As has now been mentioned one or two (or several dozen) times in this Journal, this past weekend was the first ever convention of citizens of the Aerican Empire. To celebrate the Empire's twentieth anniversary, citizens from far and wide (read: Micihgan and Ohio) came to Montreal to celebrate the glory of world domination. The event was a tremendous sucess, far exceeding my expectations.

The basic plan and schedule for the convention went public some time ago and were repeated a few days ago; this schedule was designed to be fun for everybody, to maximize time for everyone to chat, and to promote a relaxed atmosphere for people to interact. Predictably, this plan went straight to Hell from the very earliest moments of the convention. The out-of-town citizens arrived safely and with minimal problems, both being wise enough not to tell the Canada/US border guards that the purpose of their visit was to confer with colleagues bent on secession from each country followed by world conquest. For legal purposes, if any customs agents call, I now need to claim that I have family living in places I had never heard of until this past week, but if that's the only story which had to be told to customs guards for them to let people through, I breathe a sigh of relief. My plan for the afternoon called for my guests arriving in town without any major problems, so up until now, everything was going fine, and therefore, it was just about time for plans to be changed.

Friday night, as many reading this know, is invariably schnitzel night at my house. Roasted, lightly breaded chicken is cooked, and traditionally enough is made to provide lunches for the entire week. Friday has always been one of my favourite nights to invite guests over for dinner, therefore, because there's always a guaranteed healthy, interesting meal I can offer them. Knowing that my friends would show up on Friday, I therefore extended to them an invitation to save the money they would have spent on Friday dinner and instead start the convention a few hours early. This was a good plan change and a clever idea on my part, failing only to take into account that I'm extremely anti-social and would soon find that I had exhausted every conversation topic I had planned for the whole of Saturday before we had even finished Friday night. After dinner, we understandably decided to fill time with a boardgame, since everyone attending the dinner was a boardgame enthusiast to one degree or another. Digging through the games at my house gave us the usual pleasant alternatives -- RoboRally and Mall of Horror -- but it was a far more horrific game which we settled on: the Star Trek Interactive Boardgame. In this game, players take on the roles of service techs aboard the Entertprise D when it is in drydock and gets tolen by a Klingon played by the same actor who would go on to overplay Gowron. Over the course of the game, video scenes of the Klingon appear on the TV and simulates the evil Klingon speaking to the players; the rulebook actually states, for example, that when the Klingon addresses "the one whose turn it is now," they must tap the combadge on their chest (the game comes with little sticker-combadges to use) and must address him as "Captain Kavok." The game is poorly-acted, badly designed, and downright silly, and I have never played a round of it without things degenerating into fits of laughter. Needless to say, a very good time was had by all and the Enterprise was saved despite our best efforts.

Saturday morning featured the only part of the schedule which went off precisely as planned. The original schedule called for me to wake up in the morning and, at 9am, "send mocking letters to international citizens unable to afford air-fare to Canada." This I did, albeit half an hour early, sending out a good ol' reliable "ha ha, you fools" over our mailing list. From here on, not a single part of the convention went as scheduled, beginning with the celebrants gathering some three hours ahead of schedule because fifty percent of attendees needed to go buy their copies of the new Harry Potter (which came out the same day as the convention, in a fit of terrible scheduling on the part of the book publisher). Despite being in close proximity to many fine bookstores, we went to Walmart, where not only was there no line whatsoever, but a vast mountain of copies lay totally untouched. While whoever wanted one copies took, I stood off to the side and made helpful snarky comments. Since we had extra ime at this point, we went off and visited a couple of comicbook shops.

According to the convention schedule, the next planned event was to go for lunch and pie at a nice place not to far from my home. The difficulty which arose at this stage was that we were two or three hours early for a lunch for which we had booked about 3 hours. Talk of going to see a movie fell through when it became apparent that 1) there was nothing in thatres which interested everyone and 2) the theatre I had meant to take people to had been demolished some time ago without my knowing. Rescue came in the form of a nice little all-day-breakfast restaurant, at which we killed an hour and ate a lovely if unecessarily high-fat meal.

With time to spare now, we returned to the Aerican Embassy to Everything Else and, for lack of any better ideas, played cards for a few hours. The game in question was Cripple Mister Onion, an amusing variation of Poker inspired by Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. The game will not be summarized here, but suffice it to say that it was much fun and a vote of convention-goers proclaimed the game to be the new oficial game of the Aerican Empire. In the evening, we traveled into the heart of downtown Montreal for restaurants not commonly found in small US towns, a walk past some of the fre events at the comedy festival, one of the first sushi dinners I've ever eaten, and finally dessert at a chocolate place where the food was so rich that the hot chocolate is basically just pure chocolate melted down and served in cups. Not a single one of these events was on the official schedule, but inexplicably, there were no complaints.

The most interesting part of the convention, at least for me who lives in Montreal and is thus innured to exposure to all sorts of weird stuff, was finally meeting face to face a couple of people who have been my friends for upwards of six years and whose voices I had never even heard. I had previously seen images of them, but understandably, had never shaken their hands or poked their noses despite their being some of the highest-ranking members of the Empire and good, interesting people besides. I'm not a social person and, by and large, I don't enjoy going out and doing things, but meeting these two fellows was exciting and entertaining, and I'm grateful to have had the chance. I'm also grateful that they had a good enough time that there's already been talk of planning another convention next year, this one somewhere in the US for variety. I'm feeling oddly enthusiastic about such a plan; I already know that next summer I'll have one month off (July) and I'm not likely to be working or otherwise terribly busy at the time, so a little weekend (or longer) getaway.

What might I have done differently, if I had the weekend to do again? A recurring theme in the weekend was for me to misjudge the time required to walk from one place to another while downtown, and I suspect that not every guest enjoyed this as much as I did. If I had the two days to do again, I would save my guests some of that stress by driving a little bit closer to each destination. Neither of the guests complained about being made to walk ridiculously long distances, but then again, a "good guest" would never complain in any case, and a good host works to prevent situations where a guest might want to. Second, if I had the weekend to do again, I would have started Saturday a bit later. We all vastly overestimated what the crowds would be like to buy Harry Potter, so we all got up around 9 or 9:30. Since this clearly proved unecessary, it would have been better to set that outing for closer to 11 am and, even with a trip to the comicbook shops, been ready for lunch by 2 or 3. On a related note, the comic shops we went to visit were all downtown, but had I been a bi more on top of the game, I could have taken them to a comic shop and a CCG shop both of which were about half an hour closer to my house. I had decided against that because I thought they might like seeing downtown, but since we drove back there again in the evening, that proved very much unecessary. Finally, because of construction on the highway from downtown back to my home and their hotel, we sat for over an hour in traffic at 1 am on the drive home. If I had the weekend again, I would certainly have bypassed that whole area and taken a more circuitous (but, that night at least, much faster) route home. Since next time, I won't be able to peer into the future or re-live he past, the morals from this weekend are: 1) Have a clear idea ahead of time of all options for shops people want to visit; 2) pay closer attention to maps and carefully judge distances; and 3) look up ahead of time what roads will be closed, particularly in Montreal summer where construction is inevitable and omnipresent. Oh, and 4) next time, go to a sushi restaurant with faster service.

L'shanah ha ba'ah aal Pluto!

Background: Life, the sages say, is the quest for enlightenment, and there can be no greater goal for anyone, and especially any mage, than Ascension. Sadly, there is much disagreement regarding the pathway to Ascension, and some, it is taught, must forsake their own enlightenment to safeguard others as they seek wisdom. Among the Akashic Brotherhood, those who volunteer to be Bodyguards for promising mages, risking life and enlightenment for another, are held in respect, if not always understood by other mages whose priorities are more sensible. Family legend tells that Bill Holliday is descended from Dr. John Henry "Doc" Holliday, famed American gunfighter, and that in each generation one Holliday takes up the mantle of hero and protector of others. Whether or not this legend is true is largely irrelevant in the face of Bill Holliday, who has well lived up to the family reputation.

A student of the martial arts from an early age, Bill unknowingly attended an Akashic school every weekend for ten years where the master, Yi Tian, trained promising students in the hopes of finding ones who might awaken. Yi Tian’s hopes came to fruition in Bill, who awakened in his early teens and was welcomed proudly into the brotherhood. Bill took enthusiastically to his “enhanced training” and proved an apt student of Do and the spheres. Bill’s impressive athletic abilities were supplemented with training in Correspondence and Forces, with the intent of producing a warrior whose strikes could pass through steel walls, one way or another. He has been trained in the spheres of Life, to show him an enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, and Mind, to enable him to read an opponent’s strikes before they happen. Though he can master any mundane technique taught to him given time, it was apparent early on to Bill and Yi Tian that he would never be a great innovator of new styles and magics. When his initial training ended, Bill opted to serve as one of the brotherhood’s warriors rather than its scholars, putting his strengths to use in service of the mages who would play a more direct role in the coming of the Ascension. He was assigned by his order to join the Daywatch, a police force comprised of day-walking supernaturals charged with keeping the peace and ensuring that mortals do not become aware of the existence of the supernatural.

A mind grounded in the body and the physical world, Bill’s magic tends to work through him. He has proven to be relatively poor at summoning overt displays of power over distances, but his ability to channel magic through himself in combat is unparalleled. The simplest fireballs and healing spells often appear to be beyond him, but Bill is able to perform acrobatic feats and combat maneuvers beyond some of his own teachers. While Bill’s versatility is reduced by this mentality, he has proven to be relatively resistant to paradox compared to others of his order; where a whirling dervish of ice and flame might call down paradox spirits by the dozen, Bill’s more subtle enhanced-strength leaps and strikes often pass as coincidental magic in the eyes of a populace raised on wire-fu, Jet Li and Mortal Kombat.

Bill has retained close ties with his mentor, Yi Tian, and has a modest private room at Yi Tian’s chantry/dojo. When not assigned elsewhere, Bill spends most if his waking hours training in the gym, meditating at the chantry’s small node and drawing quintessence from it, and helping Yi Tian train the mostly unawakened students who come to study. Bill leads a spartan existence, taking room and board from Yi Tian’s chantry. Bill’s only personal possessions are his foci, a small collection of souvenirs and trophies, and a powerful Talisman.

One source of tension between Bill and others he works with has proven to be an unshakable code of honour which forbids Bill from landing the first blow against an enemy or taking a life. Bill's magic is grounded in the philosophies of combat and honour which he was taught, and he cannot fight someone who has not already either attacked him or threatened to attack someone under Bill's protection. Once combat is joined, Bill will do anything in his power to avoid taking a life unless he has no other choice. These two philosophies have made Bill the target of jokes among other members of the Daywatch, but most respect his tenacious principles, which he has kept to even when they have nearly cost him his life on several occasions. Bill's surival in spite of such principles can be attirubted to his skills in combat, his mastery over his magic, and an instinctual, almost supernatural sense of when there is danger about him.

Foci: Key to Bill’s magic is his Akashic training. He is at his peak in the heat of battle or the peace of meditation, and out of his elements anywhere in between. His foci reflect this. Short ribbons tied to Bill’s wrists represent his Correspondence magic, and they flutter faintly as though in their own private breeze when he uses it. Bill carries a pair of brass knuckles through which he invokes the power of Forces, most commonly to add a burst of fire to a strike or to modulate the kinetic energy of a punch or a leap. He wears a headband to invoke his powers of the Mind, on which is written the Chinese character for "thought," often covered almost completely by his long hair. Bill has no physical focus for his Life magic – years of training have taught him to use such magic almost unconsciously to pay perpetual attention to the life signs and emotions of anyone around him in alert of potential danger, and a narrowing of his eyes and a look of concentration flickering across his face may be the only outward sign that he is specifically gauging an enemy’s skeleton to look for good spots to hit.

Talisman: When he was sent to join the Daywatch, Bill's teachers gifted him with an exctremely powerful Talisman. When Bill expressed surprise that such a powerful item should be granted to him, his teachers said that they had "looked ahead," and seen that he would play a role in protecting a great mage whose coming was foretold by ancient prophecy. This Talisman is the Vest of Living Iron, and it is said that whoever wears the vest takes on the strength and durability of self-healing metal. Indeed, the vest is imbued with second-level Life and Forces magic. When the wearer enters combat, the forces magic activates, increasing the kinetic energy of the wearer's fists and effectively granting him greater strength. Should the wearer be injured while in combat, the Life magic activates, and the wounds begin to heal at an accelerated rate, hopefully faster than new damage is dealt. Because these effects are automatic, the wearer can rely on the vest for protection and focus his own energies on more immediate uses.

Favoured magics:

The One-Block Walk: A variation of the famed Seven League Step rote, the One Block Walk is a Correspondence 3/Mind 2 effect. The mage makes a minute bend in space around himself, so that every step he takes crosses one city block, moving from intersection to intersection, though the mage must still cross the street and turn corners normally. The Mind effect exerts a minor suggestion on other pedestrians, ensuring that they take no notice of the mage. In most modern settings, where most individuals pay little attention to who is on the street with them, this suggestion is easily made. Using this simple spell, the mage can easily keep pace with or move faster than a car on the same road, as long as they stay within an urban area.

Clairvoyance: As a glorified police officer, the correspondence 2 effect of peering across space is perhaps the single most useful rote in Bill's repetoire. With it, he will often follow a person of interest from a distance of several hundred feet and still be able to watch what they ate doing or even see what they are writing as though he stood next to them. By exerting correspondence 3, Bill may even reach through space and interact with the person in small ways, speaking to them or disrupting objects in front of them, though the latter magic is quite vulgar.

Boot To The Head: Inspired by an old comedy sketch, the Boot to the Head is said to be "the kick which never misses." Using Correspondence 3 and Forces of 2 or more, the Boot to the Head sends a roudhouse kick directly to the skull of the target, and then enhances the damage dealt by the strike by increasing its speed, momentum, and energy. Some mages have been known to add Life or Mind magic to the strike, adding a stunning or debilitating component, but such power is beyond Bill's current skill. Properly executed, the Boot to the Head is a spell which could conceivably evade blocks, pass through armour, or even strike a target in another room entirely, albeit at increasing risk of vulgarity.

Spot the Telegraph: Using a combination of Mind 2 and Correspondence 1, the mage opens himself to an instinctive reading of the surface thoughts of an opponent in combat and finds that as the opponent strikes, the mage himself happens to be just out of the way. The mage does not conciously become aware of what the opponent will do next, and so could not, for example, warn someone that a strike is being aimed at them, but this rote does allow the mage to evade many blows and find himself conveniently placed to land his own in turn. Interestingly, this rote is actually more effective against skilled opponents than unskilled ones; a thrashing brawler's attacks may be far less predictable than those of a trained fighter who has visualized his moves two or three strikes in advance. Against a mindless or instinctual foe, this ability is utterly useless, and in fact, a mage who relies on it overly will find himself at a sudden and deadly disadvantage.

Threat Radar: This Life 1/Mind 1 ability is a simple technique which many mages, Bill amongst them, have perfected to the point that it can be maintained almost every waking moment with minimal effort. The mage opens his perceptions to the lifesigns around him, feeling heartbeats and the ebb and flow of emotions in a 360 degree radius. With this power active, the mage knows at all times how many people are in a ten foot radius around him, their approximate positions, and in the case of strong feelings, their emotional state. Bill's life has been saved more than once by this rote, which can detect sudden bursts of hate or rage from behind the mage and provide a crucial moment's warning.

Fist Goes Here: A forces 2/Life 1 attack, this rote lets the mage analyze the enemy's body for weaknesses and exploit them. A weakness in the humeral bone may be only one enhanced-momentum punch away from becoming a compound fracture, and an already-bruised side might be a spot particularly vulnerable to a new kick or two. The mage analyzes his foe for any and all such weak points and uses forces to weaken them further.

Today, rather than a single coherent essay, some thoughts about events both past and future, and their interconnectedness and parallelism.

First off, there is now less than a week before the Aerican convention is nearly upon us. Estimated attendence is currently about 10 or 12 people. For those planning to attend and who might need the occasional reminder/sledgehammer, the convention is this coming Saturday, July 21st. Official start time for the convention is between 12 and 1 pm for those who want to meet at the hotel. Location of gathering is uncertain between 1 and 2:30, although bringing people to the Aerican Embassy to Everything Else for the opening ceremonies is a realistic alternative, and in fact we might even just move the meet-&-greet portion here for convenience if the out-of-towners want to. Latecomers showing up between 2 and 5 will probably find us at Rockaberries on St-Charles, but will probably want to phone ahead to ensure that they can find us. If you plan on showing up, it would be a good idea to send me some sort of RSVP, both so that we can worry if you're missing and so that I can laugh maniacally and show off the high attendence numbers. And for gods sake, someone who expects to be there for the majority of the convention needs to bring a good quality camera, as mine is both low-quality and on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

With the convention out of the way, it'll be time for me to sit down and start writing the story for my summer one-shot game, MIME. MIME is not yet scheduled but is expected to run on Saturday August 4 or 11 from 3 to 9pm at the Concordia Games Club or perhaps, if I'm really on top of things and people want the excuse to come visit, my new appartment downtown. There are currently still two or three empty seats in the game, due largely to people not wanting to commit to a game before they even knew what month it would be played in back when I announced it. Spots will (hopefully) fill up fast, so sign up soon.

That covers the future, so time for a few words about the past. After a seven-month delay, Tea and Arguments Night was finally held this past weekend to unanimous approval. Four players (of the six planned -- it's always good to plan an event assuming two people will cancel) gathered in a secure, comfy location, drank an average of three nice hot cups of tea apiece, and spent about four hours arguing about whatever topics got pulled out randomly from a predetermined pile. Topics included animal testing, eugenics and controlled breeding, genetic modification, Quebec soverignty and others, and enlightened, educated, and provocative opinions went around the room. Much of the night might more properly have been called "relaxed discussion" rather than argument because, with tea and comfy couches, nobody felt particularly confrontational, and discussions which started on one topic tended to follow one tangent after another until they finally ended parsecs away from their starting point, but oddly enough, no one complained about this. The Pointy Red Stick (of Doom)^TM, there to be held whenever one chose to express an opinion they knew would be considered cruel and unusual, saw liberal use throughout the night and added many laughs to the already wonderful evening. Prizes were handed out (I, perhaps unsurprisingly, being unanimously acclaimed the funniest person to attend, though someone else won most evil) and a nifty time was had by all. The only universal "this can be improved" comment of the evening was that everyone felt that a larger crowd would have made things more fun, and so when next tea and Arguments Night comes to pass -- and there has already been talk of planning T&AN2 -- it will be a much larger event, hopefully with 18 or twenty attendees and multiple tables with simultaneous discussions going on. We will need many kettles for tea.

For the curious, the list of prizes for T&AN1 was:
A red clown nose, given to the person who was "socially-positive" funniest
A black clown nose, given to the person who was "socially-negative" funniest
The Pointy Red Stick (of Doom)^TM, given to the person who said the most evil thing of the night
A ball and chain, intended to be given to the person most inflexible and hardest to separate from their opinion but which didn't end up getting given out
A mask, given out to the person who spent the most time hiding behind the The Pointy Red Stick (of Doom)^TM and/or asking questions from The Book of Questions without answering them himself
And finally, a pirate hat, whose original purpose I totally forgot between January and July and got given to the person who hadn't won any other prizes.
Obviously, some prizes ended up being given out just for the hell of it rather than for their original purpose, and since there was meant to be six players, there were two prizes too many and I ended up going home with half of them, but they gave everyone a laugh and that's all they were ever intended to do. If there are prizes at T&AN2, the organizers will have to put a bit more thought into them. If we do invite twenty people to T&AN2, there probably won't be twenty distinct prizes, or at least, they'll be from a dollar store at most and the cost will be paid by people other than me.

So that's it for tonight. Events in the past do, indeed, sometimes predict the future, and the future, in terms, both predicts and explains the past. It's a curious example of predictability and balance in an innately annoying and unpredictable Universe. It also makes for a very pleasant summer vacation, which is just generally nifty.

First, a walk down memory lane from waaaaay back to around early 2004.

In the mid 1980’s, a small spaceship crash landed on Earth. Inside was what was thought to be the last survivor of a highly advanced, biologically superior race whose world was destroyed in a massive nuclear accident. With its ship destroyed and most of its technology lost, the alien was accepted by a human family. They called it ALF -- Alien Life Form -- and it lived with them for nearly a decade before finally returning to space to be with other members of its race who it had discovered had also survived the loss of their homeworld.

Now, in 2004, other members of that species have come to Earth, but with less benign intentions. They are HALF - hostile alien life forms – and this summer, it will take the combined power of some of the world’s most powerful creatures to stop them from turning our world… into theirs...

From the people who brought you Red Dwarf: When Weasels Attack, Dungeons and Bandersnatches, Hero: the Overly Violent and Screwed by the Chronomancer comes the most terrifying one-shot of the summer...

World of Darkness: HALF

Rules: Ideal group size is 4-6 players. Characters may be WoD Vampires, Werewolves, Changelings, Mages, Hunters, or Mortals; no Wraiths or Orpheus characters will be allowed to join. Character generation will be as per book rules with characters receiving an extra 30 freebie points to spend during generation. If interested, please contact the storyteller as soon as possible; including a character concept is helpful but not necessary.

Understandably, of course, I never forgot it, and once or twice I've tried to come back to the idea and make it happen. Most recently, I tried to ressurect this game following the termination of the Game of Thrones d20 campaign I was playing in as the ill-fated Edmund Lannister, when the other players suggested I take a turn at running the next game we play. I spent a few days contemplating campaign concepts, considering and rejecting several amusing storylines which I may yet get back to someday, but kept coming back to WoD: HALF. I didn't want to make it a WoD campaign for a variety of reasons, but converting the game to the d20 system would be the work of precisely three seconds. I scrapped the idea of the players being vampires and werewolves and instead drew up basic plans for a secret Shadowy Government Agency charged with investigating unexplained cases. As my players gathered and began to ponder character concepts, slowly and surely, I drew my plans against them.

Then the game died after half of one session. Due to the fault of people other than me, the game was cancelled three sessions in a row, making almost two months since it was a biweekly campaign. The game lost all momentum; one player quit and the others' interest waned, and when the group became eager to start up a Mage campaign, I stepped aside to facilitate (and so that I'd get to play in it myself). HALF D20 sank slowly into the shadowy recesses, lost to time and never, perhaps, to be played. My stories never die without a fight, though, and HALF D20 has clawed its way up from the depths just long enough to have some of the notes from it made public. A monster always has to thrust one hand up out of the pit one last time before sinking away forever.

The Backstory: In the 1980's, a benign, friendly alien, the last survivor of his exploded planet Melmac, crashed on Earth. After years of adventures alongside his adopted Human family, the alien found that others of his people had lived, and he furnished them with some of his genetic material so that they could clone new members of their species. The alien stayed on Earth with his new family and his people returned to the stars where they proceeded to recreated their species. Something went wrong with the cloning process, though; instead of one clone, they produced thousands, in addition to recreating other genetic templates and recreating many of their species' greatest heroes. The Melmacians spent twenty years rebuilding their society on a new planet, but the overabundant clones of the single genetic line soon decided that anyone of a different genetic template was inferior. After imprisoning their creators and all other deviant, the clones set out for Earth to find their progenitor and either recruit him or destroy him.

The Plot: Our story began as the players travel to a Los Angeles suburb to investigate an entire house which has vanished, leaving nothing but a perfect hemispheric crater in the ground. This house long ago belonged to the Tanners, the family which had taken in Gordon Shumway, the alien who became known as ALF, but unknown to the clones it had been more than five years since another family had moved in. SGA agents find a handful of witnesses who observed a Melmacian ship over the vanished house, and in one of the adjascent houses they find a Melmacian agent who has killed the occupants and taken temporary residence to gather information. After either killing, capturing, or losing the alien, the characters return to their headquarters to find an alien mothership hovering over it. The invaders demand control of the planet and the delivery of their progenitor within 24 hours, and to show that they are serious, they vaporize the SGA headquarters and, apparently, all SGA agents aside from the characters. From this point, the players must choose to fight the invasion or try to bring them Shumway, and either way, they face deadly opposition and a looming and very real deadline.

And that's it. This was supposed to be the first two sessions of five, and because of how things went, the later sessions were never written. The villain was never designed, the deathtraps were never layed out, and I have no clue if it would have been a happy or sad ending. I'd created the seeds for a dozen or so plot hooks and story ideas, of which the players would find themselves choosing based on their actions. Among other stories,

• The characters seek out ALF and try to recruit him. Whether they persuade him to give up or not, he offers them advanced Melmacian weapons, most of which would have been obvious puns or jokes, to aid in the battle. Among other technology, the players would have found themselves armed with fear gas (a gas which induces fear in the smeller, such as, for example, the irrational and uncontrollable fear that your home would not pass inspection by a drill sergeant) and the platonic bomb, able to make anyone caught in its blast want to just be friends. Frighteningly, every weapon I offered the players would have been a real one which appeared in ALF continuity.
• Desperate for allies, the characters storm an orbiting Melmacian prison vessel, where "genetic deviants" are imprisoned. There, they would find and have the potential to recruit such mighty Melmacians as the Just-Brunch League, including Supermelman, Baitman, Green Onion and others.
• Taking advantage of the confusion, criminal Melmacians who have evaded arrest escape to Earth. Amongst others, Melmacula, Lord of the Hampires, lands in a quiet New England town and begins to terrorize the populace.
• In the midst of the Melmacian invasion, two other fleets appear in the sky. Other alien races who had previously thought that Earth was to dull to bother with have been attracted by all the activity, and have decided that whatever treasure would entice the Melmacians to commit their whole fleet, they want to get for themselves.

I've previously commented on the new and exciting nearness of various interesting places to my appartment, but yesterday was the first time I actually walked to any of them simply for the sake of walking to them. I'd already gone once this week to walk to the nearest entrance to the underground mall and I did in fact visit the local Games Workshop location to pick up superglue, but that was on a trip to accomplish something else and wasn't a chance to just go for a walk and see what I find. Yesterday I found myself going downtown for a meeting with my employer at the Children's Hospital and, because parking is always hellish in that area of the city except on national holidays, and because I found myself inconveniently two hours early for my meeting, I decided to go to the appartment, do a bit of unpacking and cleaning, and then try walking to the hospital, just to see how it went. One of the key reasons for getting the appartment that I did is that it's less than a ten minute walk from three of the city's main hospitals (the Royal Victoria, the General, and the Neurological Institute) but I'd previously assumed that the Children's hospital would be too far to walk conveniently, and a free hour with nothing to do seemed the perfect time to test that hypothesis.

As it turns out, the Children's is a mere twenty minute walk at my normal speed with a light backpack a torrential downpour.

One of my goals once I start living downtown is to drive as little as possible. I want to start using public transit and walking, both to do my part for the environment and because I hate driving. The whole joy of having lots of nice places in walking distance is to be able to walk to them -- not a huge leap of logic, that. It's therefore very pleasing to know that another major hospital is close enough for me to walk to, in decent weather. I wouldn't necessarily want to do that walk in the depths of a blizzard, although I probably can do it perfectly comfortably right down to minus twenty degrees celcius. I also wouldn't want to do that walk in thirty degree heat, if only because I might no longer smell professional when I get there. Yesterday was a pleasant ninteen or twenty degrees, though, and perfect weather for me. And, as an added bonus, when I was about five minutes into the walk, the skies opened up, the heavens parted, and I was greeted by rains so thick that visibility was down to about twenty feet in front of me. This is a bit of a mixed blessing, really. On the one hand, because I'm a big believer in "be prepared," I had my raincoat with me already. On the other hand, I love the rain, especially on a warmish day, and while I may be waterproof, my backpack and papers aren't, so quite naturally, at the first sign of rain my jacket goes off of me and onto my bag, leaving me deliciously at the mercy of the weather. While other people on the street were running for cover and shelter, I, in my t-shirt and jeans, was having a wonderful time going for a nice, wet walk. I hadn't had that much fun in ages.

Of course, as noted, I may be waterproof, but my papers aren't. My wallet is nylon and respectably waterproof, so the cash I was carrying got a little damp but was undamaged, which is fortunate because as thre rain started it never even occured to me tht paper money in my pocket might not enjoy the rain. Two movie tickets I had, which were longer than the wallet and so protuded out, fared less well, but survived sufficiently intact that they'll still get me into the films. The items in my backpack were protected by my jacket, so while a couple of papers at the bottom got a bit wetter than is really advisable, my valuable character sheets were safe and secure.

The fun of all this was, to me, walking in the rain has actually become a novelty. Sure, in three years it probably won't be as much fun, but for the first few times, and especially in midsummer when I don't need to be anywhere fast and I don't need to look presentable when I get there (though my employer commented that I actually looked better groomed than usual after the rainstorm), a little rain is fun. I've been driving most places that I need to go for about five years now, and before that I took buses everywhere. There wasn't anywhere near my house worth walking to, and except for a handful of times of grade school, I never really walked places most of the time. I'd go for walks sometimes with friends and family, but never in the rain, because not a lot of people like the cold and went as much as I do. In the last decade, I can remember one time going for a walk in the rain, until yesterday, and I can't remember enjoying a walk that much. The fact that I'm living downtown now doesn't necessarily mean that I *will* find myself going out for walks in the rain more often, but at least now I've got lots of interesting places to walk to, such as my places of study and work every day for the next three, seven, or fifty years depending on how things go.

To top all that off, on the way home, after the rain had stopped, the shortest route back to my appartment just happens to be several blocks of Ste-Catherine street, on which I dropped by a comic store, a used bookshop I've never gone into, and a used movie store. I even bought three new (well, used, but new to me) novels, since I had a bit of money lying around that had been budgeted for meals during the week I didn't end up needing to buy. It's all well and good to have these places nearby but they really are more fun when I actually walk into them.

I've commented a few times now that one the things I most wanted to have in my new place is a workshop/laboratory. On my list of priorities, this workshop sits just below "a computer" and just above "a bed" and tying narrowly with "Nukee the Weasel." A full dedicated workshop is one of the rooms I dream of someday having in the full compound/fortress I've kept designed in the back of my mind as far back as I can remember, much like the Scream Room and Games Room, but while it's against most appartment codes to build a soundproofed chamber and I have neither the space or money for a game room in my new place, I *do* have the resources and space for a modest workshop (though, to be fair, it probably can't rightly be called a laboratory too).

The obvious question one might ask, of course, is what the heck I need a workshop for. When people use that word, the first thing they tend to think of is machines, wood or metalwork, a place where stuff gets designed and built. It would rightly be said that these are not tasks which people associate with me; my manual dexterity is terrible, I'm too weak and puny to work extensively with large objects, and I'm allergic to wood which rules out a career in surrealist whittling. That said, most people out there know that I'm a painter -- not of canvases, but of figurines and miniatures. I enjoy painting, and while I don't have the time to do it much anymore, I still manage to produce a few figures every year. None of them would win a Golden Demon or a Slayer Sword, but they amuse me and they sit on my shelves and look pretty, which is the most I ask of most any toy. While living at home, I never had any sort of dedicated painting space. My desk has enough room for paints and figures if I shuffle the keyboard around, but it's really never been an ideal painting space, and it's always just been one activity amongst many for which that space gets used. Now that I'm going to be moving into my own place, I'll have more room, more freedom to allocate how that room is used, and most importantly, an extra desk.

While we're on the topic, I'm calling the space a workshop rather than, say, a painting studio or something because I do more than paint. While relatively few people have seen them, I've made more than a few attempts at sculpting in my life. I've never sculpted anything artistic, of course, but I have built a few pieces of wargaming terrain and even a modest building or two, including one very nice three-level temple which saw a lot of use back when my Necrons were still seeing regular use. My desk at home was roomy enough for painting but certainly not for working with a three-foot-square piece of foamboard; my new workshop is. I probably won't be building much new terrain, since I'm not bringing any foamboard with me when I move and I no longer need much terrain now that I essentially no longer wargame, but there is every chance that I might find myself working on vehicles or other large models. Even after giving up on wargaming, I've still found myself building a few large models simply for the fun of it, such as the Killer Penguin Dropship I converted from bits of a Kazon warcruiser model and my heavily modified AT-At, the Landshaker. It's rare that I put down the kind of money that you need for a larger model kit and rarer still that I get a really captivating idea for something to do with such a kit, but when the next idea hits me, I'll be ready. The Death Star models at Udisco get cheaper every year...

So, what are the components of a workshop? For my purposes, most importantly, a desk. I inherited a number of pieces of furniture from the guy whose lease I took over, including two very comfy couches, a book case and TV stand, a couple of tables, a lovely dresser, and an old, broken desk. He chose to not take the desk with him because it was old and scratched, the metal supports holding the sliding keybroard tray were bent out of shape and the bottom had come out of the main drawer. It's a little known fact that I'm actually very handy with a screwdriver and, in fact, I repaired the broken drawer easily enough, though the keyboard tray was beyond my skills to fix. I'd already picked up another, smaller desk to be a computer desk from another friend who'd moved, which left me with this big, solid, already well-scratched five-foot wooden desk extra. I certainly wasn't going to throw out a servicable desk just because it lacked a computer tray. By turning the big old desk ninety degrees, I made room for the newer computer desk against one wall and found that I still had ample room. The final set-up of one corner of my appartment will therefore be a little cubicle formed by large, sun-allowing windows on one side, a computer and desk orthogonal to the windows, and on the other side of the computer, parallel to the windows where I'll get plenty of lamplight at night and sunlight during the day, is my workshop.

Obviously, one needs more than just a desk, especially if you want to cut metal or glue plastic, tasks with which wooden desks tend to be of minimal direct help. Contrary to what most games manufacturers would like you to think, most of what you need for modeling work is all available at the dollar store -- paint brushes and a scalpel, basically. A good cutting surface is useful; my desk is pre-scratched, but I still don't want to make it any worse, so my workshop includes the big, heavy, thick, and above all expendable cover taken off of a neuroscience textbook. I'm going to splurge on glue and probably buy an unecessarily expensive brand name glue, but I use superglue practically every week, everything from building toys to repairing holes in my shoe to attaching useful modifications to my cel-phone case, and it's well worth and extra two dollars to get a brand that I know works and that I know how to use effectively. Finally, my workshop features a couple of shiny clear-plastic display cases picked up cheap, in which I want to store all of my work-in-progress figures, so they're clearly visible and out in the open for me to see but won't gather dust. The only thing I'm still missing to complete my workshop is paints, which I haven't yet picked up. Like glue, I'll probably spend a little bit extra on paint that I know is good quality, that I know looks good on both plastic and metal, and that's water-soluble.

And that's my workshop. It'll be a while before I get to try it out in action, and a lot of the time it's probably going to be little more than a glorified shelf, but I've got a proper, dedicated workshop and that alone feels like something special. And then in my next appartment, I'll try to have my soundproofed scream room.

Here's an adjustment to moving which is only occuring to me fairly late in the process: the ambient sounds in my world are changing. I've got fairly sensitive hearing -- above average, if far from superhuman -- and I'm very sensitive to sounds in terms of what sounds I like and dislike. My auditory system has always been mildly synaesthetic, which means that many sounds that I hear stimulate sensory perceptions other than simple hearing. When I hear good music, I can often really feel it as a tactile sensation and a physical pleasure, and when I hear genuinely bad music, it's been known to range anything from causing a faint buzzing in my ears to the sensation of bricks being pressed to my ears to the sensation of needles entering my forehead. Most sounds don't have any synaesthetic quality to me, but there's no shortage of ones that do, which is why people have commented that I seem to respond so strongly to my favourite songs and why, for example, I refuse to listen to Eddie Vedder or, gods help us all, Bobby Vinton. The only reason it's taken me a while to realize how different the ambient sounds are between my old home and my new one is that I still haven't spent much time in the appartment; I'm sure there will be all sorts of fun nighttime noises there that I'll discover when I spend my first night there.

The background noises at my family's house are many and varried. At this precise moment -- windows open, most of my family off at work, late on a lazy Tuesday morning after getting most of my for-pay work done for the day -- I can count at least twenty background sounds in my environment. Most obvious is the roar and squeak of the garbage truck going by outside. Fainter but still audible are the fan in the hallway and, farther but slightly louder, the sound of my father's shower, almost but not quite the comforting soound of summer rain. As the garbage truck gets farther away, I can hear the kids down the street playing -- by which I mean, screaming, hitting things with hockey sticks, and occasionally setting off nearby car alarms. There's the distant plastic-on-metal thump of a man three doors down closing his car door and, just at the egde of hearing, the sound of people at the local swimming pool, a good seven-minute walk away. Unpleasantly absent is any of my music, as the speakers on my computer have been slowly failing for months and while their performance still remains good better than half the time, at this precise moment they are not condusive to good writing. These are all the sounds to which I've grown accustomed, and they're all part of my environment; they provide a wealth of sensory data which is both stimulating and familiar, and provides a comfortable level of white noise for me to work in. Except for those idiot kids, who, in the words of the great mister Tufnel, appear to have volume knobs which go right up to twelve.

The truth is, I don't know precisely what the ambient sounds of my new place are. The hours I've spent there up to now have all been in the early morning or the midafternoon, when many people are probably asleep, at work, or at school. I've mostly kept the windows closed while there, which means little to no sound has come in through them. The building's walls appear to be thick and sturdy concrete; I have yet to hear any significant noises from my neighbours in any orthogonal direction. My appartment is on the inner side of the building, with my balcony facing, not the busy street, but the inner courtyard which, up to now, has remained basically empty while I've been around. To date, pretty much the only sounds I've detected while in the appartment have been the occasional tramp of booted feet going down the hallway and the actually very pleasant background hum of the fan in my front hallway closet, which appears to be the source of my air-conditioning. Once or twice I've heard faint noises from the walls which I'm prepared to wager are water pipes, but this is neither common nor unpleasant. To really illustrate the point, yesterday, when I was in the appartment unpacking a few boxes and arranging my desk, I know for a fact that there was major construction and angry traffic right outside the building, and, with my windows closed, I didn't hear the slightest sound of any of it.

It is proverbially quiet. Proverbially *too* quiet.

A little silence is a mixed blessing to me. On the one hand, one of the things I'm really looking forward to is getting away from the sounds of kids playing outside. I'll be more than happy to be rid of the sounds of hockey and screaming from the West, basketball and screaming from the East, and swimming and loudspeakers from the South. On the other hand, being sensitive to sound, an appartment that's too quiet makes me nervous. When I'm in the appartment, I find myself moving slowly and moving things very carefully -- I feel reluctant to break the silence, and because I can't hear my neeighbours, I don't know if the walls are thick enough to block out noise or if they're being quiet and asleep and I'll wake them up and earn their enmity as soon as I try to move a piece of furniture or drop something during weapons training. I also find the silence makes me unecessarily distractable. I can't study in libraries because in the all-pervasive silence the slightest noise distracts and distubs me, and similarly, in a deathly quiet appartment, I have a hard time reading because the slightest little change in background noise grabs my focus.

This is all more observation than complaint, of course. If I had to pick between neighbours who are perfectly quiet or loud and obnoxious, I'll pick quiet any day and especially any night. Furthermore, once I've got a computer moved into the appartment, I'll be adding its minute but noticable hum to the background, which should both reduce the silence and provide a reassuring happy-noise. When I start hanging around the appartment at dinnertime or during prime time, it's likely that noise from other appartments will be much more noticable, especially when I start keeping my windows open more. And, as with anything else, when there's a change to our lifestyle, we adjust, given time, and I'll adjust to a new level of background noise in a few days or weeks. Either way, like I said, too quiet is better than too loud, and I'm sure that in no time at all I'll be nice and comfy with the sounds around me. And if not, I'll simply take to leaving my computer playing music twenty four hours a day, and we'll see how my neighbours like waking up to "Look At All Those Idiots" blaring at 7 in the morning.

The really neat thing about living in the heart of downtown, of course, is being close to Everything You Could Possibly Need. Montreal is by any stretch of the imagination a huge, complex, and even exotic city; I could walk out of my appartment and find pretty much anything I could possibly want to look for within a half-hour walk. This is doubly exciting given that in the area that I'm moving out of, the most exciting things within a half-hour's walk are the post office, the liquour store, and the bus-stop to go somewhere more interesting.

Don't get me wrong: I love living in the suburbs. I like having some trees around me, despite my allergies. I like living on a street where it's entirely possible to go an hour without seeing a moving car. I like knowing that if I cross the road without looking both ways, the most dangerous thing that might hit me is a running toddler. I like living in a quiet, boring neighbourhood. In part, this is atributable to the fact that I have a car of my own, and so I'm not constrained by such things as bus schedules which might strand me in the suburbs, but the truth is I love living in a quiet area and I hate to leave. Downtown, understandably, isn't the same, particularly in a city like Montreal. It's not quiet or empty, and standing in the middle of the road is often safer to than being on the sidewalk when some cars go by. I'm lucky that the neighbourhood I'm moving into is a college area, relatively non-seedy, devoid of guilt-inducing homeless people, tree-lined and narrow-streeted, but if I walk South one block I'm in "classical" downtown and if I walk any further than that I'm on some of the main commercial (and yes, seedy) streets of the city. I don't like downtown -- it's dirty, crowded, and all the concrete and buildings makes the place feel oddly undead. From a purely aesthetic and decibel-concious perspective, moving downtown sucks.

That's just one perspective, of course. On the other hand, before moving, the only interesting shops within a ten minute drive are bookstores. I love bookstores with a deep and abiding passion, but they, alone, do not bring fullness to life. Living downtown, I'm now a ten-minute walk from no less than three comicbook shops, and those are merely the ones that I know of. My parents live a few minutes from a large Chapters bookstore; my appartment is literally down the street from their biggest location in the city. I'm walking distance now to at least four major movie theatres; I may never want to go to them thanks to the miracle of downloading, but it's nice to have the option. I shouldn't lack for food, since there's a Subways in the basement of my building (right near the pool -- you never know if the basement will smell like freshly-baked bread or chlorine) and restraurant from every conceivable ethnicity is nearby (seriously, every ethnicity -- at least nine kinds of Asian food, three varieties of African, eight Indian, and one place that specializes in the traditional foods of Switzerland). If anything, I sincerely regret the fact that I'm not a more normal male... it's almost sinful, all the bars and stripclubs I'll be letting go to waste.

Oh, and I'm across the street from school and down the street from three of the five main hospitals where I'll be working for the next three (or probably fifty) years. Those are convenient too, I guess.

The trouble with being near all these things is that, and let's be honest, they're almost completely useless to me. Above and beyond the fact that this summer is the last time I'll be getting regularly paid until I graduate from medical school and so I'll be living on a tight budget for the next few years, I don't really get out much. I download my movies and my comicbooks, and while I consume novels at a prodigious rate, I'm almost certainly going to simply be borrowing from my brother or getting a few books a year as gifts from my family for the next little while. The bookstore isn't that different from the stripclubs in that sense -- it's nice to have them nearby in case I ever want to go to one, but it's hard to imagine a circumstance where I'd want to. Once I'm working and getting paid come 2010, things will be different, and I'm quite confident that I'll be buying books faster than I read them come that time, but for now, the bookstore, like the computer store, the chocolate shop, and buckingham palace, is just another place which offers me nothing more than the chance to walk past, gaze into the windows, and want stuff. The comic shops are much the same, especially now that I could no longer afford to feed my habits if I was still getting printed copies; I *could* go visit Capitaine Quebec (or the much closer 1000000 Comix) every day if I wanted to, but I couldn't justify *buying* anything there more than once ot twice a year (unless, of course, a few more modeling jobs fall into my lap like the one this year did -- I'm not gambling on it). The shops are there and I might even walk in from time to time just to browse and admire all the Neat Stuff, but in the short term, practical, It Must Be Mine sort of sense, useless to me.

For no shop is this truer than the Games Workshop outlet near me. I'm thrilled to be living near an official GW store and I'm genuinely excited to be walking distance to a shop which carries every Warhammer product I could possibly want, especially since my new appartment is soon to have a dedicated Workshop for painting, gluing, converting, and displaying models and figurines. But -- and this is the point -- Games Workshop is perhaps the single most overpriced miniature manufacturer in the entire world and however much I love my Necrons the fact remains than I haven't played 40K in over a year now, let alone considered taking up Warhammer Fantasy. And if all I want the figure for is to paint and not to put on the battlefield, I'm not going to pay thirty dollars for a single model which could buy me ten miniatures, all superiorly sculpted, from another company. It's cool living near a Games Workshop store, but I'm probably never going to buy anything from them.

People ask me why I'm not more excited about moving out. This is why. It's a terrible curse, being able to see both sides of every argument.

All that being said -- much of it redundantly and all with unecessary verbosity -- the excitement of being near everything does remain pretty damn nifty. I may never be able to buy the four hundred dollar life-sized bust of Doctor Doom sitting in the comic shop, but I *could* walk over and look at it every day. The glass could be half empty or it could be half full, and I have every intention of walking to all the pretty shops once in a while and enjoying seeing all the cool things that exist, even if they aren't in my home. The fact that the toys exist at all reassures me that the Universe isn't *that* bad a place and at least there's some stuff out there which is capable of bringing me joy and amusement. I might not afford it, but it exists, and I can go look at it, and now I live close enough to do so.

And, in ten years, I'll be a doctor and earning enough to buy whatever I felt I lacked now. I still won't, most probably, because I've always been very good at resisting the temptation to buy toys that cost silly amounts of money, but the option will be there. I can wait...

Way back in late 2006, I received a letter from the Palais de Tokyo, an improbably-named Parisian arts and culture museum known for combining showcases of fine art and popular culture. This museum intended to put on a display of micronational artifacts, and being that I'm so very all-around fantastic in addition to being a talented if amateurish graphic designer, they quite naturally approached me for permission to include the Aerican Empire in their exposition, which would run in February to April of 2007 (and which I regrettably couldn't attend myself despite being sent a free ticket to the show, due to some inconveniently-placed exams). Unprepared as I was for this request, I didn't take nearly as much advantage of this offer as I should have, but I did have sense enough to agree to participate to a small degree. If I had the time again, given that they were paying shipping both ways, I would have sent them T-shirts, painted models, action figures, and even an entire Imperial dress uniform along the lines of the one I wore to my Halloween party last february. As it was, busy as I found myself with exams and caught very much off-guard by their request, I dispatched only a small number of artifacts. Among these pieces were an Imperial Guardsman ID pin, the first ever printed Aerican Passport, and one of the three full-size, six foot-long nyon flags I had printed up for the occasion. To my mind, however, the most impressive piece I sent them was the world's only existing copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Aerican Empire.

To date, at least three separate works have been called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Aerican Empire. The most wholly remarkable of these is the project by a good friend of mine to write a program which automatically archives the entirety of the Empire's mailing list going back almost ten years now, a mammoth task which he accomplished with skill and care and which at this time last year yielded a forty-seven megabyte zip archive. The second most wholly remarkable project to bear that name, and the wholly most remarkable book to bear the title, was a photoediting project of my design created specifically for the Palais de Tokyo exhibit, and is currently sold through my reasonably priced souvenir shop. One of my finest design projects to date and a damn nifty-looking book, this tome was designed, printed, shipped to me, and sent off to Paris all in the space of a few days, and consists of a nifty cover on a high-quality blank unlined notebook. The nice museum-folk liked it enough to ask for permission to make it directly interactive with the public -- let them pick it up, write in it, damage it, bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate it. This very morning, the very same box in which I had shipped them my artifacts arrived at my door with postage from Paris and a good deal more tape than I had thought to use myself. It contained in it one of my precious flags (undamaged), the Guard pin (still shiny), the passport (still in surprisingly good shape for computer-paper quality printing) and the Guide. The Guide, which had been held and handled by the public, and worse, by the French. The Guide, which had crossed the Atlantic and back and lived to tell the tale. The Guide... with every page filled to overflowing with handwriting in at least eight different language, the spirals bent, at least a dozen pages torn out, a sticker for some band I'd never heard of affixed to the back, and its cover, its beautiful one-of-a-kind cover designed by mine own hand, gone entirely. I found the damage to the book distressing, at first. Then I read the stuff that had been written in the book and somehow it actually feels all the more special. Plus, I can always have another one printed up from my store for ten bucks.

That flag, by the way, is the one of the three which will be going up on the wall of my new appartment. Above and beyond the fact that it's the only one for which i no longer have the plastic slip-cover, it seems wholly appropriate that the one I put on public display be the one which has traveled the world attracting converts to my armies.

Most of the things written in my book weren't particularly interesting. The first and last pages were signed with the myspace address for some sort of pop-emo band, whose music I tried out just to be courteous and turned off within eight seconds of the lyrics starting, and a number of people signed their name or just wrote hello in one language or another. Some of the signings were more interesting, though. I was amused by one guest's rendition of Ben, King of the Smileys; their artistic skills were even worse than mine but it's the thought that counts. One person wrote their e-mail address ending in .at (Austrian) alongside a picture of a flower and the words "...still searching" which makes me wonder if perhaps I'm being hit on from the other side of the world; I might just send them an e-mail thanking them for signing and see if I can make a friend. One particularly interesting individual (I'm pretty sure the signiture says Gary) actually filled in a full page with a four paragraph letter which boils down to "you could choose to make a new country, or you could choose to focus your energy on fixing the one you're in" and I feel bad about that because I'm sure there's a lot of subtlety and nuance in his letter which my French isn't good enough to appreciate. On the other hand, a few pages later there's the English poem someone wrote to me about abolishing state borders, which I liked a great deal, which just goes to show how two perfectly reasonable vandals can agree to disagree.

To the eight or nine people who wrote their thanks to Palais de Tokyo for hosting the exhibition, I'd like to add my voice, though I dare say I've gotten more of a laugh over it than the people who paid to attend did. To the six or so people who wrote saying they didn't know if anybody would ever read what they scrawled... "hello."

At least half a dozen new states had their outlines proposed in my book, in four different languages, some of which I could actually read. The map of Quartzland which an enthusiastic guest drew was most impressive, particularly since he took the trouble to include his neighbouring states of "friendly neighbour," "unfriendly neighbour" and "hereditary enemy." Almost as clever was the proposed flag of Ahah, which reads "I (heart) me" and quite poetically captures much of the spirit behind why I founded an Empire. The Garden of Weeden filled an inspiring amount of detail into a single page (national food: brownies; national currency: grams), even if a stoner nation isn't a terribly original idea anymore. Clearly, though, it was the Empire and not their own inventions which captured the most imagination... at least, base on the moustachioed, cigar-smoking, ray-ban wearing, bunny-suited sketch of what people imagined the Emperor might look like.

Finally, credit due to one guest who gave me the biggest laugh, with a persuasive drawing which proved that Australia is the head of a scotty dog. Larry Stein, if you only knew. Credit for the most honest entry goes to Margot, who wrote that if the expo had been more exciting, she would have written more in my book.

Overall, the book largely made no sense to me and was clearly meant to be devoid of meaning. Each page and often individual writings on a page had absolutely no connection to anything else nera it and no single clear idea was found throughout the book. It was pointless, frequently illegible, generally nonsensical, and was arguably a total waste of my time to read once, let alone the two or three times I've gone through it. It was very much reminiscent of the Principia Discordia in other ways, too. In any case, a fun read and well worth one lost cover. This book will be stored from this day forward in the secured storage rooms of the Aerican Museum of Culture and Stuff for perusal and unecessarily in-depth analysis by future generations.

The real kicker about moving is that it tends to be done in packs. I mean this both in the sense that numerous people tend to be involved in any single move and in the sense that multiple individuals in a social circle tend, in my experience, to move at one time. I've helped friends move about a half dozen times in my life -- most of those times split between only two people, mind you -- and in every case, when one of them was moving, another was preparing to, just finishing up, or was actively in the process of moving too. On a good year, two equally important people weren't moving the same weekend.

Storytime: Way back in the Colonial era, the government of Quebec passed a law forbiding the evil landowners from evicting the poor, nameless, unemployed serfs during the winter; historical records differ as to whether this was to save the lives of the poor or to keep the streets from clogging up with frozen urchins. Whatever the reason, it was decided that it would be illegal to evict a tenant in Quebec before May 1st, after the bulk of the snows had melted but before the one or two early May blizzards that inevitably hit Montreal, just to keep things interesting. This law held up until the 1960's, when it was finally pointed out by some clever politician that people are still more than capable of freezing to death in Quebec until early June, and besides, the law as it currently stood put countless students in the position of being forced to move during their exam periods and the local universities' failure rates were starting to look bad. The date was thus changed to July 1st -- all part of a Federalist conspiracy to frame the Separatist government into making it look like there was a conspiracy to rob Les Anglos of their opportunity to celebrate Canada Day. In any case, in modern times, both law and convention dictate that a huge percentage of Quebec's (and thus, Montreal's) population moves on or about July 1st. The streets are packed to bursting with moving trucks and the death-toll from falling refridgerators sends the secret robot masters who control all major appliance companies into paroxysms of laughter which can last for seconds.

All this to say, when people in Montreal move, they tend not to be the only ones moving. And for once, it really *is* part of a vast conspiracy, just one of the rare ones directed *against* landlords.

Given that my very slow move is now starting its fourth week, it may not be shocking that other people I know have found themselves moving while I'm the midst of the process myself. I have therefore found myself actually delaying my own move so that I can contribute to others' doing their -- my deadline to get my place livable is late August, after all, whereas others of my aquaintance tend to have one or two days in which to totally vacate their places of residence. I've found myself on at least three separate days in the last week alone expending more energy moving the boxes of other people than I have boxes of my own -- and in point of fact, I've climbed more stairs, lifted more pounds, driven around with more boxes, and packed more Stuff belonging to other people in this past week than I have of my own. I've been doing so much heavy lifting this week that my forearms have actually gotten nearly an inch wider just distal to the cubital fossa and I suddenly find myself able to do ten push-ups more than I could two weeks ago. I've personally lifted and carried about forty boxes from point A to point B in the last five days, and precisely one of them has gone up to my own appartment. And it's not even July 1st yet... several of my friends have yet to start their moves.

None of this is meant as a complaint, of course. I don't bedrugde my friends my help and I feel pleased and honoured that I can be there to help when they need me, doubly so since I can bring my mother's huge-trunked SUV to help them. It does, however, serve to demonstrate that doing as much of one's moving at the the relaxed pace of one box per day is a much easier and better way to do a move, if you can arrange to have the time (and not if, for example, you're moving because your building burned down just a bit). Once again, the moral is that the way I do stuff is better than the way other people do stuff. It's a carefully considered combination of planning, cunning, and having two gods watching out for you and helping you carry the boxes.

One thing I'm profoundly grateful for during this moving process -- my move primarily, but also to a lesser degree the other moves I find myself involved in at the same time -- is the presence of a plethora ("a bodily condition characterized by an excess of blood and marked by turgescence and a florid complexion" for the benefit of those who don't have Alfonso Arau's superior intellect and education) of friends around who can come and help. I never got the chance to ask people if they'd be willing to come help me move when I do the Big Stuff later in the summer -- people keep volunteering to come help me, whether I want it or not. The real test, of course, is whether people manage to show up on the actual day of the move, which as we all know isn't always predicted by whether they volunteer ahead of time. Either way, it's gratifying to know that there are people who want to help me, or at least, care enough to claim they want to help me. As things stand, I still hope to have the bulk of the move done well before the time comes to move the Big Stuff so that when the truck pulls up in front on my appartment the only thing it's going to hold is a bed, and I really am well on the way to meeting that goal, particularly with the three more boxes I packed up today and currently plan to take in by myself tommorow when I go into town for D&D.

When all is said and done, three truths come to us. First, people tend to do things in packs more often than on their own. Second, misery loves company. Third... too many objects in any given house weigh more than ten pounds.