Month: December 2016

Take Off Your Skin And Dance In Your Bones

Zombies and walking dead. I love zombie movies and zombie tv shows. My favourite zombie movie is World War Z. The zombies move quickly in this film—scary shit. My favourite zombie television show is the Walking Dead. Slow zombies. The scary shit is the remaining living human beings.

In one episode of the Walking Dead, several characters attempt to escape from their compound via a tunnel. While trying to escape, they encounter a group of rotting zombies. One of the zombies grabs onto one of the female characters. She grabs the zombie in an attempt to escape, and the skin of the zombie peels off. Like the way, skin peels off of a boiled tomato.

I don't think this was what Alex, the brewer at Troon Brewing, was thinking of when he named his pale ale, Take Off Your Skin And Dance In Your Bones. I did some more Google foo. I found a song by Les More, “T’aint no sin to take off your skin” that has a few lines of lyrics that are similar to the name of this Troon Brewing ale.

Just like those bamboo babies
Down in the South Sea tropic zone
T ain't no sin to take off your skin
And dance around your bones

Based on the music I heard in the brewery, I doubted that Les More was the inspiration for this pale ale's name. A few more minutes with Google and I found a song name that exactly matched this Troon Brewing pale ale's name. Take Off Your Skin, And Dance In Your Bones is an instrumental piece from the album Heathen by Thou, an American sludge metal band. You can listen to the song on Bandcamp.

Yep, I think that's about right. Now, enough with the typing. Time for a drink.

Dog-Eared Novel

Full-length comic books (often referred to as graphic novels) may count as novels. According to the definitions, I found online a novel is a “fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.” Fictitious prose. Full-length comic books … I mean graphic novels, are stories of superhuman (aka meta-human) beings or aliens from earth or other planets. The most famous of these beings is a person born on a dying planet who becomes earth mightiest hero.

Character and action. That being from another planet, first appeared in the American comic book series, Action Comics on April 18, 1938. The character gained super strength when exposed to Earth’s solar radiation. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound, run faster than a speeding bullet, and is more powerful than a locomotive.

As a boy, I would read his adventures over and over and over again. I am such a geek.

Troon Brewing's new Pale Wheat Ale, named Dog-Eared Novel, is "comforting and familiar, like your favourite book". Like, Superman.

Facebook Echo Chamber

Freedom and the Echo Chamber by Patrick La Roque (laROQUE - photographe.photographer.montreal)

Using Facebook as a content feed (on a daily basis, something I'd actively avoided until now) creates a vacuum of epic proportions. Over just a few days my timeline morphed into an increasingly narrow set of views, tailored to what I had liked and shared. This isn't by any means a surprise, but the speed at which my "news feed" skewed itself to a very specific category of posts is disturbing, especially from a platform hell-bent on becoming everything to everyone. Knowing an ever-increasing number of people do rely on this as their main source of information explains a hell of a lot. By giving up our personal freedom to curate, we leave the choice of content to algorithms that focus on what we already browse, read and consume. And that's incredibly dangerous. These echo chambers become their own realities, potentially spreading disinformation and lies as truth, distorting facts through manipulation. This is how people become convinced President Obama is a Muslim hell-bent on the destruction of American values; that Hillary Clinton was part of a satanic cult; or that Trump won the popular vote. This is how democracies fall. Bread and games. Total abstraction of reality. It's nothing short of mind-control—in fact, it's the very definition of it.

I stopped watching and reading the mainstream news over a decade ago. Is it time I limited my use of social media, especially Facebook?

Freedom and the Echo Chamber by Patrick La Roque (laROQUE - photographe.photographer.montreal)

Using Facebook as a content feed (on a daily basis, something I'd actively avoided until now) creates a vacuum of epic proportions. Over just a few days my timeline morphed into an increasingly narrow set of views, tailored to what I had liked and shared. This isn't by any means a surprise, but the speed at which my "news feed" skewed itself to a very specific category of posts is disturbing, especially from a platform hell-bent on becoming everything to everyone. Knowing an ever-increasing number of people do rely on this as their main source of information explains a hell of a lot. By giving up our personal freedom to curate, we leave the choice of content to algorithms that focus on what we already browse, read and consume. And that's incredibly dangerous. These echo chambers become their own realities, potentially spreading disinformation and lies as truth, distorting facts through manipulation. This is how people become convinced President Obama is a Muslim hell-bent on the destruction of American values; that Hillary Clinton was part of a satanic cult; or that Trump won the popular vote. This is how democracies fall. Bread and games. Total abstraction of reality. It's nothing short of mind-control—in fact, it's the very definition of it.

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Personal blogs are enclaves, small corners of the web that are increasingly hard to discover, drowned as they are by the clamour and noise of social media platforms. I still use RSS feeds in Feedly and I know for a fact this makes me a dinosaur. But it also puts me in control of what I read, allows me to subject myself to a wide-ranging set of point of views if I choose to do so. We all tend towards what we already relate to, we seek out like-minded groups; it's a very normal, human behaviour. But when we isolate ourselves when it becomes all but impossible to hear anything else, then we lose our ability to make informed, coherent decisions.

I agree.