[Continued from here. All articles in this series will be archived here]
My mom and I talked after this doctor left, as neither of us could recall which department he had said he was from. We joked desperately that perhaps he didn’t even work here. A twisted soul who came in off the street to give bad news to strangers. An angel of death.
A day or two passed. The junior geriatrics doctor met us and we discussed ‘the palliative option’. Then the junior geriatrics doctor brought the senior geriatrics doctor. They were kind and thorough. They echoed the angel of death. They described your state since the fall as a ‘delirium’, and said it was actively harmful to the brain. They said you would likely be much worse off, if you recovered, which now seemed unlikely.
By the time the geriatrics team was preparing to leave we had decided that you should go into palliative care. You did not deserve this suffering.
I cried when they left. Your breathing got quite bad – these ragged, grasping pulls of air. Sometimes it sounded like you were either trying to say something, or calling out in pain. My mom became upset and demanded a nurse give you some pain medicine. It helped. The machines now showed your vitals update every second and I watched them like a stock trader in the middle of a crash. I did get one glimpse of a smile when I talked to you – barely visible under your oxygen mask, but detectable in the creases of your eyes.
They told us we should go home and get some sleep so we tried it. That night was hard. Here I was, in my newly purchased home, drinking a scotch, and there you were, in some nether state of consciousness, labouring to breathe, completely alone. I wished I knew where you were, where you were going.
Early the next morning the phone rang. It was my mother – the hospital had called and you were not doing well. I called a cab. I was on Bayview when my mom called again and said you had died.
My sisters and mothers were there when I arrived. You were there in body only — I struggle uselessly to write about this moment, my sentences forming and then falling apart. My words like a bridge across a chasm, a bridge that falls away.
You had loved a particular song, one that you and I performed at my aunt’s funeral. We always knew we’d sing it at yours. I always knew I’d experience something like its final verse. Alyssa started singing it right there at your deathbed, and we all joined in.
Went back home, my home was lonesome Since my mother she been gone All my brothers, sisters crying What a home so sad and ‘lone.
Will the circle be unbroken, By and by, Lord, by and by. There’s a better home a-waitin’ In the sky, Lord, in the sky.
[Continued from here. All articles in this series will be archived here]
You fell. Two weeks later you fell again. But no one told my mom, so when she got in, she tried to get you out of your chair to bring you to the bathroom. You screamed in pain, then told her, “something important happened!”
It was a Tuesday. You had gotten up in the middle of the night, as you liked to. A caregiver came in to see you shaky in the middle of the room. You fell and she managed to protect your head, but you banged your hip and knee.
My mom asked one of the home officials if they would not do an x-ray, and he said the physiotherapist had examined you and you were fine. He moved your leg and said, “see? He’s fine.” Nonetheless my mom discovered she could insist on an x-ray. They said they would do it the next day at 2:30. She got there at 2 and they told her they had done it at 8am. They had only x-rayed your knee. It was fine.
My mom grew angry and told them they needed to do your hip. They said the doctor would examine him and see if it was necessary. But the doctor would not be in for a couple of days.
You were out of it now. You weren’t eating well for the first time in ages. When you had to be taken to the bathroom, we had to use an elaborate machine – kind of a crane for seniors. It hurt to look at this thing, to see your delicate sleeping frame being hauled like goods.
When the doctor did see you, it was the following Wednesday. She said you needed a hip x-ray. The machine was brought in the following day and it showed you had a broken hip.
You were taken to Sunnybrook hospital. They said they could operate and fix your hip, but if it had been a couple days later, they couldn’t have done it. If they did the operation, you might regain your previous mobility. If they didn’t, you’d never walk again. We decided you should get the operation.
Both your daughters came up, Heather and Alyssa. You were not conscious enough to respond to any of us. I took time off work. I would sit next to your bed and talk to you, but the only glimpses I got were the hint of a smile now and then.
The operation happened extremely late at night. We were there, waiting all day for it to happen. Finally they took you down. We followed, not knowing what to do with ourselves. One of the doctors came out and asked for us – you had become agitated as they moved you to the operating table. But finally it was done. We were told it could take hours and there was no point in staying, so we went home.
The next day we came in to find the operation had been a success. We waited for you to come to. Heather had to return to the states for her work. We waited the next day, and still you slept. The following day your breathing became laboured and your vitals got worse. They said you may have contracted pneumonia. We told Heather and she came back the following day.
The hip doctors had done their thing, and said you were now in the hands of the geriatrics. We waited for a visit from them. In the meantime we got a visit from another doctor. He introduced the idea of palliative care. You might very well recover, he said, but to some level below your previous baseline. And 50% of hip fractures over the age of 70 die within the year – it’s a sign of the body’s fundamental weakness. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Would your father want to live like this?”
I became angry. This was so obviously a speech he had given many times before, and his empathy was so manufactured. And how could we suddenly turn around and give up on you, after we had gone through all this? But at the same time the reasoning rang true. I felt like I was lost in a forest, and had just gotten my bearings to discover I was much further away from home than I thought. I might be angry about it, but it didn’t make me any closer to home.
Have you ever talked to an autodidact? That’s someone who is self-taught. If you have a lot of knowledge on a subject, that you acquired through institutional educational means, and you talk to someone about it who has simply gobbled up whatever they could find in an undirected manner, you will find a lot of passion, obviously, but you will also find huge gaps in their knowledge. They will have assigned special significance to insignificant events, and completely missed hugely significant ones.
That autodidact? That’s me with most things. On the internet, rampaging through chains of links, gobbling up data, blowing past important doors, not going into them, not even noticing them. It’s probably all of us; it’s built into the medium. It’s a web, but you can’t follow every strand. You choose one, then another, then another, mistaking the path you took for The Only Way.
I love bossa nova. When I went to university I took some of my parents’ records with me and one was Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim. I used to take naps to that motherfucker – it’s total elevator music; I have literally heard it playing in the supermarket – but it’s also beautiful, beautiful, rhythmic, symphonic. I have listened to many more bossa albums since then, and much more Brazilian music, but only today, in a Spotify web-strand-tugging escapade, do I find this song, considered “the all-time best Brazilian song” –
It’s written by Jobim; he did an English translation himself, and there are subtle and fascinating differences between the Portuguese and English versions, in part because rain in March means such difference things in the northern and southern hemispheres.
In summary: don’t take Brazilian music lessons from me, but here’s a beautiful song. And Happy March.
[Continued from here. All articles in this series will be archived here]
The building was still under construction when we took the tour, and it was just as under construction when you moved in. The inside was done, if sparsely decorated, but the gardens outside were unfinished. It was in an ex-industrial area of Scarborough. One of the neighbouring lots was a vast tract of under-construction townhomes. Another was an empty field apparently undergoing decontamination.
Pretty soon my mom had your room looking great, full of photos and paintings.
We had to buy you a wheelchair. It was an expensive, elaborate thing. You were permanently diapered, despite being continent when you were admitted. You could control your bowels and bladder but it could be a lot of effort getting you to the toilet and back because you were unstable on your feet.
Everyone on your floor was in a wheelchair. We began to wonder about that. My mom got in the habit of coming to see you every day around 3, and when she got there you’d be dying to take a leak. A lot of your fellow residents were always asking to be taken to the bathroom. The caregivers couldn’t seem to keep up. Dinners were theoretically at 5, but often it was 6 or 6:30 before you were served. There didn’t seem to be enough staff.
Months went by and the gardens outside were still ‘under construction.’ Ministry of Health officials were seen now and then, apparently evaluating the facility. You had a fall, but no big injuries. We asked about the toileting schedule. Apparently once every four hours was plenty. We objected. It was not until your daughter Heather, a doctor, visited that we got this reduced to two hours. They put a sign over your bed detailing this. No one seemed to notice. There was a high turnover rate in caregivers. We knew from talking to them that they were brutally overworked by the management. There were one or two amazing caregivers, and when they were on duty, my mom didn’t feel she had to be there as much. But they tended to quit before long.
I told you I had bought a house, and you asked, “does it have umps and muffles?”
Later you asked where my clothes were and I responded, I’m wearing them.
“No,” you clarified, “when do you close?”
Moments like that I would feel proud and elated that I had caught a glimpse of you. That beautiful smile of yours, that smile we can see in all your photos when you are looking at one of your children. That smile was still around.
I wondered what you thought about, how it felt to be you. I was pretty sure you could hear what I was saying, but your words came out all wrong. Did you know they were wrong, or did they sound right to you? We would always try and take you for a walk, but sometimes you would have trouble because the tiles on the floor seemed like rocks over a precipice. You would step gingerly from one black tile to the next.
When you were in bad shape, you simply slept, hunched forward in your wheelchair, drooling. If we weren’t there, we knew no one would wipe the spit away for hours.
That July, we celebrated your birthday. My other sister Alyssa was visiting with her kids. We booked the special room at the nursing home, and had a big meal, and cake. You seemed happy, despite everything.
[Continued from here. All articles in this series will be archived here]
After the first trip to the hospital you went back home. You said, “you really did it! You rebuilt it!” You thought it was a perfect replica of your house. I looked this up, it’s relatively common. it’s called reduplicative paramnesia.
Caregivers now came a few hours a day to help my mom. It wasn’t enough. After a few weeks you nearly attacked one of them, and then you collapsed. So back to emergency.
After the second trip to the hospital you never went home again. The second time, it seemed like no one could find the records of the first time. They kept on asking the same questions.
There was no way to bring you back home. My mom was exhausted. You had a bizarre sleep schedule that involved early morning roaming, which given your shaky limbs (also part of the disease) meant my mom would have to wake and keep an eye on you, which meant that by the time of this second stay, she hadn’t had a good sleep in weeks.
They moved you to a place called Toronto Rehab, which had a floor for geriatrics. They took all the problem cases from nursing homes. The first time my girlfriend visited there she burst out crying. Many of the patients were far gone, difficult and screamy. There was a smell. But it was not a bad place – the nurses were incredible.
Your roommate Brian was deaf, blind and demented and he would call out to his dead wife in a boomy, old-style radio DJ voice. One time he started masturbating during dinner. A lot of us laughed.
They had you on anti-psychotics which made you much less prone to the sort of paranoid visions that had caused the two hospital visits. These were so uncharacteristic of you; it was a relief when they abated. You were quiet, withdrawn, and often amiable. Your awareness took on a multi-day cycle, from sleepy and unresponsive to borderline agitated a few days later. At your most aware you were unhappy with your situation. Who wouldn’t be – as a solidly independent man for the majority of your life, being so helpless must have enraged you.
Toronto Rehab was merely a temporary stop on a trip that would take you to a “long term care facility”, i.e. a nursing home. These things are often privately run, but in our province anyway the admissions list and the funding is administered by the government. You can choose three homes and then you go on a waiting list. My mom and I toured many facilities across the city. There are tons of them, huge buildings nestled into every community that you somehow never notice until you are looking for them. Most are horrible. Some are beautiful. The former have short waiting lists. The latter can take years. Of course we wanted the best for you, so we had you signed up for three homes with long waiting lists, the shortest being six months to a year.
In emergency situations – and in our province taking up a hospital bed like in Toronto Rehab is considered an emergency – you go on the ‘crisis list.’ This means you get priority placement ahead of anyone on the normal list. So you were on this special list, but even after two months passed there were still no openings for you. The government representatives started saying we’d have to choose somewhere with less of a wait or they would send us to the next available facility, meaning one of the horrible places.
We had seen a place in Scarborough that was a new building, beautiful and bright, that an older, previously all-female facility was in the process of moving into. It was far from us, but it seemed like a good place. They weren’t afraid to show us the dementia ward on the tour, which seemed refreshingly honest. So we signed you up, and a few weeks later you were moving in.
There turned out to be something wrong with this place.
We used to be told that the use of language is what distinguishes us from the animals. That was before we realized that dolphins were basically talking… and whales, birds, etc. etc. Or, humans use tools, no animal does that. Except chimps. And then was it opposable thumbs? Whoever thought that didn’t have raccoons prying open his green bin every night. I’ve also heard empathy proferred as the trait that earns us our “human” membership badge. Except… goddamn dirty apes again.
The Netflix doc series Cooked, an adaptation of Michael Pollan’s latest book, argues that cooking is what makes us human. Animals all eat raw food. Gorillas spend half their waking hours masticating. (And the other half masturbating? Sorry. Could not resist the punny punch-up opportunity.) Humans have smaller jaws and slenderer gut-zones and big juicy brains because it’s easier to ingest cooked stuff so we can get more energy into us to make our brains all big and juicy.
It’s a nice theory, and especially comforting for those of us who actually cook – but how long until they discover a raccoon who is loading garbage into a castoff crock pot? A chimp roasting chestnuts over an open fire? Fire Eagle, the Fire Breathing Eagle and Southern Barbeque Pitmaster? Or fucking bees, does that count?
Let me get ahead of this potential fiasco and list off some things that are still exclusive to humans so we can use it in our brand positioning:
We are the only animal to practice genocide. So there’s that.
Jazz. Only human musicians have the sophistication to play jazz.
I have mixed feelings about cars, which really comes from my parents. My dad grew up in the midwest; when he was a teen he was a real gearhead and used to basically build cars from scratch. But he lived in NYC for ages and then downtown Toronto and was definitely fond of cities, bikes, walking etc. My mom grew up in Europe and her tastes for the different modalities of urban transport basically reflect that. When I was a kid we always had a car, but only one, and it was always an econobox, often used.
I grew up loving cars, being especially fond of identifying the different makes and models on the road. That was my go-to road trip game. In high school we all wanted them; we all had that traditional north american thing where the car is the symbol of adulthood, freedom, (social) mobility etc. We were jealous of the rich kids who got their own cars for their 16th birthdays. Yet maybe around university I stopped caring about them, and through a young adulthood of living in the city cores of Montreal and then Toronto it never seemed to make any sense to get one. I could have had a beater Dodge Colt hand-me-down from my folks in the mid-2000s and I tried it out for a bit and just got too many parking tickets and generally found it expensive and unneccessary. Not being much of a sportsman, I had come to rely on walking and biking for my exercise, and if I drove everywhere I’d have to either join a gym, take up a sport, do a shit ton of pushups at home, stop eating so many burgers, or get pretty fat? No thanks.
I think if you spend a lot of time in a car, you start to internalize the car’s point of view. The same is true of bikes, transit and walking. So over the years I developed a rather strong non-car perspective. Why was it ok that car “accidents” were the leading cause of death for young people? Why were street lights timed to cars and not pedestrians? Why did 150 people in a streetcar have to wait 1 minute for a single occupancy vehicle to turn left? Could the relationship between our relatively low gas taxes compared to Europe, our relatively high car dependence and our relatively high obesity be any clearer?
More tomorrow. Thrills, I know. But also, I promise this isn’t a car hater post (skip to 6:40 ish)…
If there were a scene in which the line “forget it, Jake, it’s Leslieville” were uttered, it would take place in front of a cupcake bakery, with a smokestack in the far background. We moved here five years ago when we bought our house, when it was one of two reasonably walkable neighbourhoods in Toronto that first-time buyers could afford (now, there are none). Originally one of Toronto’s streetcar suburbs, at the time we moved in, Leslieville had a lot of hype (NY Times article comparing it to Brooklyn and shit!), that left this city kid a little disappointed.
I grew up around Bathurst and Bloor, and post-college lived in apartments a little west of there. That area has plenty of bars and restaurants but also markets, supermarkets, flower stores and stationery stores. It’s dense, and there’s a mix of uses (jobs as well as houses). In short, it’s a well-functioning, diverse urban environment. Leslieville five years ago seemed a little short of that. It had lots of pricey restaurants, mid-century modern antique stores, and cupcake bakeries, but no markets to speak of save for the massive, car-centered Loblaws along Lakeshore. Stores tended to be closed at odd hours. Weekday nights were deadsville. It was cupcake urbanism, more of a recreational destination for nearby neighbourhoods (I’m convinced half the patrons in Leslieville restos are actually from the Beach) than a functioning liveable hood.
That’s changed for the better since then. Condos have sprung up along Carlaw and elsewhere, and rental prices further west have gotten out of hand. The net result is more millenials moving in, which has helped the neighbourhood get denser and more lively. There are more options for smaller walkable markets now (and there not even all super-expensive!). Leslieville still doesn’t have enough jobs, which means fewer people here during the day, which makes it harder for local businesses to sustain themselves. But the studios along Eastern have been busier with the slide of the Canadian peso.
And there’s something nice about the concept of the streetcar suburb, a walkable area that is nonetheless less dense than the city core. There are several parks within walking distance of my house, and the beach a quick bike ride away. During these cold winter days I think longingly of the cycle tracks along Lakeshore.
Editor’s note: I hummed and hawwed about this post because I don’t love it. It’s true, what it says, but it leaves too much out. Leslieville has a lot of interesting history, for example! Also, shitty ending. But, I’m doing a post a day, so gotta ship it out anyway! Sorry
This the most entertaining and terrifying US election I remember. It’s fascinating from a Canadian POV. Bernie Sanders could be a middle-of-the-road member of two of our major parties (he’s pushing for single-payer health care, not nationalizing any industries – other than health care I guess!), and I feel like policy-wise he’s closest to what I want. But is he electable? Conventional wisdom would say the dems need a centrist, and a Clinton-Trump matchup seems to favour Clinton, whereas Trump vs Sanders scares me. But maybe the emerging Democratic majority has finally emerged, and it’s possible an avowed social democrat (democratic socialist?) can win…? Question mark? It still seems like that sentence needed a question mark.
On the republican side, it’s especially entertaining and terrifying. Part of me thinks Trump can’t call Mexicans rapists and win the election (if Republicans can’t win over Latinos, they can’t win Florida, which basically means they can’t win). So in some ways I want him to be the candidate. But having a crypto-fascist making it all the way to the general election is very scary. And most of his competitors are equally scary, especially “melting goblin” Ted Cruz (I did not invent that slur nor do I remember where I saw it – somewhere on Twitter – and I don’t like making fun of people’s looks, and that’s not why he’s scary, but it’s kinda funny – man this is an absurd parenthetical).
It just feels unpredictable, which is exciting. And terrifying.
If I were going to join a religion it would have to be something dedicated to the chef Mark Bittman. I’ve always wanted to be good at cooking but it didn’t seem to be in my nature. I was too slavishly devoted to the recipe. All I could do was follow it word for word. If I was missing one thing I didn’t know how to substitute and would wind up messing up. It wasn’t a resilient way to cook, but worse, it wasn’t any fun. And so I’d cook the handful of recipes I knew really well, and rarely try much else.
Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, in iPad form, changed all that. The way he presents recipes just clicked with my brain. He gives you a recipe in its most stripped-down form, and then presents a handful of variations. His stripped-down chili non carne, for example, not only omits the meat but also the tomatoes and almost everything other than spice and pinto beans. The variations add them back in and give you an option for “white chili” which I really need to try. It doesn’t hurt that he is a clear, concise and personable writer, but the proof is ultimately in the chili: I have gotten great results nearly every time with his recipes. And the whole approach has hammered into my mind that I can change any recipe I want to anything else. This has been a wonderful, life-transforming thing, no joke. Now I enjoy cooking. It’s not a grim word-for-word recitation, it’s a chance to explore.
The How to Cook Everything app is a little long in the tooth now (never got the iOS 7 makeover), but I still use it all the time. It’s also available in book form and it is ENORMOUS. It’s best thought of as a modern-day Joy of Cooking. He’s got other books, like Kitchen Matrix which takes his variations to their logical extreme. Come. Join me in the Church of Bittman.
Motherfucker I’m running behind here. Didn’t get a post done yesterday, nothing yet today. I was sick yesterday and EXTREMELY low energy. I have this excercise app that I got a few days ago and generally it is THRILLED with me. It’s all about the health benefits of a half hour of low impact exercise (walking) per day. Turns out I get a half hour just dropping the kid off at school and coming in to work. So this thing was logging me at 60, 90 minutes a day. I am ranked like #8 in the region! It’s hard to imagine it being hard to get a half hour of walking in – until you are sick in bed all day. I got like 10 minutes exercise. Not great. Today I drove so I’m only at 17. If you want to get a half hour of walking in DON’T DRIVE! So anyway the app keeps on sending these notifications, “maybe take a walk?” “Walk around the block?” “Time to stretch your legs”. Nag nag nag.
While sick I logged a lot of Jessica Jones. It’s a good show. I wasn’t hugely taken by Daredevil but JJ is more my speed. Writing and acting are higher quality, and it has that quality I love in imaginative stories – the fantastic as an attention-getting metaphor for very real, very human, very mundane stories. In this case a strong woman can’t come to terms with how an abusive partner was able to override her feelings and make her do things she didn’t want to do. JJ super power is physical strength, but not endurance; she can lift cars but still get shot, she can jump high but could break her legs on landing. Her nemesis is Killgrave, who can make people do whatever he wants. He’s the ultimate entitled white guy character. JJ is essentially a PTSD sufferer and is rendered accurately, movingly: drinking problem, fits of rage, overactive defense systems.
So that’s all the time we have for today – a jumbled piece of diarist crap that nonetheless fulfills my self-imposed quota!
She says to me, “want to play daughter”? Of course I do.
This means I will play the daughter and she will play the “momma”. So she gets to make all the rules, which is the whole point of the operation – a carnivalesque flip of the power dynamic.
She orders me to get into bed (the couch); she pulls a blanket over me.
“Read to me,” I say. I play my part by saying things she would say.
“No,” she says. “I won’t read to you because you didn’t listen to me.”
“I need a hug and kiss.”
“Hug but no kiss.”
She’ll enforce the pretend sleeping – if I open my eyes I find her standing over me, vigilant, ready to threaten the suspension of dessert prospects, or milk rights. But after a spell, after she’s put the pretend puppy to bed and she’s pretend slept herself, she wakes me up, and offers dinner. It’s really a plastic turkey on a plastic saucer, but that’s not how she spins it.
“Here, it’s pepperoni and cheese and watermelon and peanut pizza but I have to take off the peanuts because I’m allergic.”
After dinner we have to drive to a picnic. I sit on the floor and she straps me into the child seat with the sash from a bathrobe. She sits on a wood box, mimics the steering wheel, and makes maybe the cutest driving sound I have ever heard.
It’s all warped and distorted, but it’s clearly a portrait of her world. Little chores, duties, orders given. Punishments and rewards. Do we really seem this stern to her? Does she really think we’d serve her peanuts?
The journey takes about half a second. We get out and we go to the store to get food for the picnic. “Come with me!” she says, and opens the fridge. She starts looking for food.
Real food, I note.
I come out of character and insist certain things aren’t taken out of the fridge. It’s starting to look like the pretend picnic is morphing into real eating, as we’re playing to kill time while her mom makes dinner and she’s starting to get real hungry.
We negotiate, and settle on a handful of blueberries. I get four spoons as ordered, and a bowl. Pretty soon real dinner happens, and play stops. She’s not the boss anymore.
I signed up for Apple Music when it came out and have been using ever since. I first tried Spotify about a year ago but didn’t pay for it; didn’t love it. I went back and started a trial of the pay version a couple weeks ago.
Streaming music is a tradeoff. On the one hand you get basically ALLMUSIC for cheap. On the other hand you don’t own any of it. That last part was a hangup for me as I am literally and figuratively very invested in my music collection. However I have tried to sidestep the issue by contemplating music’s fundamentally intangible quality. It’s, like, not really there and shit, so can you really own it anyway? Man?
You can certainly rent it from one of these two services.
I really enjoy hunting down music, so I wasn’t looking for any assistance with “music discovery”, but indeed that’s what impressed me right away about Apple Music. Like predecessor Beats Music, its claim to fame is its “curation” by “humans” and at first those hand-picked playlists were fun to explore. There weren’t really enough of them though. However, there are also algorithmic album suggestions which I found were quite good. Amusingly they often suggested albums I already had in my library; also amusingly, I actually found that useful.
Apple Music has huge problems, however. Firstly, on the Mac it’s grafted onto the aged iTunes, which is best imagined as an ancient, rickety donkey which has already had a whale, lion and giant squid grafted onto it. All of its knees have exploded and been put back together with duct tape.
Secondly, both iTunes and Music on iOS are buggy AF. I often try to go to an artist page only to get a completely blank one. Or, a song just stops playing halfway through (especially infuriating in the car or when my hands are in a sinkful of water). Or, some tracks are just greyed out for some reason on some days. Who knows. It’s like the back end just isn’t into it, like it’s being run by a bunch of sullen teens who keep on getting distracted by Snapchat or whatever.
But Spotify? Damn, son.
I didn’t like Spotify using the free version – poor sound quality plus ads every four songs or so made for a crappy experience. But once you pay up you’re good. If the “discovery” was good with Apple Music, with Spotify it is almost too good. I am finding a new, awesome artist like every day, and that seems constrained by my available attention bandwidth. Score this round to the machines.
I also like that I can make a playlist, that it is default public, and people can “subscribe” to it. On Apple Music it’s like only all-powerful yet anonymous genius types who can present you with playlists, but on Spotify anyone can “curate”, including your friends – which would seem to offer more value anyway, and be more analagous with the real world.
My only real complaint is that Spotify hasn’t bothered to get the “AllMusic”:http://allmusic.com licence. I stumble upon some new artist and I want to know a bit of background, and I keep on jumping out to Google. But that’s living. A++, highly recommended, would listen to again.
Was talking to a fellow dad at a party once and he asked how old my child was, and she was like 20 months at the time. He said that was an amazing age, between 18 months and 3 years. I had never heard that before. You hear about terrible twos, or that threes are actually worse, and that babies are horrible, etc. etc. (No, babies are not horrible, but they won’t sleep through the night for the first three months, and they won’t really acknowledge you for like six months or so.)
But the age he was talking about was so great because so many systems are coming online and develop at an incredible pace. Mobility and language are the big ones; the child has probably just managed to walk, but does it shakily at 18 months. Likewise it can string some words together, or maybe just lay down individual words. But by three this kid is going to be running, jumping, and motormouthing on and on, and seeing those skills come together is someting else.
I love when they don’t quite say things right. Yesterday I was tired and got sign-off on a nap. My daughter hadn’t gone down for hers yet. She looked at me, sighed and said, “okay, I’ll show you where your bed is.” She went up to the bedroom, started turning off the lights, and said, “I’ll turn the dark on for you.”
Blogathon update: I don’t have much time today and I’m not feeling particularily content-generational so I went looking through my archive of draft posts and found this one from last summer about one of my favourite parks. I’ve added a little to it but it still doesn’t feel finished, but so be it.
The square is hidden, almost. It’s at the centre of a bustling downtown block, but it’s not visible from the street. You walk between two buildings, or down an alley, and there it is. It’s small, more a parkette than a park. But it is well-used by the groups that know about it: office smokers, the homeless, and birds. Occasionally a gaggle of newcomers will notice it from the market building that abuts its southern edge and abscond to the square to eat their lunch. I like to think they are bound to return.
The market building used to be an actual market which included a butcher that hung chicken corpses in the window. That space is now occupied by a bubble tea house and a bakery that sells cronuts. There are a couple other fast food-ish places – jerk chicken and somalian food – but much of the space is empty. It was much busier a decade ago, when Big Stan’s burger house and The Lunch Box lured in visitors, but the landlord raised the rent drastically and all of the tenants were forced to move. Apparently the landlord owns a club or two and is much more interested in those properties. He stores some surplus kitchen equipment in an unused portion of the market, which would be better used maybe on seating for the restaurants’ customers but oh well.
The jerk chicken restaurant occupies the space closest to the square and the smell of jerk dominates the air. It’s called The Jerk Joint and it is excellent. The chef gets in at 5:30 every morning and starts a laborious yet nose-pleasing series of smokings, rubs, and marinations. If you bring your jerk chicken to the square to eat you will surely be visited by wasps, and birds will gather about you eagerly. There are flocks of pigeons and sparrows in the rather ample canopy of the square – so much so that you should watch where you sit. A frosting of bird shit coats many of the benches and many parts of the concrete retaining wall that skirts the square.
There is a condo building on the western edge, next to the design store Umbra, and a strip of row houses to the east, which are largely split into rental apartments. In the north there is the butt end of a public pool building. Along the alleys that demarcate the edges of the park prowl infrequent service vans, cars pulling out of the condo parking, and the odd Mercedes belonging to a Queen Street restaurant owner.
Smokers descend from their creative-class office buildings and chat in groups, or pace while on the phone. If you’ve quit smoking but have temporarily relapsed, this is the place for you, away from the judgmental eyes of your co-workers. You can take a break and observe the migratory patterns of the birds or the homeless. The park tends to house only one or two homeless people at a time. There are more later in the day, but it usually sleeps only one or two. Last summer there was a masked transgendered homeless who slept in the middle of the open area of the park. She had a friend stay with her for a few days, and then he was gone, and then she was gone. This summer there is an old man on a bike, who sleeps on one of the benches in the shady area at the south end. He is very polite, and collects bottles from the condo recycling bins.
The park has a dense tangle of trees, landscaping, paths and benches in its south end. Its middle is largely open, a sun-trap mini-field that gets little play in the summer. The north end by the pool building has a ring of seating and if it has a primary use, it’s weed smoking. The concrete mini-wall along the edges of the park means that there’s almost always somewhere to sit.
If you’re ever around Queen and John and you need some refuge from tourists, shopping and nose rings, wander north-east a touch. This could be the place for you.
OK I’m heading into this one blind, totally blind, so it’s probably gonna be shit. Back story: I’m doing a blog post a day. Links don’t count. YouTube videos don’t count. I have to write something.
I have a bunch of topics, there are always topics. Here is a tag cloud that swirls around my life: preschooler dad Leslieville Toronto Canada US-election 501-streetcar transit tech apple movies games gadgets home-reno modern-design cities coffee food slow-cooking music memories the-future the-past 40something regret love family nesting farts
I could go on. I am amazed, frankly, at the tags above that I have never posted to. Nothing about Leslieville? About my family? About the peculiar and wonderful habits of children? Yet how many posts about tech apple movies games and gadgets?
To cut myself some slack, I don’t ONLY write here. I write a journal, or rather a weekly writing exercise that often doubles as a journal. The more private things tend to get worked out, or not worked out, there. And I write a lot of posts that never get finished or published. A lot of those are tech posts where I stop caring enough to actually polish and post the thing.
I’m out, but before I go, here are the tags I wish described my life: ninja kickpunching heroic-rescue professional-jazz-drummer warrior-poet master-chef backflip space-travel giant-robot eye-lasers independently-wealthy
Note: Not sure whether this “project” applies to every single day of the month or only every weekday. We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.
I am going to write a god damn blog post, god damn it. This blog has been on my mind a lot, but I rarely do anything about it. Essentially I want to kinda redesign it a little and change out the back end, but is it worth doing all that for something I spend very little time doing? How committed am I to this?
(In case you hadn’t tuned out already, this is a category of post that is almost certainly uninteresting to read, in which the author questions his will to write. Imagine the signal shorting out and a graphic coming on the screen of a harried writer crying and drinking, and maybe tune in later. K?)
Like what’s this fucking thing for, basically? My story to myself about it is that I collect inputs of interest and then use it to process my thoughts via writing, which I think may have been the case at some point in the aughts (do people still say that, or do I sound like I’m a hundred years old). But now it’s more like, I link to interesting articles sometimes, or sometimes don’t, and then I want to post some pics or songs I like but it’s a pain in the ass and I only ever seem to be grabbing five minutes here and there because I have a three year old and a full time job and if I’m not tending to one of those things I’m collapsing sighingly into the couch with Netflix and an overgenerous pour of the brown liquor which gives you Energy and Strength.
But I also think the things I was used to writing about, to thinking about, to wanting to process, are no longer the things I currently need to process. I would like the life-stream aspects of this thing to function properly, yes – hence the desired move to a back-end system that is not like a cobwebbed abandoned relic – but perhaps the more important thing to figure out is what I do really want to write about, and perhaps I am unwilling to cast myself as the mommy blogger or home-reno douchebag I appear to be transforming into? I would LOVE to write more about the collapse of my industry (TV! Lol) but that is far from politically expedient. I am not an exhibitionist, honest, so perhaps at times I wonder if I want to be posting anything on here at all, but then I consider how our in our self-surveilling society it is better to treat this as the Age of Honesty and Openness and if you don’t post it yourself it’s just gonna wind up on checkoutthisfuckingagingbloggerdipshit.gif anyway. I mean it’s 2016, I’m aware no one writes blogs anymore. I know you’re all on the Facing Books posting cat anus selfies or whatever it is you do over there.
Anyway. Clearly I have lost the ability to actually edit blog posts, along with write them. So here is what I will do. I will post one post a day, for a month, and then see how I feel about the whole operation. So adjust your RSS feeds accordingly haha WOW! OK I’ll get back in my time capsule and head to whenever the year of RSS and stunt blogging marathons was – 1989? No but seriously see you here tomorrow and if I don’t show up, flash that crying writer PNG again in your very understanding and hopefully forgiving mind.
This is a post for bike month, continuing from this one. All of these live here, in reverse chronological order.
So yeah, I wound up buying a Simcoe. These are city bikes designed with Toronto in mind. They have all the city bike conveniences, plus some weather resistance, yet don’t feel heavy or slow.
The Bad
I bought this bike the first year it came out, which sums up most of my criticisms. A lot of the accessories were not firmly attached – the fenders came loose quickly and made a horrifying rattle; the kickstand came loose and was of debatable quality anyway, so I replaced it.
I was surprised by the weight of the thing. Any of my beater mountain bikes would be lighter. That dismayed me.
I was holding out for the “Signature Edition” 7-speed but it was delayed and I needed a bike, so I got the cheaper 3-speed. I say cheaper, but the bike was still like $900, which is more than all of my previous bike purchases put together.
The Ugly
It was supposed to be blue, but it’s really a blue-green that honestly I’m not that fond of. Ok honestly? There’s no real ugly to be had here. It’s just a riff on a movie title that doesn’t quite match. I mean I would probably choose a modern bike style over the Simcoe’s retro looks, but this bike is, to continue the metaphoric math, better looking than all of my previous bike purchases put together.
The Good
Everything else. Even some of the bads.
Despite the weight, because of the slimmer tires and the quality components, this bike rolls faster than … all of my previous bikes put together. A few pedals and I glide for ages.
I thought three gears would be a problem – my last bike had 21 – but if anything, it’s a blessing. There’s just less fussy stuff to do. Plus internal hub gearing is much smoother than the usual derailleurs, and it allows for a full chain guard, which means I’ve never gotten bike grease on my pants. The fenders are also great (and should be on every bike); I’ve ridden a few times in the rain without incident. Nothing to be afraid of.
I’m no bike expert, and I can’t compare the Simcoe to other bikes in its category. But I love it. It obviously signifies something special to me – a new way of looking at biking. A new chance at mobility.
Three years ago, I eagerly hopped on my bike for the first ride of the spring and rode up my alley to Dundas East, where I needed to turn left. It was rush hour, so cars were backed up waiting for the light. All I needed to do was make my way through these stationary cars and get to the bike lane just beyond. I saw a gap between a car and a pickup truck, so I went for it. The truck pulled forward and blocked my way.
The driver yelled at me, saying I should walk my bike to the lights at Greenwood and cross there. Said lights were currently changing, so now I was stuck as oncoming traffic headed toward me. The truck pulled away. I yelled “thanks” – I intended it to be dripping with sarcasm but really it was soaked in futility. Someone must have let me in, but the damage was done.
Hopefully I don’t have to point out that the truck driver was wrong about bikes and intersections (bikes are considered legally “road vehicles”, the same as cars, with few exceptions1). Or that he was an asshole. But it goes to show how bad it can be biking in this city, much like in many North American cities, I’d guess. My first ride of the year was not even a minute old before someone was needlessly endangering me. More frequently it’s carelessness rather than spite, but the latter does happen. I could feel things getting worse as Rob Ford’s mayoralty sunk in. He campaigned on ending “the war on the car”, on banning streetcars and condemning bikes to trails. Most drivers are decent people, but Rob Ford’s road rager transportation philosophy made the assholes feel empowered.
There is definitely a correlation between geography and belief. The relative car-dependence of downtown Toronto vs. its suburbs goes a long way toward explaining the political divide between the regions. As density increases, the traffic gets worse, and the only way to alleviate it is to encourage walking, bikes and transit, which often takes road space away from the operators of private motor vehicles, which makes them feel beset upon, despite their continued position of privilege in perhaps every regard of urban transportation other than cost. Even that is debatable.
It doesn’t have to be this bad, and hopefully now that Ford is just a councillor again it can start to get better. The results of the Richmond/Adelaide Cycle Track pilot project are in. These physically separated bike lanes took away a car lane but tripled the number of cyclists using the route, despite their stumpy length. Perhaps more interesting is the survey feedback. Of the 1424 survey respondents who self-identified as non-bikers, 54% strongly agreed the lanes should be made permanent. Only 25% strongly disagreed. Even more interesting, data indicates that car travel time has actually improved since the lanes went in. One more bike is one less car, quite often, and that should encourage both cyclists and drivers.
1 Bikes are not allowed on highways, and are expected to keep to the side of the road where safety permits.
Or, third post for bike month, continuing from this one. All of these live here, in reverse chronological order.
As I learned more about city bikes, the thing that really amazed me was how I had bought into this weird suburban attitude towards bikes without realizing it. I always bought beater mountain bikes, and I was always proud of how cheap they were. Yet they were always falling apart, sometimes dangerously so, and with the slightest hint of rain they would spray water everywhere. Even stranger, I was always obsessing about speed when biking. I’d get pissed if someone passed me, I’d be proud of quick times, and generally enjoyed biking as hard and as fast as possible – even though I am not hard, fast, adrenaline-soaked, or performance-oriented in basically any other sphere of my life.
Let’s go back to the back for a second. As I mentioned in the previous post, a couple years ago, I started getting these shooting pains in my back and down one of my legs. It started getting worse. I was diagnosed with sciatica, a classic old man disease I was somewhat disappointed to be getting a sneak preview of in my 30s.
Sciatica is a mysterious illness. I was told it was probably caused by a herniated disc, but no imaging was done so it was never clear what caused it. Apparently since the treatment is the same (physio) in almost all cases no matter what caused it, they don’t spend the money to find out. Could have been spine gremlins!
They told me that 90% of cases are fully recovered within 9 months. They said it didn’t necessarily take that long, but that was how the study was done. I was also told that I would probably feel it on and off for the rest of my life.
It got worse over a couple weeks until I couldn’t walk or stand for more than 5 minutes at a time. Then I slipped and fell and made it worse. I missed work for 2 weeks and spent them lying down – I couldn’t even sit.
I kept going to physio, and got gradually better over a few months. But I had to evolve a bunch of new habits when walking around the city. Every step was painful, so I was moving with the speed of an 80-year-old. No jaywalking, no rushing to make lights. No rushing at all. Over the next months, as my back slowly healed, the walking got easier – but I kept the slow motion habits. I had come to like them. What was the rush? It would take me a bit longer to get places but I would enjoy the trip more. Toronto is a lively city, and walking around it, when you take the time and let your senses roam a bit, feels like a privilege. When you’re rushing you’re fixated on one thing – the menacing abstraction of a clock counting down. When you slow down you can absorb everything.
Thinking about getting back on a bike, I realized that not only would the bike have to be upright, but my attitude would have to be a whole lot… slower.
It’s now about a year into my personal slow-food biking renaissance, and I can report in a bit. A key part is obviously biking slower, but that’s not all of it. In fact, that’s the easy part. I also have been trying to cut out a bunch of behavioural shortcuts that one tends to do when rushing. With walking it’s basically jaywalking, but with biking this can be: not stopping at stop signs or lights, going the wrong way down one way streets, passing stopped cyclists at intersections, riding through crosswalks, etc. etc. You do them when you’re in a rush or just impatient, but almost all of them compromise your safety. Or make you less predictable to your fellow road-users and/or make you an asshole. And if you’re not actually in a rush – or even if you are – is it worth it? Leave earlier and just relax.
This slow-bike attitude isn’t always easy to pull off, though. In my experience, the more separated the bike route, the easier it is to maintain. If you’re in mixed traffic with cars, you wind up absorbing their pace and stress.
This sort of meanders naturally from the previous post.
So yeah, I was making some discoveries about bike types, including the surprisingly practical Dutch bikes, which no one seems to use here.
Except, they do. Sort of.
Dutch bikes are a type of city bike, which is sometimes also called a utility bike, a cruiser or a roadster.
Doing my research for possible bike purchases, I stumbled upon Simcoe, a new Canadian bike company. As it turns out, it was run by the people who do Curbside Cycle, an Annex bike store I had visited many times. Their specialty? City bikes.
Also, talking. Listening to the mighty Eric get rhapsodical about Simcoe, I learned a lot about these city bikes. Here’s an interview with him that will provide a reasonable facsimile of the experience:
You can create a direct link between the decline of the bicycle and mid-20th century suburban expansion. At the turn of 20th century, North American cities supported a dense urban culture where 90% of activities took place within 10km of your home. In that situation, the bicycle was an ideal mode of transportation and upright bikes, or “city-bikes,” were everywhere. But as suburbs evolved and people began to live further from their daily destinations, the bicycle fell into relative disuse. Cycling also didn’t really work in suburbs because cul-de-sacs don’t encourage terribly serious biking. Your main supplier in that situation is a store like Canadian Tire where you could buy relatively inexpensive, lesser quality bikes. Out in the countryside, cycling evolved into an adrenaline sport, i.e. performance road racing, mountain biking and BMX and whole new bicycle varieties were invented while cycling’s urban antecedents was slowly stripped away.
More thrilling heroics on this topic in the next post.
About two years ago I started having back problems that turned out to be a dreaded old man disease: sciatica. At one point I couldn’t sit or stand without great pain – I spent a week lying on the floor. Fun!
It gradually got better, and once recovered, I was never happier to just walk around. But chronic aftereffects remain, and I have had to adjust a lot of things in my life, from work to posture to one of the best things in life: cycling.
My physiotherapist simply said, get an upright bike. I had never thought about relative uprightness of different bike frames before. There was a lot going on there.
Here are four different bike types:
Mountain bike
This is what I always used to buy. I would spend very little money on them and I would brag about it. My logic was that with Toronto streets not being shy with the potholes, having some tread on your tires is probably a good thing. But really it’s designed for offroading. It’s missing a lot of things that might be handy for what I do 99% of the time, which is ride around the city. I used to just not ride if it was raining, for example, as the lack of fenders meant I’d get extra soaked by water flying off the tires. It’s also not great for troubled backs.
Road bike
I never rode these, as I once saw someone riding one hit a pebble and wipe out. Now I know that many other factors may have been at play, including tire thickness. And when I look up bike taxonomy things get confusing: what is the exact definition of a road bike? I most associate road bikes with the drop handlebars, I suppose. And I think of these models as the fastest. They are also the bikes that require the most hunched-over riding position, which makes them a no-go for Old Man Back.
Dandyhorse
OK, no one rides this anymore, but isn’t it awesome?
Dutch Bike
When I was looking at possible new back-friendly bikes, I talked to my sister, who had just spent a year with her family in the Netherlands. She told me all about Dutch bike infrastructure, culture, and the actual bikes themselves. They are very different from mountain and road bikes. They ride upright, and the emphasis is on utility, durability and style over speed or sportiness. You can make out in this pic a few features lacking in the other bikes:
internal gearing – more reliable and durable than external derailleurs
built-in dynamo lights, powered by the motion of the bike
chain guard – to avoid fouling your pantleg on the chain
rack – the bike equivalent of a car’s trunk.
fenders – makes it a lot easier to ride in the rain
Clearly, the Dutch had spent a lot more time thinking about biking than I had. More in the next post.
It’s bike month! It starts on May 25th… Or maybe it starts June 1? So maybe it’s not bike month? Whatever. Any month you can bike is bike month.
In honour of this sacred time, I’m going to publish a series of posts about my experience with bikes. Okay, most of it is really from one super long draft that got completely out of hand and makes more sense as a series of posts.
If you hate bikes, or are simply indifferent, I would understand if you looked away, but I’ll try to keep things accessible. Part of the point I’m going to make is that bikes shouldn’t be some niche thing, it should be an option for everyone, and if the infrastructure in your area precludes this (I’m looking at you, most of North America), it is something we should be working on.
Been digging on Uncle Sid’s latest treat, Starships. It’s Civ Rev meets Ace Patrol, with a turn-based space squad combat game tied to a 4X-lite empire builder. It’s pretty fun – although at the default difficulty level, it’s a bit of a breeze. But if you want to play on “Hard” difficulty or above, some strategy is required. So, here we are!
Specialization
Starships has different victory conditions, and they require different strategies. Here are the types of victory:
Population – control 51% of the galaxy’s population
Wonder – control seven wonders
Tech – upgrade three technologies to level 6
Domination – be the last surviving player. I’m not sure how you get this without already having achieved a population victory, though. Since you can choose to limit your game to one victory type, perhaps that’s the only way.
It’s important to keep in mind that the resources in Starships each apply to a separate improvement category:
food – used to build cities, increasing population and thus the output of all resources from that planet
science – used to get tech upgrades, which affect your starships only
metals – used to build wonders and upgrades to planets. With the exception of the warp nexus and the megabots (more on those later), each upgrade increases the output of a resource.
energy – used to upgrade starships
credits are the exception as they can be exchanged into any other resource, although your exchange rate in each category will get worse the more you do it.
The other important things are your affinity and leader, both chosen at the start of the game. Here are the affinities and the bonuses they get:
Supremacy: start the game with a wonder already built
Harmony: half price starship repairs
Purity: doubled resource rewards for completing missions
And here are the non-catchily-named leaders:
Barre: reduces the cost of cities by 25%
Sochua: two random tech upgrades
Kavitha: one extra city
Elodie: 10% morale boost
Kozlov: 25% metal production boost
Hutama: always gets a first visit influence bonus
Fielding: generates 50 credits per city per turn
Depending on the victory you are going for, you want to choose a matching leader and affinity, and concentrate on certain resources. Here are some ideas:
Population – choose Purity (a good all-rounder) and as a leader try Barre or Hutama. Focus on food production and build lots of cities. You will also want to expand, as adding systems to your federation will also add to your population.
Wonder – the wonder victory is perhaps the easiest. You will want to make a lot of metal. Choose Kozlov as a leader and supremacy as your affinity, for the free Wonder. Upgrade your planets’ metal production first, then build Wonders wherever you can. Some are better than others (more on that later). Wonders in systems you take from rival civs count toward your seven wonders, so don’t play too defensively.
Tech – this is a hard one as the tech upgrade prices seem to increase at a faster rate than the wonders. Definitely take Sochua as your leader. Affinity doesn’t really matter. Concentrate on science production. As for the techs to upgrade, some are cheaper than others (torpedoes, stealth, sensors), but the more expensive ones (shields, lasers, armor, cannons) have a more direct effect on ship combat ability. I particularly like stealth and fighters – again, more on this in a sec.
Domination – I haven’t actually won this sort yet, so this is speculative, but go with harmony as your ships are gonna get battered. Elodie and Hutama would be good leaders. Focus on energy production, and to a lesser extent science and metal and use the metal to amp up energy facilities and to build some combat-improving wonders.
Expansion
No matter which victory you are trying for, you will want to expand as much as you can in the early parts of the game. Not all systems are created equal, so focus on systems that have advantages you want, whether in the rewards for missions or for their production boost in one resource or another. That said, you will also want to favour those systems that your neighbouring federations are closer to.
The default map size is pretty small and with a high default number of competitors, you are going to bump into them right quick. If you like that, great! If not, the largest map still isn’t that big, so pick that and maybe also drop your number of rivals down – although this does make the game a bit easier.
In terms of the missions you have to do to win favour, green are easy, orange are medium and red are hard. If you are going science you should bend over backwards for the free tech upgrade missions.
A big help in expansion, and also in the defence of your systems, are the warp nexus improvements. Normally travel decreases your crew morale until you have to take a shore leave, aka end your turn. However, travel between systems with warp nexuses (nexi?) doesn’t hit morale at all. Building these things lets you scoot around the galaxy much faster.
Also, let’s say a neighbouring civ decides to attack you and your fleet is on the other edge of the galaxy (it will happen). Normally, you start that battle with one or two ships from your fleet, plus whatever megabots you have built. The rest of your fleet shows up after a number of turns that correspond to the distance of your fleet from the system you’re defending. If you have tons of warp nexuses, you could drop that number to zero. So it’s better to build them than putting money into megabots.
Combat
Since expansion is a must, so is combat. Some general pointers that you’ve probably figured out: use cover. Try to get behind your enemy. Impulse power lets you move an extra hex, or turn to face a better direction, but usually means you can’t attack. Where possible, you want to attack from the open, but save a few movement points so you can get behind cover for the enemy’s turn.
And, again, you’ll need to specialize. On easy you can just upgrade all parts of your ships without thinking too hard about it – but on hard, you don’t have that luxury. You can build specialist ships, and you’ll want some of that: fast ships pair well with plasma cannons, slow ships with lasers; you can have carriers, torpedo boats, etc. But you will also want to tailor your fleet as a whole to match your other improvements. Wonders and science are important to consider.
Take stealth, for example. At its highest, your ship is undetectable unless the enemy is in a neighbouring hex. There is a Wonder that automatically engages your cloaking device every turn. Plus, the stealth-related technology improvements are cheaper than some of the others. All these bonuses stack to make your fleet a squad of mysterious ninja ships, caring not for cover, stepping out from the shadows to blast the enemy, only to vanish again.
Also consider fighters. You may have discounted them since a base model fighter is essentially a one-shot kill for your opponent, and it takes a turn to deploy them. Think again. Upgrading the fighter technology gives your fighters random improvements: some will get extra armour, some extra guns, etc. The more you upgrade the better your fighters will be. By the end of a recent game my fighters typically had 90 armor – that’s basically a destroyer, and each of your ships can have eight of them! The wonder that gives you two actions per unit per turn means that your carriers can discharge two fighters a round. Some other handy wonders for the fighter enthusiast are the one that allows passage through almost any asteroid hex, one that lets your fighters move immediately upon deployment, and the one that lets you make three moves on impulse power. Finally, let’s not forget that even when the enemy takes your fighters out right after they deploy, it’s still to your advantage. The rather crappy AI tends to target fighters, and that’s good, as you can use them as decoys. You don’t have to pay to have fighters repaired like you do with your capital ships.
I also must give torpedoes their due. They can be frustrating since you can’t be sure of hitting anything. However, even a single vanilla torpedo is useful in that it strongly discourages the enemy from entering part of the board. Given that asteroid fields often constrain available paths, this can be hugely helpful. Again upgrades can make them much more menacing: you can use science to up the damage they do, which is already substantial, and certain Wonders can make them undetectable or faster, with longer range. If you manage to get stealth torpedoes, equip them on several of your ships and start your turn firing torpedoes down every path the AI is likely to take to get to you. Even without stealth this is a good tactic; I’ve won a battle using only torpedoes this way.
Final notes
Not only do you have to win, you have to do it before your opponents do. Keep an eye on what’s going on during their turns, and while the diplomacy aspect of this game is mostly useless, you can get your rivals to brag about both their achievements, which can keep you appraised of impending science and Wonder victories, and their fleet, which can let you know if it’s wise to attack them or not.
Positioning is important. You may want to take your Shore Leave in a system a rival is likely to attack. You can also decide by their fleet’s position, and by the visible buildout of warp nexuses, when and where to attack them.
If you do fight a rival civ and win, keep going. Often they can’t or don’t repair their ships after a fight, and you can take a few systems for the price of a few tediously one-sided victories. Also, if you move into their system when they are weakened, hit the ‘negotiate with…’ button to see what they’re offering. Tech upgrades are a possibility, and they may be worth giving up on a system for.
Any comments? Stuff I missed? I am @dsankey on Twitter, hit me up there.
