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.

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.

I’m not even sure I need to justify this, and in fact, this or being a lumberjack, was a tough call. This may be even worse than a pepper spray tester.

I’ve often wondered how these guys can do it: standing in the washroom for 8 hours, handing out towels to D-bags and hoping to get a loonie in return. I was at Mod Club on Saturday, and I happened to be in the bathroom long enough to hear the kind of things he had to put up with. Not just the smell of urine, combined with booze and an array of bad to worse colognes, but to listen to big, white boys –most likely frat brothers– ask him the same questions over and over, on separate visits.

Sometimes its an immigrant named Pedro, other times its an old white guy in a tuxedo, probably looking to supplant his pension income. On this night, it was a young, black guy with the look of pure torture in his eyes. He didn’t even bother handing out towels or offer gum. He just sat on his stool, decaying from the acidic fumes in the washroom.

As I was standing in line waiting to pee, I witnessed two different meatheads come in after another and ask the poor guy, “Oh man, you must hear the craziest stories, eh! What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?” As if they were old friends. Maybe because he was black they thought it’d be cool to befriend him and hence be cool by association.

And just as I was leaving the washroom, I heard a third meathead burst into the washroom, yelling, screaming, singing and then striking up the exact same conversation with him as the previous two guys. I would not have blamed him, if he just lost it right there. “That’s it!” he’d yell. “Fuck this job!” And then maybe, spray a bottle of cologne right into their eyes and dunk their heads into the toilet. I could imagine that is what I’d do. But I wouldn’t have the same problems as he does. No one wants to befriend an Asian guy wearing an argyle sweater vest.

Maybe instead of community service, they should put criminals into these washrooms and make them work for free. Maybe instead of jail time, they were required to endure a few nights of this mental punishment; breathing in the urinal cake aroma and mopping up projectile vomit.

I hate having to tip those guys, seeing as I’m tipping the bartendars a buck a drink, but in some situations, I feel so bad for the guy, I just drop a fiver and then pee with an eased conscience the rest of the night.

My retirement plan

I’ve been back from Europe for two weeks and slowly getting into the rut of things again. My summer of unemployment is moving along smoothly and my weeks blur into my weekends; neither are so very different. I wake up, roll over to the living room and continue my foray into self-employment. I’ve recruited a friend to join me in my quest for emancipation. He’ll likely help out with business development.

We often have video conferences using Skype, sometimes daily. Its encouraging to talk to people when you’re self-employed and work from home, seeing as the most conversation I have is with my tequila bottle. I like to reach out to those who are in the same situation as me, and we form an ad hoc league of self-employed deadbeats.

He commented once, when we were Skyping, that the scenary never changes in the webcam. Sometimes I am topless, but the background is generally a scattering of papers, dying plants and biodegradable coffee cups. Perhaps I might surprise him one day and answer the video chat from my bathtub.

You might think of me as a Man of Leisure, but that is the whole point to being your own boss. You work at your own pace. I work during the mornings the best and rest during the afternoon, reading books on related materials. Sometimes I work late into the night, other times I work Sundays skipping meals. That is all part of the new world order for me.

I think back to my vacation in Europe, and when people ask me about it, I catch myself sounding like a tired old cliché. Is Europe a cliché? I have always thought so, doing my best to avoid Western Europe mostly, but wondering why do people have the same general experiences when going to Europe? “A revelatory experience!” or “I’m a changed man!” are the catch-phrases of European dilettantes upon their return. Though I cannot articulate why, I feel remorseful for feeling the same way.

I came home to an apartment strewn with cobwebs, a few knocked over potted plants and dishes I somehow missed cleaning before I left. The spiders did not miss me at all and I had to throw out a cup that became home to a colony of pathogens, nestled in a puff of orange, furry moss. And somehow, there are ants roaming freely in my apartment. At least, rent-freely.

Only two weeks ago, I was sharing a park bench with a bearded homeless man* as we silently watched the scene that revealed itself before us: the sun going down over Lake Zürich, young Italian travelers laughing by the port, a Swiss couple hand-in-hand walking along the dock and scooters zipping and buzzing by behind us. I had a small tupperware of mini-pepperettes which I would quietly pass over to him and we ate without saying a word. If that’s not romance, I wouldn’t know what is.

It’s scenes like those that I remember about my trip. That, or sitting in a big park in the middle of Stockholm with Liam, eating a torn off leg of a Tandoori chicken in one hand, and gripping the neck of a bottle of red wine with the other. Or jumping on a train to Vienna instead of a plane back home, looking to spend one more week, maybe seeing something I wasn’t expecting. Searching for moments, taking chances and never looking back.

I’ve been looking to gain clarity and see through the fog without the necessity of infrared glasses (although that might be pretty cool). The future remains uncertain, with only a shell of a plan for myself, so any guidance I can ascertain from reading these books will hopefully make me more sure-footed if not somewhat emboldened.

————-
*I met another homeless man at the train station (Zürich HB) later on that evening. I sat in the SBB lounge waiting for my train while he sat beside me. I offered him some of my aforementioned pepperettes. He began to speak to me about Che Guevara in German. None of which I understood. He was a large man, of about 50. Stood 6 feet tall, perhaps taller. He proceeded to pull up his pants (while explaining to me in German) and showed me his swollen ankles. Due to malnutrition I suppose, or possible walking a lot. He refused my pepperettes and walked away, but not before shaking my hand in gratitude.

]]> http://tantastik.org/blog/2009/07/22/international-man-of-leisure/feed/ 0 http://tantastik.org/blog/2009/06/24/how-swede-it-is/ http://tantastik.org/blog/2009/06/24/how-swede-it-is/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:59:56 +0000 tantastik http://tantastik.org/blog/?p=647

Mesmerized by the ugliest monument ever

It’s been a week since I’ve arrived in Stockholm. I’ve mostly walked and taken the local transit around town to see the city. The city is surprisingly smaller than I thought it would be. Mostly centered around the royal palace and shopping districts.

The people here are as rumours foretold: glamourous, stylish and beautiful. A few centuries of war, famine and disease have done well to clean out the gene pool. Most days, I meet Liam for lunch. We typically grab some take-out and sit in the park with his co-workers. The park is always full of people and there’s even a bar in one of the parks near Stureplan. I spent one lazy afternoon sitting at a floating bar by the water and even took a nap on the bench.

I spent yesterday afternoon wandering around Södermalms, one of the islands in Stockholm. There are so many islands in this archipelago I can imagine spending a few weeks just sailing around them all. I walked up and down the cobblestoned streets, for a few hours until resting at a small Indian food restaurant and sat outside for a mid-afternoon snack. Feeling my way around, I continued through the backstreets and wound up in a small city park that had a large fountain. The fountain had a sculpture of a viking beating down a dragon that spewed out water.

One of the great things about Sweden is all the public people spaces they have. Large squares, fountains, sculptures and various other centerpieces. In the round-about near the center of it all, there is a large (very ugly) monument in a fountain. Then there are benches lined up on the sidewalk for people to just sit and watch the fountain. It’s great for people watching too.

Today, I’m heading over to Djurgården island and maybe try to take in a couple museums or castles. Most of Europe can be described by a continent of museums and architecture. I’ve decided to extend my trip by a week to visit Vienna and Prague. I’ll be leaving for Zurich on Friday morning.

I landed in Paris early Tuesday morning. I had about 6 hours to kill before my flight to Stockholm so I decided to venture into the city for lunch. In the travel guide I had, it said there was a Pho restaurant tucked away on a side street in the Quartier Latin on rue Galande. If there’s one thing I need to try in Paris, its a big bowl of beef noodle soup!

It’s about 45 minutes to get into the city. After wandering the expansive terminals, I found the ticket booth and managed to purchase a ticket for 8,40 Euros and hop on the train bound for St. Michel Blvd. There, after stumbling through the subway terminals with my large backpack on, I went up the 8 stories (so it seemed) of escalators and walked into the most awe-strickening scene I have yet to remember. C’etait merveilleux la scène!

The architecture of the buildings were amazing. Medieval in style, castle-like in structure, the buildings rose above the streets. Packed cafes were brimming with tourists, sipping espressos out of tiny little cups. Scooters blazed by, leaving behind that distinctive sound of their motors. The smaller side streets were all cobble-stoned and took on a spirit of its own, running in any direction it pleased. I walked by Sorbonne University which was sitting amid the other buildings, wonderfully decadent and perennial in architecture. I circled the building but avoided the streams of tourists, mostly because I was trying to avoid contracting H1N1.

I picked a cobbled street at random and let the street guide me, not knowing where I’d end up. The streets were narrow and the sidewalks even more so. I hugged the curb trying not to knock anyout out when I turned and swung my backpack. Every so often, I’d check my iPhone for WiFi coverage. Paris apparently has free WiFi in the city (though I’ve yet to be successful in connecting).

I took left turns when I felt like it, and right turns when I saw something interesting. The streets bended and circled but I never felt lost. Like the Earth’s magnetic pull, I felt a tug towards the scent of beef balls. I endured the weight of my backpack for a little while longer, pausing briefly to admire or snap a photo of an interesting alleyway. In Europe, corridors of alleys have existed for centuries all waiting for me to take a photo of them. I paused before crossing the next street and looked up at the street signs: ‘Rue Galande’ it read. I smiled in part relief for having found the right street.

On a Tuesday afternoon, the neighbourhood was quieter. Perhaps it gets busier on weekends, or maybe I’ve just stumbled into a less popular area. I walked up in the direction where I thought my Viet-Parisian cousins would be, and sure enough there it was: Pho 67. What a strange name, I thought. What is the importance of 67 in Paris? As it turns out, that was the year Ho Chi Minh led the Tet Offensive and laid siege to South Vietnam. Wait a minute, this restaurant was a communist haven! Goddam commie lovers. And a bowl of Pho cost 13,00 euros! Who in their right mind pays that much for Pho, let alone Communist Pho? So, I went across the street and ate at the Italian cafe.

I stopped by L’Institut du Monde Arab for a quick look, then came back around to the train station to get back to the airport. After taking a brief nap on the most uncomfortable chair in the world, I got on a plane and headed to my next stop: Stockholm, Sweden. Liam has promised me meatballs and blonde haired girls, two of the best combinations you could ask for.

I’ve decided to leave my laptop at home, and bring a notepad and pen. For the most part, I’ll try to update with photos of my travels but likely, I’ll just post random notes when I find an Internet cafe. I’ve got an iPod and a pocket-book guide of Paris. Hopefully, that’s all I’ll need.

If you want a postcard, send me your mailing address!

Here’s a photo I took the other day with my phone of St. Lawrence Market, Toronto.

St. Lawrence Market, Toronto

The title is from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but I recently saw it used in this movie.

High Park, Toronto

In the first part of this series, I was on an interminable search for reversible suits. It appears, since then, I’ve found one but now it just sits in my closet with the tags still on, wrinkled due to the humidity. It was a very nice suit, designed by some Italian guy with tiny hands probably. I spent half my signing bonus from my previous job on this suit and its been over a year ago already. Unfortunately, I quit that job faster than you could say, corporate whore. And so, the suit remains.

These days, I am officially self-employed. Self-employed or unemployed, both generally mean the same thing for me. I work out of my second story apartment in the Junction: an undiscovered neighbourhood spilling over with struggling artists and people who can’t afford to live in the more affluent Bloor West Village. There are also those like me, just too stubborn or lazy to find a real job. I became quickly aware of the fact that I am also the only Asian in the village.

This last fact I found out recently as I was sitting at the Axis reading a book and having a pint. I’m not completely unaccustomed to being approached by leggy blonde girls (although I still have anxiety attacks when it happens and on good days, I am able to avoid throwing up on their shoes) but truthfully, girls that are too aggressive often scare the crap out of me. She sized me up and down, pointed out that there are no other Asian boys in this neighbourhood, and that this meeting was destiny. I could’ve used a bit of warning.

As much as I am for destiny, I fled the scene. I still couldn’t come to terms with being tied up, forced to wear army fatigues and being called General Tso. I don’t even like chicken balls! Do all girls have this same fantasy? Perhaps more research is needed.

Despite my occasional encounters with life or death, I try to maintain a positive outlook. I’ve recently found ways to curb my spending and limit myself to eating out less frequently. While living off my savings, I’ve had to find other ways to supplement my income without selling organs. Using every ounce of my creativity, nothing came to mind.

Then it occurred to me. During my baseball games, I always see these shabby looking people walking around, with their eyes trained on the ground, scanning, scanning, scanning. They carried large garbage bags and most of them could pass for an older version of me: old Chinese men or women stalking the parks of Toronto, waiting for people to finish their beers and then deftly swiping the empties off the benches. If a 70 year old lady can do this, then so can I! With competition like this, there was a certain amount of success guaranteed. I am not beneath wrestling feeble seniors for an empty magnum. That’s $0.20!

I decided to go for a test run with all the empties I could find in or near my apartment. Scurrying the quiet back alleys of the Junction, collecting beer cans, wine bottles and anything that I can exchange for at least a nickel I managed to fill up the trunk of my car and headed off.

I went to the LCBO first to drop off the wine bottles, but when I arrived, and unloaded my car, a homeless man came over to me. He looked at me, then looked at my pile of recyclables and I worried that I might need to defend my loot.

He had a deeply wrinkled face that was tanned from being outdoors every day. His clothes were grimy, held together by threads. His eyes didn’t look menacing beneath his grayed brow. I couldn’t help but notice that he rode a really sweet bike with fruit colour noisemakers on the spokes. I wondered if there was a kid somewhere missing his bike.

Our stand-off lasted only a few seconds before he raised his hand and pointed at the Beer Store next door. As a beginner, I clearly didn’t realize that the Liquor Store does not take empties, only the Beer Store does. How embarrassing. Here, was on-the-job training!

Relieved, I said thanks and reached down to offer him an empty bottle for his troubles, but when I looked up he had already rode off. I watched him ride away, listening to that distinctive plastic snapping sound of his bicycle wheels trail off into the distance. I’ll see you tomorrow at 5AM with your shopping cart, good sir! He didn’t look back.

It was a good first go at this, and after collecting my $11.20 I tried to bargain with the storekeeper for a 9-pack of Cameron’s. Of course, in this capitalist society, there will be no bartering at the Beer Store. So I put the $11 in a jar, and now I’ll see how much I can make from it over the summer. Its true, the rate of return is not high, but at least I’ll have co-workers again. Maybe we can all have lunch in the park.

This weekend, I spent most of it working on GoEyeball, preening and polishing. We just launched the redesign, and its now starting to gain momentum. There is some excitement there, especially when people find out that they can see a list of the most discounted items (i.e. have the biggest price drop) for free. People think we’re competing with Red Flag Deals, but in fact, I think we’d make great partners. Too bad they don’t see it that way.

Now, I’m neck-deep in Internet marketing and its a feeling somewhat foreign to me. I vaguely remember my life as a software programmer, too proud to resort to begging or too shy to reach out and network. Life in the world of business development requires a particular skill that most developers would shy away from. It requires the skill to communicate an idea without losing the audience; to reveal the hidden potential of a concept and to bring in customers without being needy. In these situations, all you can do is ask, ‘What would Obama do?’