corporation trying to ride the nebulous, unpredictable wave of vapid indie culture, you would do best to minimize your involvement. Sure you might think that tacking your name to Nuit Blanche at every opportunity is a rad way to get 'in' with hipsters, but mostly they will sneer and say cynical things like, "TD has a better investment portfolio." It is nice to support the arts, but the credibility of the arts lies in critical detachment from the base, material things in society (yes, the baseness which funds them). Some people might say that it's best to be up-front about corporate sponsorship, but I think ignorant bliss is way better. That way you can fool yourself into thinking that you're being all counter-culture.

Anyway Scotiabank was everywhere, but I bank with TD so I was all like WHATEVER. I had just watched two hours of hardcore lesbian pornography and art films with girls pleasuring themselves with torn up pieces of pig heart, so at least I began with the correct Patron of the Arts mentality. That seemed to be the dominant mindset of the night - twentysomething couples strolling the streets with rolled-up copies of Now magazine, culturally smug. Of course nobody seemed to be thinking about any of the stuff they saw. They just went, saw, said "Huh," and proceeded onwards. It was like Pokemon: collect them all, see every exhibit, get some good watercooler conversation for Monday.

I met up with Jen outside the United Church on Bloor, roughly half an hour after I was supposed to be there. Luckily she is just as terrible a person as I am and was also half an hour late. I lost track of time having a beer with a burlesque troupe, she was being held captive by a gigantic locust in the middle of a football field. Shit happens, but I would've really liked to see that locust.

So we went into the church and I guess it's a little bit risque to have an avant-garde fashion show in a church? That seemed to be the deal, at least, and a line of people filed docilely past the fashion models while a DJ thumped out beats from the pulpit. Wooo!

Jen's friends had a subversive mission to film a certain number of exhibits for a school assignment, so in a way we were no better than those yuppies with their Nuit Blanche catch-em-all agenda. In another way we were much sweeter, because we roared around in a giant SUV and didn't have to cram onto the streetcars like the rest of the Patrons of the Arts. Over at Trinity Bellwoods the crowds milled around the centerpiece exhibits (as dictated by Now magazine, and Eye, and the National Post). There was a stag made out of chocolate. There was also this dome which was supposed to represent the "unilateral qualities of democracy", where equality liiiiiiiiiives and reconstructing a children's playground out of neon lights is apparently a mighty advancement in human expressionism.

The bathroom at Trinity Bellwoods was locked, so I peed on the door.

On a tennis court, a tent was set up and divided in half. Upon entry every punter was told that, "Life is about choices. Make a choice." - which was another way of saying that you can either go through the door on the left or the door on the right. The left door led to a brightly lit tribal bounce-fest while the right door led to a bunch of alarm clocks on a counter and a couple of bored-looking guys taking apart a turntable. The whole exhibit was about dream versus reality. Now I don't know if this was intended, but if the party side was 'dream' then the 'reality' side looked a whole lot like what happens in a club after all the party people go home to sleep. I kind of think the effect was a mistake due to technical difficulties, that reality was supposed to perhaps be a different kind of party, but oh well. This exhibit was the only one that remotely approached genuine insight. So what did we learn? Waking up sucks.

Onwards marched the documentarians, passing some godawful karaoke and a couple of dudes working an anvil on the back of a truck. Minus one documentarian who had to go dump her girlfriend and hook up with a new girlfriend (wheee lesbians!), I was now the key grip on the project. I carried the camera past stoners, stoners playing hackeysack, stoners looking bored, stoners recharging and stoners smoking illegal drugs. I was also charged with the solemn duty of watching for rapists and, if possible, prevention of rapes.

Walking walking walking... and soft? The lane was carpeted which was nice on the feet. Unfortunately a rather inane posted explanation for why the lane was carpeted made us laugh and ruined the magic. The creators gave us some carpet of our own. I ate mine.

These people weren't really an exhibit, but they functioned very well as one. Near-naked and crucified, three young activists must've asked What Would Jesus Do? His response, they decided, would be to make a spectacle of himself while protesting nuclear energy in Canada. So that's what they did. A crowd of angry drunken libertarians gathered around them and peppered them with drunken abuse - both informed and ill-informed. "Get off the cross!" "Wind power is too expensive to be implemented on a wide scale!" That sort of thing. The lone male crucifee fought back with the weary strength of a half-dead bull calf while his associate, So Very Green Girl, sang chants of the Maori tribe to herself consolingly. The third activist was very hot and so her role was to garner the sympathy / horny male vote with her exposed midriff.

Finally we came to the Fish in the Store. This was the big ticket exhibit in most publications, so predictably folk were milling and swarming about: "Ooooh, look, fish! Omigod, there's fish in there!" Indeed there were 'fish in there', and a lobster too. Silhouettes of gigantic fish swimming past silhouettes of floating chairs. Would've been a cool sight if I had just walked down the street and happened across it, but the hype and the welling crush of humanity eager to consume art was a bit of a buzzkill.

So everywhere I hear stuff about how Nuit Blanche wasn't as good as last year, but I'm pretty sure last year was just better because it was cold and raining and hardly anybody went. The problem, my friends, is people. The solution is rat poison in the coffeemaker. Another problem is art and how you, too, can be an artist if you can make some shit and then say some pretentious shit about your shit. It's a metaphor for democracy! For homophobia! An emblematic signifier of the struggles everybody has with their dualistic nature! Blah blah blah... anyway I sound like I hated it but in fact it was entertaining to be such a critical asshole, as always.

"Why can't we just say that 'pulling a Jen' means something good? Like 'having a whole lot of fun'?"

Our first opponents, a team cleverly titled "Freshmen", were a bunch of freshmen. First years. Rookies with lithe bodies, as yet untouched by the unflattering weight gains of the Frosh Fifteen. They quickly crushed us beneath their youthful heels, 'dodging' our cannonades and retaliating in kind. They threw balls at us: blue ones and yellow ones and red ones, while we kept tabs on how many of us got pegged in the face. The teammate with the most facials at the end of the season will get a prize, hopefully some sort of cold ice compress to ease the swelling beneath the eyes. I kicked someone in the kneecap with ill-spirit and poor sportsmanship. We lost.

Somewhat demoralized, we tried to do some team-building but nobody had seen a Disney sports movie in quite some time. Heartwarming speeches are hard to ad lib, y'know. Somebody actually writes that shit. So we practiced hitting each other in the face until our second set of adversaries showed up. Actually only four of them showed up, which is technically a forfeit, but we decided to let them play because we selfishly wanted to feel good about ourselves by destroying a severely handicapped team. They were freshmen too. As it turns out they gave us a run for our money but dodgeball is a war of attrition, my friends, and no matter how unskilled your army is you can still kill a lot of Krauts if you fire wildly into the air.

So we won, sorta, and our dodgeball future is off to a roaringly sexy start with a 1-1 Win-Loss record. It's not like the movie where every team you face is some sort of themed stereotype, unless that stereotype is good-natured, punk-ass kids. If we take on a bunch of Brazilian breakdancers next week I will let you know.

Chris: "Okay so elevator cinema refers to films that rely on layered realities, right? Like in the movies 13th Floor, or eXistenZ. But not the Matrix. That only has one layer of reality."

Class: *blank stares*

Chris: "Oh right, you guys grew up on Power Rangers and shit. Okay, so imagine you're having this dream where you are fighting all these pumpkin-headed monsters and then you wake up. WHEW! Only a dream! But then a pumpkin-head monster kicks down your door and you realize that you're still in the dream. And then you wake up again and go WHEW! Because the dream is over. You're actually on an airplane taking an uncomfortable nap. But then a pumpkin-head monster appears outside your window... it's flying! It's flying! It's gonna mess you up! And then you wake up. What's real? What's virtual? These are the questions which define elevator cinema."

Class: ?

Chris: "I can see you understand."

*Class draws a myriad of pictures of me being attacked and/or terrified by pumpkin-headed monsters as positive feedback that class has been a SUCCESS! Also a few queries: "What are you going to be for Halloween?"*

This is weird. We all know that Super Mario Brothers is a game. It might, in fact, be the game. But all the definitions of what a game entails demand interaction as a central function: ergodic activity, as supernerd Espen Aarseth puts it. There's gotta be a player, there needs to be some kind of feedback loop employed. Otherwise it's TV, or a movie, or jerk-off material, or whatever. Not a game. So here we have a veritable icon of video gaming (Mario the semi-retarded plumber!) subverted into passive entertainment. It's almost as curious as that awful movie they made.

However, the 'player' - or the person holding the controller - still has choice I guess. You can move or jump through the Perpetual Mario Machine levels... with the near-certain knowledge that you are dooming Mario through your participation. You can choose how he dies, if you wish, or you can hands-off and let him bumble towards a brighter future on his own. Interactivity is limited but it is there. Watch and Mario wins. Play and Mario dies. So yes, we're looking at a game here, but a pretty shitty one.

With a soft throbbing headache there is no drone. There is no buzz. Every conversation is a sharp shot, information about shopping being forced into a cranium which honestly has no desire to learn anything more about shopping. There's a sale here, there's a sale there, there's a sale everywhere. I am learning.

With a soft throbbing headache, it is possible to learn much more about the world than ever before. Instead of idly tuning everything out, you are tuning everything in. You may not want to, but the irreparable knowledge of where "that skank" got her "skank clothes" is lodged inside your squishy brain. H & M. She bought them at H & M, like everyone else. See? You still remember. There's a sale there right now, by the way.

For someone with a terribly poor memory, this soft throbbing headache is a remarkable boon. Toronto is eating you alive with its facile concerns, but now you know a secret: you can lightly bash your skull with a ballpeen hammer and while your ears ring the world is your Wikipedia.

DRAGON FORCE!

Of course, I'm too poor to buy Guitar Hero III. One of the things about grad school is that you feel like a big man when you find out that you're getting lots of funding. Then when it's time to GET that funding, and you need it for things like - say - food or rent or Guitar Hero III, your wang deflates. They give it to you parceled up in little chunks, starting well after the need for that money becomes desperate. They give it to you grudgingly. A many-ringed hand reaches out through a maze of red tape and paperwork and you snatch eagerly at the fistful of dollars it holds. But no! The hand pulls back into the morass, taunting you. Not yet, not yet. Wait it out little donkey.

A PhD guy in my program is planning on begging for change every morning, right outside the Graduate Studies office on Bay Street, until we get our cash. Employing shame, he will prostrate himself before the economic supermen (and superwomen) of this city. He will show them once and for all that academics are poor as fuck and that we, too, need handouts to fuel our brains.

Oftentimes I wonder why society would think it good and proper to fork out cash to thinkers, thinkers who most often don't contribute anything tangible back. Sure, we advance canonical thought here and there, and perhaps some psychology studies leak out into advertising and P.R., but for the most part academia is a sexy little bubble. We're really very lucky to get paid to do this. It's just hard to feel lucky when you're eating 79 cent cans of spaghetti.

A skyline perpetually under construction, featuring a tower that is a very, very big tower (also under construction).

The infamous 'seven-star' Sailboat Hotel, whose real name - as I recall - was the Burj-al-Arab. It's really hard to say that until you see it spelled out for you.

So many skyscrapers, so much steel. "Which hotel are you staying at?" "Oh, the one that looks like a sphinx with blood-red windowpanes for eyes."

The super-sexy Sheihk Ziyad neighbourhood, populated only by the super-sexy playas of roaring industry.

Here is where Muslims pray!

The Gold Souk, which unsurprisingly has many, many gold things for sale. Special discount for Canadians!

One tower or two? Hover over the image for solution!

Note: your browser may not support this quest for knowledge.

Feet a-burnin', face a-roastin', scuttle scurry back to air conditioning and Arabic music videos. Arabic music videos, as an end note, are entrancing in their ridiculousness. Guys sing their love for girls. Girls look alluring and properly disinterested until the guy smashes down their door, still singing, and forcibly molests them. Then they usually get married but sometimes the man, his passion slaked, decides that she's not really what he wants after all. Cue deux ex machina appearance of girl #2, who prances off into the sunset with her new rapist boyfriend. Original girl gets to cry on her bed for a while.

So the world seems a little bit absurd at the moment. I can't take it seriously: everything seems like a dream version of everything since I returned. By which I mean that course outlines and tutorials and a piece of paper proposing that I will eventually write something nice and spicy - well, none of this shit feels real to me. It's not immediate. Watching the sun bellow and blister as it's dragged beneath the horizon seems more immediate. Galactic warfare seems more immediate.

I imagine that seriousness will return eventually, like a dog that you never really liked. You drove it out into the sand dunes and left it there, figuring it could eat cacti and drink iguana pee. On the way home you remembered that movie Homeward Bound and thought, "I hope Seriousness isn't like those asshole pets from Homeward Bound. He better not come back somehow." But you're sure he won't, because he's pretty stupid (which is why you didn't like him in the first place). And Disney movies tend to portray animals with inordinately high I.Q.s, spawning a generation of disappointed kids crying because their clownfish won't quip. And then you pull into the driveway and there he is, Seriousness, sitting on the front steps with his tongue out and a big pile of poo on the mat. Not only is he smarter than you, but he's fast as fuck too.

But, of course, it's always better to be sick in the comfort of one's own home rather than a foreign country. The only thing worse than feeling wrung out like a janitor's towel is feeling wrung out like an Egyptian janitor's towel. So sorry, technical difficulties while I overcome the Africa inside of me.