1237: Is Everything All Right?

Members of the restaurant industry! Be you serving staff or restaurant owner, know this: my meal is just fine, and thus you don't need to ask me if everything is all right with it. If, on the off-chance, something is actually wrong with my meal, I will attract your attention and explain what the problem is. In the meantime, kindly bugger off and leave me alone.

I know this is an irrational thing to get annoyed about, but it's not so much the thing itself that I find irritating as it is the reason it happens. Because when your waiter/waitress comes over and asks you if everything is all right with your meal, they are not doing so because they care. They are doing so because their restaurant's policy is to go and check up on people five or ten minutes after they have started eating, just in case they're too, I don't know, shy to bring up the fact that their food isn't cooked properly.

I give this information from a position of experience, having worked in a few pubs and restaurants back when I was at university. It was simply policy to do this to make it look like the staff cared when in fact all they really wanted was for all the members of the public to go away so they could enjoy a good old-fashioned apple sauce fight in the kitchen.

I think the knowledge of why this happens — to give the illusion of good customer service, rather than simply to provide good customer service — is what makes it particularly infuriating. If I believed at any point that the people attempting to look like they cared about my dining experience actually did care about my dining experience, I'd be fine with it. However, my mind poisoned by my past experiences on the other side of the customer/staff divide, I just can't see it that way; I just can't believe that these people really give a toss whether or not my meal is to my satisfaction or not.

It's the same with going to shops, of course. That innocuous-sounding "is everything all right there, sir?" can usually be translated as "can I sell you anything, sir?" Checkout operators have stickers on their tills reminding them to thank customers for waiting, and to smile at them. And employees of certain fruit-based computer manufacturers' retail presences have a little "routine" to go through any time they attempt to engage a customer in conversation. (To be fair, in the latter case, it worked quite well, but it's still a completely "false" interaction with another person — speaking from the script rather than from the heart.)

Pish and balls. I guess I'm just grumpy. It is nearly 2AM after all. I should probably go to sleep. It is Sunday tomorrow, then on Monday I am covering E3 professionally for the first time in a while, albeit still only on the "home front" rather than actually going there. One day… one day.

I'll leave you with this.

1236: On Being That Guy Who Picks 'Japanese' in the Sound Menu

I always used to be one for having my game's voices in English. I liked being able to understand what they were saying as well as reading the subtitles on screen. In some cases, I didn't have the option; I'll always associate Persona 3 and 4 with English voices, for example, even though, in retrospect, it would probably be better with Japanese voice acting. In others, the English voiceover job was so genuinely good that I didn't want to try the Japanese version — Xenoblade Chronicles springs immediately to mind in this regard.

I can remember the moment that I realised Japanese voice acting was something worth exploring even though I didn't speak the language, though. It was while I was playing the utterly terrifying PSP visual novel/adventure game Corpse Party — one of my favourite games on that platform, and legitimately one of the most disturbing games I've ever experienced — that I realised that, frankly, Japanese video game voice actors aren't afraid to let rip with the utterly raw emotion. They'll shout until their voice cracks; they'll scream; they'll cry. And by God, they sound like they mean it.

It was around one of the many points in Corpse Party where one of the characters is bawling their eyes out and screaming in terror at the horrific situation they've found themselves in that I realised when it comes to voice acting in games — which are typically accompanied by subtitles, particularly in the visual novel and JRPG genres — it's not about the words that are being said, but about how they're being said. It didn't matter that I didn't understand the Japanese words that were being screeched into my ears (seriously, play that game on headphones and you'll never want to turn the light out again) — the meaning was all too clear simply from the tone of voice.

Those who have been reading regularly will know that I've been playing Ar Tonelico 3 recently. I played the first game in that series in English, largely because I found the English voices in the video cutscenes too jarring when paired with Japanese speech in the main game. I played the second in Japanese because I'd been warned that the English dub, much like the overall translation job, was somewhat questionable. And I started the third in English, but after not very long I switched to Japanese. It is a decision I did not regret.

It's very obvious from the huge rift in quality between the English and Japanese voice tracks in something like Ar Tonelico 3 that the English actors are, for the most part, phoning it in somewhat, while the Japanese actors care about what they're doing. In many cases, it is the difference between a rush job (English) and having well-known professionals handle the voices.

I witnessed a scene this evening — no spoilers — that had me more than a little choked up due to the amount of raw emotion and passion that the actress playing one of the characters was throwing into the delivery of her lines. I believed that she meant what she was saying. This character was supposed to be upset, and I believed that.

The other thing that comes into play is that when a game's dialogue has been translated relatively literally from the original Japanese rather than fully localised, reading it out loud in English often sounds very stilted and artificial, simply because that's not how English people talk. We don't say things like "what is this, all of a sudden?" and start entire conversations with "By the way". We don't refer to ourselves in the third person to be cute. (Usually. Saki will do it!) And we don't use the term "lovey-dovey" anywhere near as much as Japanese people apparently do.

There's nothing wrong with doing a literal translation from the Japanese — so long as you do it with enough care to make it understandable, of course — but if you're going to take this approach to translation, I've come to the conclusion it's best to leave the voices as they are. If, on the other hand, you're going to take the Ace Attorney/Cherry Tree High Comedy Club/Recettear approach to localisation and actually make the dialogue significantly and noticeably more "Western" in the process, then we can talk about English voiceovers.

I must confess to always having found an attitude like the one I just described a little snobby in the past. Having immersed myself in this side of gaming (and anime) culture for this long, though, I totally get it. Once you get used to the infinitely more professional job Japanese voice actors do on productions like Ar Tonelico (and even on lighter fare like Hyperdimension Neptunia, for that matter) you'll likely never want to go back.

1235: I Hate Clothes Shopping

As has previously been discussed on here once or twice, I am, to say the least, unhappy with my body. Specifically, I hate the fact that I am a fat bastard who cannot seem to keep the weight off, even when I make a concerted effort to exercise regularly and eat well. I hate the way I look.

More than that, though, I hate how shitty clothes make me feel. And the only thing I hate more than that is how shitty clothes shopping makes me feel.

I'm not huge. I must confess, to my shame, to sometimes seeing people who are larger than me and thinking "well, at least I'm not that big." I feel bad the moment I do it, but it also makes me feel slightly better. I can, at least, usually buy clothes that sort-of fit off the rack.

That "sort-of" bit is the frustrating part, though. I went out to go and get some new clothes earlier today, since I had a ruthless clearout of crap I don't wear or which doesn't fit recently, and I need to stock up on things like, you know, all types of clothes. What I discovered was that I appear to be somewhere between standard sizes, whereby one size is just slightly too small to be comfortable — particularly when it comes to shirts — and the next size up is much too big and baggy. It doesn't help that the more X's you add to the size of your clothes, the more revoltingly abnormal you feel.

I really do wish I could lose weight. A lot of weight. There are a lot of thing I would like to do if I lost weight that I simply can't right now either because I don't have the confidence to do so out of fear I'd look ridiculous, or because it's simply not possible for me to do so. It may sound trite and stupid, but, for example, I would love to cosplay. I absolutely love dressing up and pretending to be someone else, and combining that with expressing my appreciation for a favourite game or anime would be awesome. Yet as it stands, I'd just be the fat nerd who thinks he can pull off a [insert character name here]. No thank you.

I'm aware this is all very self-pitying and whatnot, and frankly I don't care right now. I know I need to lose weight, and I do intend to keep trying to do something about it; it's just immensely frustrating when all my efforts — and I've spent considerable effort over the years — appear to amount to nothing in the long term, and in the meantime, making those efforts often makes me miserable.

Oh well, at least other aspects of my life are going reasonably well at the moment. Guess you can't have everything, huh.

Sorry for the half-hearted post. I'm feeling meh and the rest of the Internet (including me, frankly) is far too angry at Microsoft to care what I have to say tonight anyway. Good night!

1231: On Your Doorstep

Something sprang to mind for me and Andie while we were over in Toronto. Our friend Mark was taking us out for lunch to an intriguing little Vietnamese place called Banh Mi Boys that served all manner of interesting sandwiches and meat buns and the like, and we suddenly realised that were the roles reversed, there weren't all that many interesting places we'd be able to take visitors to our fair(ish) city of Southampton.

This evening, then, we went out in an attempt to start rectifying this situation just so, on the off-chance that friends from abroad do come and visit, we'd have somewhere more interesting that Burger King or a Wetherspoons to take them.

We actually visited two different establishments this evening. The first of these was La Cantina (or just Cantina as it appears to be known now) in the Bedford Place area of the city, just on the outskirts of the city centre. This is a Mexican place that I'd heard good things about in the past, but had somehow never made it to. They serve you standard Mexican platters like nachos, burritos and whatnot, but they also do tapas servings of tacos and various other tortilla-based dishes whose names I've forgotten. Andie and I had a sharing platter of nachos with beef mole and two of these tapas dishes each, and that was plenty of food for the pair of us.

It was some tasty food, and a good level of spice — just enough to get you sweating a bit, but not so much that your tongue goes completely numb and you can no longer actually taste what it is you're eating. The beef mole had a bit of a kick, though I suspect this came from the seasoning of the meat rather than the slices of chili pepper that were in it, which actually turned out to be pleasantly mild-ish.

After dinner, we decided to drop into a brand new establishment that has just moved in almost next door to Cantina — Tutti's Gelato. This is, to my knowledge, the second dedicated gelato shop that has opened in Southampton — the first being Sprinkles in "student central" area Portswood.

Tutti's offers a wide variety of gelato flavours, available either as scoops in a cone or little bowl, or as part of a bigger dessert. Said bigger desserts — crepes, waffles, sundaes — all look like they'll probably give you a heart attack, but I most definitely intend to give them a try at some point in the near future, perhaps when I haven't filled myself up with Mexican food beforehand.

My only real criticism of Tutti's — which was clean, looked good, served delicious desserts and had some comfortable seating — was that their menu was riddled with spelling and punctuation errors, and wasn't even consistent about the mistakes they made. If you can correctly pluralise "crepe" into "crepes", then why the fuck did you put an apostrophe in the word "sundaes"? And don't even get me started on how they spelled "raspberries" (hint: it involved an apostrophe, and did not involve the correct "-ies" ending.)

This aside, though — which, after all, isn't really the most important thing (yes, I winced a bit writing that, but it is true) — Tutti's was a great place to go, and I've been all for the "late night dessert" thing ever since I was taken out to a shop that specialised in chocolate-based desserts in New York several years ago. (I can't remember the name, but by God it was amazing. They had a chocolate pizza that looked like instant diabetes.)

Anyway, my rambling point in all this is simply that now, if someone comes to visit, I have two places I can take them. And hopefully we'll discover some more in the near future.

1226: Call Me 'Pan'

I have been contemplating my own mortality lately.

Actually, that's a total lie. I've simply been pondering what it means to be 32 years old, and whether society expects something different of me to what I am providing.

You see, in many ways I consider myself to be a "grown up" but in lots of others I feel very immature, and I'm actually quite pleased about the latter part. I still feel odd when I hear, say, a mother in a supermarket refer to me as "that man" rather than "that boy" when telling her child to get out of my way. Conversely, I don't feel any shame in purchasing things that are for adults (get your mind out of the gutter) such as alcohol, 18-rated videos or mature-rated games or other media. I occupy a sort of weird middle ground where I'm aware I'm an adult, but I have no particular desire to start acting like one.

Why am I babbling on about this? Well, it stems from a conversation Andie and I just had where we both agreed that when I'm 60+ I will probably still be happy to sit around in my pants playing video games where girls' clothes fall off to allow them to absorb more magic from the air, or to bust out the board games for a social occasion rather than doing something more dignified like a dinner party or whatever. I will also probably never stop finding burping, farting and the word "cock" funny.

I feel pretty confident that that is how my life is probably going to go. And I have absolutely no problem with that whatsoever. (Neither does Andie, I might add.)

Why? Because being a grown-up is boring. Being a grown-up means being interested in things like bank accounts and shares and insurance providers and all manner of other equally tedious things. I'm aware that many of these things are essential to survival, but I just don't have the time, energy or inclination to waste on them any more than necessary. I keep my financial arrangements simple but effective, for example, and so long as service providers such as insurers and utilities aren't actively robbing me, I'm happy to pay them their money just so I don't have to think about complicated things. About the most "grown-up" thing I'm prepared to entertain the thought of is buying a house, and even then that's largely because 1) I want a cat and 2) I want to be able to put up awesome pictures without having to worry about where I'm putting holes in the walls.

There are doubtless some people out there who would chide me for this arguably reckless attitude, but the fact is that — at present, anyway — I'm happy with the way my life is in terms of boring things like financial security and who supplies electricity to my flat. And, frankly, my own ultimate goal for existence isn't particularly lofty or ambitious — I just want to be happy. As longtime readers of this blog will probably know, I have had more than a few lengthy periods of unhappiness over the years, so my current state of reasonable contentment is quite enjoyable, frankly. Long may it continue.

The only really frustrating thing about taking this approach to life is, of course, the fact that not everyone around shares the same desire to remain "young at heart". Some people I know actively want to be grown-ups, and to have grown-up responsibilities and whatnot. Some people I know get excited about things like extensions and gardening and their new investments and all manner of other things. And fair play to them, if that's what makes them happy. I just don't find anything either interesting or desirable in behaving in that manner, and that's why I intend to stay the way I am for as long as I possibly can.

And if you don't like it, you can &c. &c.

1225: Red Wizard Needs Z's Badly

I'm exhausted. I'm not quite sure why I feel so utterly exhausted because I slept well last night and today hasn't exactly been a particularly strenuous day. We played a couple of short games this morning before departing the pleasant country farmhouse we'd been staying in over the weekend, drove back, then, presumably, did our respective "Things" once we got home rather than immediately falling into a coma like I feel like doing right now.

The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is the two gin and tonics I had last night. I don't really drink any more so even a tiny bit of alcohol tends to have quite a strong impact on me — disappointingly, this doesn't tend to take the form of getting amusingly giggly or wobbly any more; rather, it tends to just make me a bit tired, particularly the day after I've been drinking. I guess what I'm enduring is a sort of hangover, albeit a rather pathetic one that will be immensely disappointing to those who used to enjoy past drunken (and post-drunken) ramblings.

The other thing it could be, of course, is the fact that we stayed up until about 2 in the morning playing various combinations of board, card and computer games, then tumbled into bed (not together) before waking up relatively early (for a bank holiday Monday, anyway) today.

Either way, it's not a particularly good show, is it? I vividly remember the days when I'd happily stay up all night just for the hell of it (and regret it for the majority of the following day, particularly if there were any university lectures involved) and consume several gallons of alcoholic beverages before texting people I fancied messages with lots of X's on the end of them (the number of X's was typically proportional to how much I fancied them) and collapsing into bed, quite possibly fully-clothed.

Depressingly, the time when I was able to behave like that on a regular basis was over ten years ago now. Longtime readers will doubtless note that the posts I linked to above were from relatively early in this whole #oneaday lark, but they were isolated incidents rather than something I was doing on a regular basis.

Actually, I say "depressingly", but I don't really feel the need to stay up until ungodly hours in the morning and stagger in as pissed as a fart on a regular basis. At the tender age of 32, I'm more than happy to spend my evening lounging on the sofa watching some entertaining videos or playing a game. It doesn't stop me from indulging in a late night once in a while, of course — apparently I just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences the following day!

Now I am going to go to bed and possibly sleep for about a thousand years. (Note: It will probably not be about a thousand years. Probably more like 8 hours or so, I imagine.) Good night, and hopefully I'll have a more lively brain that is willing to talk about something a bit more interesting on the morrow.

1221: How Do You Make Friends Again...?

One of my earliest and most enduring memories of my time at secondary school is also, coincidentally, the first time I was consciously aware of what I now recognise to be a longstanding case of social anxiety.

It was the first day of secondary school. Everything was big and new and scary — I'd come from a small village school in which the entire school population was roughly the size of a single year group in my secondary school. I'd chosen to go to said secondary school because a lot of my friends were going there, and also my brother had attended there some years previously and had come out of the experience as what is generally accepted to be a Good Person. Also, a lot of the people who had been bullies to me in primary school were going to a different secondary school, so I knew that I wanted to avoid that one like the plague.

But I, as ever, digress.

It was the first day of secondary school. I was sitting in my new seat in my new tutor group, and our tutor, Miss Quirk (yes, really), had tasked us with spending a few minutes getting to know the people around us.

I gazed around me. I was sitting next to a boy named Murray whom I didn't know. In front of me was a girl named Claire, whom I had instantly fallen in love with due to her long shiny blonde hair and the fact she wore short skirts with tights — something which I found (hell, find) inexplicably attractive. (Hey. I was eleven years old and easily pleased — but to be fair, she did remain consistently stunning throughout our entire school career.)

Behind me was my sometime best friend from primary school, Matthew. I say "sometime" because he wasn't always my best friend — he was a somewhat fickle chap rather prone to occasionally deciding he'd rather hang out with the "cool" kids, whose opinion of me tended to flip-flop back and forth on an almost weekly basis. Needless to say, I ditched him fairly soon into my secondary school career as a result of two events: one, him sneezing so hard he snotted over his hands and then ate it — mmm — and two, him deciding that sitting in his chair, miming masturbation and bellowing "I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" would be somehow amusing. (To be fair, it was sort of amusing, but perhaps not in the way he intended; needless to say, I didn't really want to be associated with him after that.)

Anyway. Our seating arrangements were the way they were in order to encourage us to interact and get to know each other. We'd been deliberately seated next to people we didn't know to encourage us to break out of our primary school "cliques" and widen our friendship circles — a theoretically sound idea that even at that tender age, I could see the benefits of.

Unfortunately, I couldn't act on it. Given the prospect of being thrown into enforced interaction with someone I didn't know from Adam, I froze up. I had no idea how to begin a conversation, how to get to know this person. Frantically, I turned around to gaze at Matthew (a pre-"I'm a wanker! I'm a wanker!" Matthew, I might add) and looked at him pleadingly.

"I can't remember how to make friends!" I said quietly to him. He just laughed and motioned for me to turn around and talk to Murray. He obviously hadn't taken my statement seriously, and that was frustrating, but I had little option but to try. It was a terrifying experience, though, and obviously I didn't set a particularly good first impression on Murray, because he became a complete bellend who bullied me on a regular basis. (I got my own back by punching him in the face just as the principal was walking around the corner and, although I was punished for lashing out like that, the unspoken consensus between my parents and the teachers involved was that he probably deserved it — and to be fair, he didn't bother me again after that.)

That first day and that pitiful statement — "I can't remember how to make friends!" — stuck with me, though. Because I can't remember how to make friends. It just sort of happens. I have made friends with people over the years, of course — the friends I made after I abandoned Matthew following the "I'm a wanker!" incident (such as Edward James Padgett, who has been mentioned in this post since it was first written, he just didn't see it); my university flatmates; my fellow students on my music course (though not on my English course — I didn't really get to know anyone on that side of things); and people I've worked with — but if I'm thrown into a new situation with unfamiliar people, or simply decide that I want to get to know new people who perhaps share my interests… I still have no idea how to do this.

This is, as I'm sure you can appreciate, frustrating, particularly as at the age of 32 I finally feel that I have found a number of geeky "niches" that I fit nicely into, and would like to share these experiences with like-minded people. I greatly enjoyed spending time with Mark and Lynette while we were over in Canada because they are both My Kind of People who enjoy the things I do — but I also found myself somewhat envious of them for having a group of friends they play Dungeons & Dragons with, watch anime with while drinking cocktails and all manner of other things that are in keeping with their interests.

This isn't to say I don't have friends, obviously. The friends I see most frequently are my regular(ish) board gaming group, and I wouldn't exchange them for anything, since I really, really appreciate the time I spend with them indulging in our mutual hobby. However, we do have our own incompatibilities — two of our number are really into football, for example, while the rest of us either have no strong feelings or actively hate it. (I fall into the latter category.) Similarly, I very much like Japanese video games, while several of the others cling to common misconceptions about them and thus either refuse to play them or have little interest in exploring them and having their misconceptions disproven — though at least they are patient and willing to listen to me talk about them. Conversely, a couple of our number are big into Skyrim, a game which I found almost unbearably tedious after a while. To continue the pattern, I'm a big fan of anime and would really like it if I could have a semi-regular viewing session with a small group of people, but no-one from that particular group is biting for various reasons — some don't like or don't see the point of sitting and watching something together as a group; some aren't interested in anime.

You get the picture, anyway. I obviously don't begrudge my friends these incompatibilities we have — everyone is different, after all, and thus has their own tastes — but I find myself wishing on a regular basis that it was a bit easier to find additional friends (note: not "new" friends, because to me that implies a degree of "replacement", which I don't want) who have common interests.

Actually, let me qualify that somewhat: I find myself wishing that it was a bit easier to find additional local friends who have common interests. It's obviously no problem whatsoever to find new friends on the Internet who have similar tastes to me, and I'm very grateful for the fact that I do have so many people on the Internet that I can rant and rave about how awesome Ar Tonelico is or how much Kana Little Sister made me cry or whatever. But as much as I appreciate these friends in far-flung corners of the world, it's not quite the same as having someone you can just pop over and see at short notice, hang out and do some things that you both enjoy.

So, uh, anyone want to hang out, play some games and watch some anime?

1216: Hometime

I am writing this to you from English soil. Boooooo!

Yes, that's right; we're back home. Apologies to those of you who are in the Toronto area who maybe wanted to catch up and we didn't get the opportunity to — turns out we filled two full weeks pretty nicely with Stuff to Do.

A very public "thanks" to Mark and Lynette for putting us up for two weeks at their lovely house with its regular squirrel visitors, and thanks to our mutual friend Jonathan for providing us with some board and card game entertainment on more than one occasion. It's a shame we didn't have more time to try some games a little more than we did — I would have liked to play A Touch of Evil again, and I'm bummed we didn't get time to play Mice & Mystics — but we'll just have to save those for next time, I guess!

The flight back was uneventful, and unusually for me, I managed to actually sleep for most of it. This was perhaps at least partly due to the fact that we had to be up at some ungodly hour in the morning to actually catch the plane, but perhaps it was also a case of the prior two weeks catching up with us somewhat. It wasn't the most hectic, chaotic holiday I've been on — thankfully; I'm not a big fan of holidays where you're constantly doing stuff and never get any time to just kick back and relax — but it had enough stuff going on to keep things interesting while wearing us out somewhat. To be honest, my main priority for the trip was to see my friends rather than do the "tourist" thing, but I'm glad we had the opportunity for a jaunt around the ROM and the zoo while we were there.

I think the highlight of Toronto for me has to be the board game cafe Snakes & Lattes that I mentioned the other day. If there was such a place here in Southampton, I think I would probably spend a lot of time there — so long as I could find people to go with, of course.

There actually is a regularly-meeting board game group here in Southampton, but I have held off attending thus far due to my own issues with social anxiety and meeting new people. I have little doubt that I would probably have a good time if I just went along and met some new people, but it's getting over that initial hurdle that's the tough bit. Of course, if I lived in Toronto and attended Snakes on a regular basis, I'd probably run into the same issue, so… well. That's something to contemplate another time.

It is both nice to be back and sad to be home. We both had a great time, and I hope we get the chance to do it again sometime soon. For now, however, I think it's probably time to get some sleep!

1215: Zoology

Andie and I took a trip out to Toronto Zoo today. Getting there from Mark and Lynette's house was quite a trek on public transit, but it's eminently possible. (For those curious, you ride the subway all the way to the east end of the green line — Kennedy station — then catch an 86A bus to the zoo. Said bus stops approximately every 100 yards on the way, lengthening the journey by a considerable degree, but you do get there eventually.)

I've been to the zoo here before, but Andie hasn't. (Obvious, really, since she hasn't been to Toronto before.) Like much of my wanderings around the city in general over the last couple of weeks, I was surprised by quite how much I remembered. A few things have changed since I last came — some exhibits have opened and closed, and we were just a day too early to get a chance to see the zoo's newly-acquired giant pandas — but for the most part it was pretty much as I remembered.

I'm generally not particularly big on "cultural" trips. Museums often bore me if there's not much in the way of interactivity, and my appreciation of the visual arts (or lack thereof) limits my enjoyment of an art gallery. I'm not even a huge fan of live music in many cases, despite being a musician myself, because I'm more interested in the music itself rather than the performance more often than not. (The exception to this rule is live performances of jazz/soul etc, which often have a lot more "personality" than live performances of art music. But I digress.)

Where was I? Oh yes. I'm not generally that big on "cultural" trips, but I must confess to having something of a soft spot for a good zoo. I think it's the simple fact that animals are interesting and unpredictable to watch, and it can be fascinating to discover a creature you were previously unfamiliar with. Particular highlights today, for example, included a "tree kangaroo", which looked rather cat-like; the discovery that bats can and will climb around like monkeys as well as hanging there being boring and/or flapping around wildly; that tigers actually do say "rawr"; and that somewhere in deepest darkest Africa there's a ridiculous-looking bird with an enormous beak that would apparently rather jump between tree branches than actually fly.

Toronto Zoo is a good zoo if you enjoy looking at animals (derp) because there's a lot of them in a variety of different environments. It's quite a trek to get around the whole thing, but it's a worthwhile experience, as you'll have the chance to see all manner of different things. Although today, being a weekday, was relatively quiet, it was clear what the "highlights" for the general public were — the polar bears were winning by a long shot, though I suspect once the new panda exhibit is open to the public it will prove similarly popular, if not more so.

We also took a ride on the "zoomobile" electric car tour thing. This initially appeared a bit steep at $8 each, but after riding it all the way around and being taken into some "zoomobile exclusive" safari park-style areas with free-roaming animals, it proved a worthwhile experience, so be sure to check it out if you're in the area.

Oh, and also we saw a horny male zebra with a gigantic dong trying to boff a female who wasn't having any of it. Poor chap.

1212: The Meme-Ing of Life

We went out to Toronto's apparently-famous comedy club The Second City tonight to see a sketch/improv show called The Meme-Ing of Life. And what do you know? It was pretty great.

I'm a fan of sketch comedy, and have been since the days of The Fast Show and Big Train. One of my favourite shows that I've seen live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in years gone by was a sketch/improv show, too — performed by Amsterdam outfit Boom Chicago. I particularly enjoyed tonight's show because it reminded me, to a certain degree, of Boom Chicago's shows that I've seen in the past — and that is most certainly a very good thing indeed.

The Meme-Ing of Life was an interesting show for a number of reasons, perhaps chiefly for what it wasn't. The name and posters implied that this would be a show heavily inspired by Internet memes, which gave me some degree of trepidation going into it. A two-hour show in which people who think they're funny simply regurgitate things they've seen on Reddit recently would be pretty cringeworthy, I'm sure we can all agree — there are certain things about Internet humour that make it best viewed in its native environment rather than bringing it into meatspace.

Fortunately, however, the cast didn't take this route. Rather than directly referencing memes, the show consisted of a series of sketches that were loosely inspired or which made oblique references to things which had been Kind of a Big Deal on the Internet at various points in the past. For example, one sketch featured a band of cheerleaders spewing out increasingly-inappropriate sexual chants on the subject of "legitimate rape", abortion et al, while "Coach," an "old white man who knows what's best for us" gets increasingly irate. This is, obviously, a reference to a number of things — the famously-heated discussions over whether or not you can make the word "rape" funny (hey! You can!) and the U.S. politician (I forget who) who made the ill-advised comments about "legitimate rape" a while back.

It wasn't all politically-charged stuff, though, and not all of it wore its inspirations on its sleeve. Two of the best sketches in the show featured no words whatsoever — one was a wonderful mime/dance number accompanied by music in which a man and a woman did the "dance" that will be familiar to anyone who has ever ridden public transit in their life as the man attempted to get the woman to move her bag off the seat; the other was a fantastic mime scene in which two rival basketball players performed increasingly-ridiculous shots.

The overall theme of the show was "making a little difference", and this was returned to a number of times throughout the course of the evening through a number of touching little interludes. In one, a member of the audience was "picked on" and it looked as if he was going to be the butt of a few gags, but it actually turned out the cast were just buying him a drink. In another, the same thing happened, but this time the "unfortunate" audience member was rewarded with a pre-loaded Starbucks card. And in the last, an audience member was quizzed on what she would do if she had a bit of money to spare and then rewarded with an improvised song about her desires which unfolded while a bucket was passed around the audience for everyone to sling some spare change into — once the song was over, she was just given the money.

To say too much about the show would be to spoil it significantly, but it provoked a number of genuine laughs very regularly. I'm always impressed by the quick wit of people who are good at semi-improvised sketch comedy, and this show certainly did not disappoint in that regard. In fact, just to prove that they were serious about what they do, the cast returned after the main show had ended and performed an extra, completely improvised routine based on an audience prompt word. It was something quite special to see.