Let's Get Political

Warning: longish post - allow me to bribe you with a video. :D

The BC provincial election will be held in May 2009, which is decently far away. We've just come out of a federal election and a municipal election, not to mention the hugely publicized national election of our neighbours to the south. Me, I'm all electioned out - I'm tired of people vote-grubbing. Already, though, our local MLA's office has been phoning everyone with surveys about issues for the upcoming election.

Ever since the first day we broke out the calendars for this year, American politics has been prolific in every facet of media. After all, picking a new president is hugely important. The US basically has a two-party sytem. Sure, independents can run, but it is widely agreed upon that votes for independents are wasted votes, which is terrible, in my opinion. Many people don't subscribe to either polarized party, but have different stances on different issues. Some people agree with one party or the other on most issues, but may not be as extreme as the parties try to be in their efforts to be as opposite as possible from each other.

In Canada, we have a handful of different parties, which presents its own problems. Other than the Bloc Quebecois, which is centered on looking out for Quebec, we have two parties which are actually decently well aligned and one party which is fairly different, as well as the Green Party, which don't even themselves expect to win. This past election seemed to be all about being 'for' or 'against' the Conservatives, who were at the time also the current ruling party. The problem is that most Canadians were against the Tories this time around, but their votes were scattered among the other three parties (with the exception of Quebec, of course), so the Tories won again.

That election also featured the smallest voter turnout in our country's history, and there's little wonder about why - it happened near the tail end of America's campaign period, and who wants to pay attention to Canada's mostly on-topic and somewhat boring, under-publicized, under-the-radar election when you can watch scandal-rife, entertaining, outrageous politics from next door? You could try and find the Canadian stuff - there might be something on one or two TV channels , or you could watch what's going on in the US on 30 or 40 channels. The radio stations are happy to talk about American politics and only spent marginal amounts of time outside their mandatory Canadian content quota talking about our own election, instead choosing to squeeze American politics into their Canadian time-slots by talking about how they would affect our nation. Our election was also called with short notice, and the camaigning took all of 37 days, by a Prime Minister who was vocally against calling early elections (and yet we let that hypocrisy slide - or at least, 42% of us let it slide by not voting at all, and substantially less than half of the remainder let it slide by voting for them anyways). Here is a cute summary of what happened, for all those who missed it:



When it came time for our municipal election, just after Obama's victory stateside, many of us were just not interested, which is too bad. Municipal elections, in my opinion, are such a breath of fresh air after all the divisive party politics. In the city election, the candidates are not party-affiliated - they are all independents, so we have to choose based on their platforms and qualifications. Further, we vote for 8 of them, plus a mayor. This is excellent, because it means the candidates can't get ahead by pulling their opponents down - they have to prop themselves up instead. It becomes a decision of 'why should I vote for you' instead of 'why shouldn't I vote for your opponent'. The downside is that people have to actually inform themselves about the candidates instead of lazily subscribing to a red vs blue mentality. It's far better for us in the long run, but voter turnout is always the victim because of it.

So, back to BC politics - right now, I frankly don't care. Don't come to my door, don't phone me, don't put propaganda in my mailbox. Give me a breather.

Kinships in LotRO

The other night, the LotRO kinship I'm in (kinship = guild in MMO language) promoted one of our recruits to a full-fledged member. We've recently taken to making an event out of promotions as it gives us an excuse to see each other 'in person', as well as making the recruit feel welcome and a part of everything. We all don our matching unofficial uniforms, the officers change our display titles to 'Officer', and the leader changes his to 'Leader'. Then our leader beckons the recruit(s) in question to the top of our 'stage' and gives the recruits a graduation-style speech, whereupon they become promoted. Then there is much congratulating, cheering, clapping, and general celebrating, during which the leader continues his official duties by 'giving' the recruits the unofficial uniform too (in LotRO there's a cosmetic outfit system where you can equip an item cosmetically and then even when that item is no longer in your inventory, you still are wearing it - we keep a couple copies for the kin that we share around). Then we celebrate some more before visiting Matilda, our inn-league keg.



The more of us that are present for these promotion ceremonies, the cooler it starts to feel to be a part of it all. This most recent one featured our biggest turn-out yet, so I captured the moment above. It is really neat to be part of a kin that seems to be so unique. I haven't seen any other kins doing a uniform the way we do, and while I can't claim to know for sure, I've never heard of any other kin making a production of promotions, either. Our leader commented yesterday that other players all seem to blend together with their different outfits, whereas we stand out by all dressing the same, and he is absolutely right (plus, our outfits are really sharp!). When we roam around the countryside, crawl through dungeons, or charge through a busy city, we turn heads with our matching outfits. Players will often send me tells complimenting our outfits, and sometimes the comments reach the public chat channels. On explaining this all to my boyfriend, he commented that our kin sounds like what a kin is supposed to be like. I've also gotten some comments to that effect from several of our members. It feels really good to be a part of such a group.

/em raises her glass to the Guardsmen of the Free Peoples.

Renovations and LotRO

Okay, so I know I stopped updating this pretty much right after I started it, but for whatever reason, I couldn't access this page for a while, and then forgot about it altogether. See, I got rather occupied with a project:



I wish I could find my 'before' pics, for the sake of comparison.

"But Ana," you say, "surely that didn't take two years to do!"

It's true, it didn't take two years to do, but it did take longer than originally anticipated. We were fairly close to on schedule for the basement, but things slowed down significantly with the main floor. There were a lot of little things that kept slowing us down (such as three layers of wallpaper on the ceiling, some stuck on there with glues that are so old modern glue solvents don't work on them), and our money supply dwindled until we could no longer afford to pay for help. It turned into a drag instead of a fun project (at least, it did for me).

As we got nearer completion, I fell into Middle Earth via Lord of the Rings Online.




This is one of many beautiful sights to see in the Shire. That's my main character standing outside of the hobbit hole she used to call home. The game, with all its sights, its mostly very pleasant player base, its storyline and the gameplay itself have captivated me for a year now, and with the newly released expansion, Mines of Moria, offering over 500 new quests, new gameplay, new players, new player classes, new crafting, and many other new things, I think it's safe to say it will hold my attention for quite a long time to come, especially considering there was still so much for me to see and do before this expansion was released.