So much poop

When I bought my condo there was pigeon netting covering the balcony.  It was ugly, but I figured it must be necessary if everyone had it up.  Over the next few years it decayed, and finally I tore it all down.  Never once did I see a pigeon.  For ten years the balcony stayed happily free of both pigeon netting and pigeons.

But not anymore.  This past month pigeons have taken up residence on my balcony and made a gigantic mess of the place.  We have constantly heard their cooing noises and rushed out to the balcony to yell at them.  Being hardened avian citizens of Toronto they are used to humans fussing at them and we had to get awfully close to make them run away.  Apparently they are quite sure that fussing does not lead to actual danger.

After a few weeks of this the balcony was covered in bird poop.  I got increasingly frustrated by seeing a place I love to hang out become coated in it, and realized that the fussing was worthless.

Today I went outside and the pigeon wouldn't move even when I got right up into its face.  When I came within centimeters of the creature it finally flew away, and lo and behold I found the reason for its incredible courage.

Not only am I running a dorm room for pigeons who make a mess and never clean up, I am also apparently running a pigeon factory to produce more of the pests.

Time to fix this mess!

I realized that the pigeons must be on my balcony for a reason - they are hunting for nesting areas.  They clearly want to be secure from the elements and hidden from the birds of prey that hunt them, so I yanked everything off the balcony.  The bike we had stored out there for years is now given away, the chairs are packed into corners or our storage locker, and the balcony is empty, except for the spattering of bird poop stains everywhere.  I will clean those up properly once it isn't freezing out there.

I also have to figure out what to do with the pigeon egg.  Pinkie Pie was sad at the prospect of tossing it out, I don't know if eating a pigeon egg is a good idea, and while I wanted to get rid of it with extreme prejudice, maybe a 'kill em all' approach isn't the best behaviour to model with a kid.  Children make simple things more complicated!

And then I will put up some new damn netting.  We had a good ten years there with no pigeons, but I guess the wheel has turned round again.

A deadly virus

This past weekend The Flautist, Naked Man, Amazon, Wendy, myself, and two people who don't yet have creative names on my blog all went to do an escape game called Pathogen.  It is held at a fantastic escape room place here in Toronto that I have been to before, and I have been consistently impressed with its offerings.  This latest one was no exception.

Note that I will be discussing some things about the escape game, so there will be thematic spoilers.  However, I won't discuss any of the puzzles directly, so it shouldn't affect your results, should you attempt it.

The theme of Pathogen is that we are doing a heist in a dystopian future.  There is a deadly virus and we have to break into the place holding it.  The environment felt a lot like the Portal game - futuristic computer panels and graphics combined with tubes and knobs.  A slick mishmash of high tech and functional engineering is how I would describe it.  It works.

In every escape room group you need to figure out how to divide up jobs.  We have a bunch of puzzle experts in the group so I figured I would take the role of large man who whacks things.  You don't have to destroy stuff to win an escape room of course, but sometimes having someone focus on the physical tasks is beneficial.  Plus I take immense glee in throwing myself down dark tunnels not knowing what is at the end and I do not fear dirt nor discomfort.

Naked Man organized the group, and he puts together a good crew.  He certainly wants to set records, and he knows a lot of people who are good at this sort of thing, so getting onto his teams is a good way to experience success.  When I am not around he generally gets to be the one doing the physical tasks, but it is hard to do that in a group I am in because I am already throwing myself down the tunnel and you can just try to catch up.

I ended up being a bit of a hybrid between solving puzzles and doing physical tasks.  I figured out a couple of the puzzles on my own and was part of a team doing others.  As usual after we ended the round there were some puzzles I had absolutely no idea about that other people solved while I wasn't looking - I could probably run the game again and spend half my time doing totally new things.  However, I absolutely got to do the most fun physical part of the game - lasers!  You know in movies when the protagonist is sneaking through a maze of lasers to get to the thing?  I got to do that, on a clock, worried about alarms.  It was magnificent.  It turns out that you can finish the lasers either by being small or by being tall, but if you are neither you are pretty screwed.  Thankfully I have the tall bit all wrapped up and I completed the lasers quickly without any alarms blaring.  I also got to crawl through tunnels and tubes which was excellent.

The theme of Pathogen was brilliantly executed.  I felt wrapped up in the show, to the extent that at one point I thought "We need to get in the elevator and go to another floor in this building"... and then remembered that the 'elevator' is just a room with some display panels, not an actual elevator!  There were 7 possible endings to the game which reflected choices you made throughout, and they felt appropriate when we learned about them all later.  The one thing that marred the experience was that we made one choice but then got the ending sequence for a slightly different choice when we finally finished solving everything.  A small glitch, but one which didn't reduce the fun much.

We finished up in 40 minutes, leaving us 20 minutes on the clock still.  Our score was 4350, which is slightly more than double the average score of 2150, and was the monthly high score.  Go team!

I had a blast, and everyone else seemed to feel the same way.  Finishing with a high score is a rush, and Naked Man and I have spent time since discussing the puzzles we missed and how we might have done better in order to get that score to be an all time record instead of just a monthly one.  A couple conclusions we had were that we needed someone dedicatd to not solving puzzles who would just watch over the whole crew and read stuff.  A manager, essentially.  Also we should cut down on the number of people.  5 or 6 is ideal, but 7 left people just in the way or with nothing to do at some points, and made communication more difficult.

The one trouble with escape games is that they aren't cheap.  They are pretty much the best thing going in entertainment though, so while I don't like the price I certainly want to pay it again.

Bribing me with my own money

The Ontario government is trying to bribe me to hate teachers.  Recently the government decided to slash education funding in high school, aiming to increase class sizes up to 45 kids in some instances, and start a big trend towards mandatory online learning.  Right when Pinkie Pie is about to head off to high school... great.  When elementary teachers decided to strike in protest, the government offered to give money to parents to offset childcare costs.  They are all about not spending money on educating kids, but when it comes to tossing it around randomly at parents who vote, well, there is money for that!

I have seen arguments that these changes actually aren't so bad.  After all, in university courses often have more than 100 students, and much learning takes place online.

This is true, of course.  For people like me for whom school was easy neither of these things is all that bad.  I could have easily done high school by reading websites or in huge classrooms.  No problem.

But I am not the only student, nor am I the average student.  I am one of the top people out there in terms of finding school easy.  You could teach me that content in any pants-on-head stupid way and I would get it.  Other students will not.

Our focus should not be on whether the top students can survive, it should be on whether the struggling students can thrive.  This is the metric where the new changes are a disaster.  Kids who struggle with terrible home situations, learning disabilities, poverty, or other challenges need teachers who have the time to spare to help them.  They need educators who can see their difficulties and step in to help them.  "Here is a website" is a nightmare for those kids, and they will learn nothing. 

I have also seen arguments that online learning will be good because it can introduce competition into the school system.  This is foolishness incarnate.  Competition just means that we will find some way to score students and then we will pay companies to raise student scores.  There won't be measurements for emotional regulation, no allowances for outside challenges will be made, and the end result will be companies producing content designed explicitly to get higher grades on a standardized test.  The ability to get a high score on a specific high school test is worthless to employers and terrible for general education. 

For kids that are struggling we need teachers who can help them, and we need those teachers to be managing 20-25 kids, not 40+.  Trashing education is exactly the sort of thing that sends countries spiralling downward.

Right now my government has decided to torch the future, and their response to criticisms is to blame the teachers or tell people to go to private school.  They are trying to bribe parents to support their actions, and it is reprehensible.

I am glad that the teachers are taking a stand to push back against this awful nonsense.  Taking money from children's education to pump it into stock portfolios is foolish governance based on the Conservative philosophy of taking a dump on those who are poor or struggling to give to the rich.  It must not stand.

Big scary man

I sometimes have daydreams or fantasies about fighting people.  They are mostly banal revenge fantasies where I beat up a group of teenagers threatening my daughter or somesuch.  I assume that such an occasion will never come to pass, and certainly it would be best if the opportunity never arose to test my mettle in such a way.

Today seemed like it might be a day where I get to find out if I can fight as well in person as I can in my imagination.  Thankfully no fighting of any sort occurred and the question of my martial capabilities is as yet unresolved.

Pinkie Pie called me up to say that her friends were being chased and harassed by a group of teenage boys from the local high school.  She and her friends needed to get somewhere, but they were worried about what would happen if the big kids found them.

An opportunity to be big and scary and yell at teenagers?  I am in!

I put on my usual outfit, which is pretty well suited to this cause.  It is a leather jacket, black leather gloves, and sturdy boots.

Also a knitted rainbow striped hat.

When I got to the elevator and looked in the mirror I realized that although the rainbow hat is a fine fashion statement usually, it really did not help me at all in the 'looking scary' department, so I stashed it my pocket.  If I really wanted to rock the scary biker man aesthetic I should invest in some facial tattooes I think, but thus far the call for that look has been lacking, so my tattooes are all under cover.

I walked the kids three blocks out and three blocks back, and absolutely nothing whatsoever happened.  We were on busy streets the entire time so even if the troublesome teenage miscreants had been about nothing would have happened, but I am glad I could set their minds at ease.  I remember being scared of other kids when I was young, so I don't mind providing moral support.

I wasn't looking for a fight.  Much as my fantasies would like to be fulfilled, real fights suck.  You can get punched in the face, and getting punched in the face sucks.  What I really wanted was a chance to go all Scary Man on some evil teenagers and make them regret harassing smaller people.  Scaring smaller people is ethically sound when it is in retaliation, right?

Right?

But no intimidation was required, just walking.

Much like the rest of parenting, there was hope for excitement, worries about danger, and then a whole lot of tedium.

I did learn to not take my rainbow hat out when my job is to be a big scary man though, so at least I am practiced up for when it happens for real.  I wouldn't want to screw that one up!

Armageddon, but for farms

I am back from Farmageddon.  I travelled to North Carolina on the 26th and got home yesterday.  It was a grand time with so many games played.  Even though the event was themed around the game Agricola I only played it five times over ten days of gaming - I don't even know how many different games I played but I had a great time in any case.

North Carolina gives me culture shock.  The group at Farmageddon was pretty liberal and fit with my politics fine, but when driving around or wandering through airports I was often taken aback.  Last time the thing that got me was the emphasis on the military and veneration of active duty military personnel, as well as people wearing clothes that made it clear they wanted to murder people.  This time the strange thing was medical ads.

There are advertising pushes for hospitals here in Canada, but they are fundraising drives.  I think this is stupid and we should just tax more to fund them properly rather than wasting money making ads, but I don't get to decide this stuff unfortunately.  However, in the US the ads were different because they didn't seem to be about fundraising but rather about recruiting patients.  The idea of medical institutions having ad teams to drum up business blows my fucking mind.  How is this the way it works?

I knew that medicine in the US was privatized, of course.  Sometimes though these things catch me unawares and I realize that I hadn't followed it to its logical conclusion.  Why is healthcare in the US so ludicrously expensive?  Lots of reasons... but one of them is patients are paying for advertising aiming to bring in more patients!

The free market is a useful tool, good at many things.  Running hospitals is not one of them.

A consequence of travelling to visit my parents from the 21st to 25th and then travelling to play board games from the 26th to 6th is that my workout routine is completely disrupted.  I can do pushups anywhere, and I can do pullups off of a beam at my parent's place, but that isn't a proper workout.

During Farmageddon I found another person who was really into the whole gym rat lifestyle, and we figured out how to get our workouts into days that are full of games.  We set up challenges where we would do clap pushups based on game actions, which ended up with me doing something like 75 clap pushups over the course of a single game.  I made a lot of time in between game turns into pushup time over the days I was away, but I really didn't know how my fitness level would hold up.  Today I finally got back to the routine, and I found out that my constant pushup sets during gaming kept those muscles in good shape.  All of my push exercises were no problem.  The other exercises were pretty rough though.  However, this means it shouldn't take long for me to get completely back into fighting shape.

I wonder how much me running away from the game table to crack out 25 pushups all the time affected other people.  Were they just laughing at me?  Annoyed at the interruption?  Vaguely amused that I refused to take a week off?  I don't know!  I do know that I feel better when I get my muscles sore though, so I am going to keep on doing this as a way to cope with a lack of a proper gym.

As much as I enjoyed my time there though, I am glad to be home.  I need my own space, my own kitchen, my own computer, and some quiet and silence.  No matter how great people are, at some point I gotta run away.  I certainly am not an extreme introvert, but I trend that way without a doubt.