tantastik dot org

I’ve been recently looking for an apartment downtown but its taken me quite a long time. It took me nearly two years to move out of my parent’s place from Mississauga after I came back from Vancouver. In fact, my parents still think I live at home. Last week, my mom said she saw me on the subway getting off at High Park station. I told her that’s where I lived. She promptly called my sister and told her that I was living in a park somewhere and that someone should intervene before I was eaten alive by rabid dogs.

Now, I’m ready to upgrade my apartment and move out of the tree fort I’ve built in High Park. At least, for my own mother’s peace of mind. Maybe I’ll even invite them over for tea and ask them to bring me my mail.

I don’t have many requirements for life: dark hardwood or laminate floors, 6 appliances including ensuite washer and dryer, free parking, proximity to Pho restaurants, and enough space to work; also enough space for my microphone stand and Rockband drums (possibly to be upgraded to real drums in the near future).

Henry gave me the microphone stand last week. Mostly out of pity, I think. I suppose when he came over and saw me rocking out on my drums with the microphone duct-taped to my chest, he felt bad for me. His eyes revealed everything. I’ve never seen that look of total and absolute admiration!

The rumours you have heard are true. I have in fact considered busking for a living with my Rockband set. I love Rockband, but they don’t make it easy for the lonely and solitary rockers. I seldom have friends over, but when they do visit, this rock band of one becomes a rock band of two. Sometimes two friends come over and then I think, Is it true? Could it be? A rock band of three?

I only need a guitarist and bassist as I haven’t quite figured out how to play guitar, drum and sing at the same time yet. My entire goal is to learn to play In the Air Tonight in a gorilla suit with a glass of milk. Before this, I couldn’t ever imagine getting there without all the neck injuries I’d have trying to balance a microphone and play drums at the same time. But now that I have a microphone stand, just think of all the duct tape I’ll save!

There aren’t that many places in Toronto that could house me and my traveling band for the amount I can afford. I’ve slowly lowered my expectations of finding the perfect place. I have also given up on purchasing a home — well, at least until I can do it online. If I can buy a wife online, why not a house? I likely wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage on a single income anyway. No one is going to give a self-employed web developer a mortgage. Not even PC Financial!

As much as I’d love to have a two-level loft with exposed brick and 12′ ceilings in Liberty Village, I will just need to bide my time and continue renting. I often wonder if I only want that loft to feel accomplished or successful. But then again, what is victory without the spoils?

I suppose this is all fairly new to me as I’ve never actually had to find an apartment in Toronto before. I’ve always lived off the remains of friends who became former tenants; like a red fox taking over the abandoned den of another burrowing animal.

My current place is Jeff’s old place and it has served me well. Aside from the mice and leaking ceilings and occasional hammering from the pipes when I flush, it’s pretty much ideal. It even has a “feature wall”. I do like living in this area, and I really love claiming that I run around High Park every day. Most people just assume I live here because I run marathons, but they don’t realize, I also eat a lot of pork belly.

Eventually, I’ll just settle for a home somewhere around King West near all the skinny-jean hipsters and scowl at them when I walk to Starbucks. It’s unforgiveable that these people pose as struggling artists, but somehow can afford living in a loft in King West. Go on, just revel in your disdain of the free-market system and drink your over-priced organic vegan fair trade soy latte. Those skinny jeans you’re wearing were made in China!

I woke up early on Saturday hoping to get a head start on the weekend. There was much to do this weekend, including visiting my parents and downloading New Moon. Yes, it’s probably only available in shaky camcorder TeleSync, but there are times that you might crave a Tim Horton’s double-double coffee and even though you know fully well that you are lactose intolerant, you still just have to have it. The aftermath of these decisions are altogether rather similar.

Imagine my surprise when I went to mininova.org and all I saw were globally available and legal torrents. Boring! But of course, I wasn’t that surprised. How surprised can you be when yet another popular torrent indexing site goes down. In fact, I was usually surprised when I would go to the site and see that it was still up. And profitable, despite its .org designation. I never did find out which charity it was supporting.

They didn’t even bother being discreet, since they based their domain name on suprnova.org — its original predecessor. You can’t run a bit torrent indexing site and expect it to be kept a secret for very long (I tried to keep it to myself for as long as possible). Even oink.me.uk, a referral only and registration-based music distribution site couldn’t remain hidden for more than a week. Of course, there’s also the golden rule of the Internet: If you want to keep something a secret on the Internet, don’t tell Google.

Mother BREIN

I’ve actually been following the ongoing saga on Torrent Freak for the past year or so. I started following these cases since oink went down. These legal battles interest me, more because I am continually amazed at the blatant idiocy of these giant lobby groups like BREIN.EU, the most recent public enemy since the RIAA stopped suing dead grandmothers. Once all the torrent sites moved to Europe, BREIN revealed itself to the public and joined in the whack-a-mole game, that these recording industry lobby groups love so much, of trying to take down every single web site that even mentions torrents.

File sharing and torrents have instantly capitalized on the distributed nature of the Internet and suddenly you have a global distribution network overnight. Why don’t recording industry executives like this? They can’t figure out how to make money from it and they can’t control it. The fear of not being able to control the distribution has caused them to deny its very existence and they will destroy what they don’t understand.

The irony is that the typical person that purchases CDs probably wouldn’t know how to use Bit Torrent anyway. Its not like Mininova had a user manual or a tutorial or even a 1-800 call center.

Try explaining how Bit Torrent works to your mother, and by the time you’re done, she’s already at Zellers buying Season 2 of Quantum Leap for you for Christmas. “Stop wasting your time, you need to get me a bag of rice,” she says. She’s right though. Trying to download Season 2 of Quantum Leap when there are only 3 seeders (and they’re all in Sweden) is a daunting task.

So now what? Am I to watch G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra TS camcorder edition for the 10th time? I can barely make out Sienna Miller with all this pixelation and I missed a tight-spandex moment when someone’s head bobbed up and blocked the projector. What kind of shoddy video recording workmanship is this?

How should we rally to go against giant lobby groups like BREIN? The more I read about these legal cases, the more discouraged I am at the disorganized nature of my fellow revolutionists; a group of dissidents that can’t even agree on how to pronounce “warez” (is it two syllables or one?); a group of rebels who take great pleasures in typos that are ruining the English language. To think that some day, “pwned” or “noob” could be added to the English dictionary. That would be ‘teh suck’.

As much as I would hope for an end to the BREINs of the world, I can’t help but wonder  how this particular group could ever become organized enough to make a real stand, let alone be capable of withstanding a cross-examination without reverting to anxiety attacks, several games of Halo and consequently bad-mouthing their enemies on mIRC. After all, I use to be –and still am to some extent (but I suck at Halo)– one of them.

These days, I have been steadily preparing for a new era. The second decade of the 21st century awaits, with maybe two more years left before the end of civilization as we know it. With a few attempts at dating, and then keeping work projects from going SNAFU, I’ve found little time to do my own laundry (but I hear you can out-source that). I forget appointments and often end up late picking my mother up to go to her eye doctor’s appointment. My mother is very punctual, but unfortunately, I am not.

We have a good system. I take her to the doctor’s, she prepares containers full of food for me to take home. Usually, its two hours spent at the doctor’s with her, and I am kept in the waiting room while she has her eye exams done. The office is an IKEA showcase room with the standard placements of generic black and white photos in dark-stained frames. In the massive waiting area, rows of chairs line up against each other back-to-back. Mounted on the ceiling are large flat-screen televisions playing Pink Panther starring Steve Martin on a continuous loop. In the past year that I’ve been taking my mother here, I’ve seen this movie nearly 50 times. Once, I filled out a feedback/comment survey and wrote in large black letters, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CHANGE YOUR MOVIE. That is all.” Since then, they have alternated with Jim Carey’s 2005 box-office hit, Fun with Dick and Jane, a movie determined to destroy your will to live.

I’ve been thinking lately that I need something to help me keep track of my appointments. Something in the way of a voice recorder that translates to Outlook appointments, or barring that, maybe a midget. Maybe a midget that follows me around with a pad of paper and pen. Maybe he’s wearing a tuxedo. Who knows. The point is, I need something to keep my life in order.

Maybe he would keep an eye on my steak so that anxious waitresses would not take my meal away from me, before even finishing half of it. It was probably my fault for looking away, momentarily being distracted with conversation.

It amazes me that at some point in the past, I was able to remember so much more. Before cell phones, we use to memorize phone numbers. Before GPS, I use to have to plan ahead. Now, most of things I need can be made available on demand. Now all that space that use to be reserved for information is a vacuous hole of grey matter. There is nothing left up there.

For the past three years, I’ve meticulously replaced all that space with movie trivia and various theories about Lost. Has my life gotten better? Has the utility in my daily life been increased? And how much would a midget assistant (MA) actually cost?

There is no certainty what will happen in 2010. Nick and I have an office now up at Yonge and Eglinton and maybe GoEyeball will start to take off. The goal of this all is to be liberated from full time work. The 9-5 life is foreign to me now. I can’t seem to be convinced that that is the best way to spend your life. There has to be a better way.