a game in which you start with one word, and then add to it using common phrases. for example, “unicorn” and then “unicorn on the cob” – adding “corn on the cob” to “unicorn”. you can use the last word of the preceding phrase, or the last sound. you must repeat the entire string and then affix your addition to the end. if you forget a step, or get something wrong, the game is over and you have lost.

amanda learned this game from daniel this morning and taught it to me this afternoon. this was the incredibly epic game we played on the bus ride home from SFU. 57 rounds. we ended it because our brains were starting to hurt. i’ve written out each round. remember that every time, we were repeating everything preceding that level. i’ve written out the entire game at the end.

hat
hat stand
standees on public transit
transit cops
cops corrupt
corrupted files
files erased
erased pencil marks
marks of membership
memberships ahoy!
ahoy mates
mates of state
state officials
officials at a soccer match
match struck
struck my head
head games
games for children
children at risk
risk takers
takers and givers
givers of love
love songs
songs stuck in my head
head tax
taxes due
due-de, where’s my car?
car keys are lost
lost socks at the laundromat
laundromats are boring
boring people live in the suburbs
the suburbs sprawl out to nothingness
nothingness and being
being here is great
great/grated cheese
cheese sandwiches
sandwiches and soup
soup is good on a cold winter’s day
dayglo abortions
abortions are illegal in guatemala
abortions are illegal in guatemala, which has an approximate population of 9 million people
9 million people could be having sex right now
now is the time
now is the time for us to get off this bus
now is the time for us to get off this bus, which won’t take us all the way home
home is where the heart is
the heart is a pump
pump up my bicycle tires (at this point, we got off the bus, and were applauded by the other transit riders – standees and sitters alike)
tireswing
swinger’s club
club sandwich
club sandwich featuring avocado
avocado rolls
rolls down the hill
hill/hilton hotels
hotels are for one night stands
standees on public transit

(57 rounds)

hat standees on public transit cops corrupted files erased pencil marks of memberships ahoy mates of state officials at a soccer match struck my head games for children at risk takers and givers of love songs stuck in my head taxes dude, where’s my car keys are lost socks at the laundromats are boring people live in the suburbs sprawl out to nothingness and being here is grated cheese sandwiches and soup is good on a cold winter’s dayglo abortions are illegal in guatemala, which has an approximate population of 9 million people could be having sex right now is the time for us to get off this bus, which won’t take us all the way home is where the heart is a pump up my bicycle tireswinger’s club sandwich featuring avocado rolls down the hilton hotels are for one night standees on public transit

on the 135 people were laughing and applauding and trying their best not to prompt us along with help. when we got off the bus (at pump up my bicycle tires, amanda’s line) the whole back of the bus clapped for us. it was too awesome.

Two items sent in by an anonymous alert reader have caught my interest this morning. First is the profile of a queer gaming festival in (the queer/vegan promised land of) Portland, Oregon, this coming weekend. The event will be a safe and fun space to introduce people to pen-and-paper roleplaying (think Dungeons and Dragons). Called Fantasy Quest, the event is a three-day spectacular designed to appeal to two historically marginalized categories of people – queers and geeks. Some of us are both – what does that makes us, queeks?

Check the article for photos of total babes Forsorcerers, who will be playing the second night of the event. I would love to attend this. It’s right up my alley.

The second article is a BBC story about a hetero couple seeking a civil union in the UK. They’ve been denied a license for a civil union – not only are gays not allowed to get married, but straights aren’t allowed to have civil unions either. The institutions are designed to widen the gap between “normal” and “wrong”, and Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle have decided to challenge that.

Halloween was alright. Probably one of the best I’ve had in recent years – both Friday and Saturday I picked one event and stuck to it, more or less, which reduced the stress I usually have by trying to pack as much fun into a night as possible. I inevitably end up disappointed, that way.

Friday night I shot photos at The Bourbon for Premature Ejackulantern – the second annual pre-Halloween show put on by Run With The Heard, also featuring the talents of The New Values and Fake Shark – Real Zombie! I’m really pleased with my photos from the show; I think they’re some of the best show photos I’ve ever taken. To see all 191 photos, check out the Facebook album I posted.

That night, I dressed up as Tank Girl, and when I showed up, found two others – so we ended up crashing the stage during the group costume contest as Tank Girl, Sub Girl and (me) Jet Girl. It was pretty epic. I hope someone took a photo. I haven’t found one yet.

Saturday night I went out to the Biltmore to see Fan Death. I didn’t bring my camera, which was probably a good call, but I did take a bunch of photos beforehand. I was James Dean, queering up the fifties in drag. It was pretty awesome, actually.

All in all it was super fun. I’ve been posting tonnes of photos on Flickr lately.

okay, so this is what i am up to.

i’ve undertaken a project to draw pictures of scatterheart, after jesse saw this drawing of mine. i think i’ll do a great job, but i’ll want to colour it and i don’t colour as well as i wish i could. entirely due to lack of patience and not at all due to lack of skill.

i’ve been working the last couple weeks on perfecting a website i made for women into healing centre, a local drug and alcohol addiction treatment and recovery centre located in maple ridge (a suburb of vancouver’s suburbs). it’s going really well and i’m quite happy with it, though i still have a few plans for it that haven’t been brought to fruition.

a new layout for this very site (that is, malloreigh.com, because i know you may well be reading this elsewhere) is in the works. slow but steady.

i’ve just done a couple of graphic ads for juicy! juice bar, a raw, vegan, & otherwise super-rad whole foods vendor in new westminster (another vancouver suburb). this place is owned and operated by my good friend, the yoga princess katie kitson, for whom i will someday build a personal portfolio (you heard it here first). juicy’s grand opening is september 14th – discounts and free samples will be all the rage that day, i hear.

i’m back in school for the fall, taking four classes (and hopefully, soon, a fifth, if i can nudge my way in). and no, i’m not at concordia – i’m still in vancouver at langara. speaking of which, @langaracollege, why was there someone with a stinky, emission-spewing leaf blower having a joyous time blowing irrelevant surfaces the other day? and why is the cafe in the new student union building using styrofoam when the cafeteria uses compostable greenware?

yes, i am that asshole student who agitates for constant vigilance on the eco-friendly side of things. we’ll never be doing enough. whatever, someone’s gotta do it, and learning makes me idealistic. (as if i wasn’t already?)

i’ve been tumbling quite a bit. check that out if you like pretty and interesting things.

ETA: These are from Ruminations.

“More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.”

“Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.”

“Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what the fuck was going on when I first saw it.”

“I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.”

“I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.”

“A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.”

“LOL has gone from meaning, “laugh out loud” to “I have nothing else to say” ”

“How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?”

“While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and i instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.”

“Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if
I do!”

“There’s no worse feeling than that millisecond you’re sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.”

“I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dammit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What’d you do after I didn’t answer? Drop the phone
and run away?”

“I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it’s on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.”

On another note, there’s this asshole spider that’s been hanging around in our house for the last few days. He does unnerving things like drop rapidly from the ceiling while I’m moving through a room or the hallway, and then do it another few feet away a few minutes later. What a creep.

Right now, he’s walking along the floor, still attached to his web string. He’s brown and has these spindly legs and his body is about the size of a clove. Perhaps I should find out if he’ll kill us.

So yesterday was Vancouver’s Pride celebration – a weekend celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and other non-traditional/generally unaccepted sexualities and sexual/gender identities. Last year, I sat with my friends watching the Pride Parade on Pacific Avenue, and just like every year, the Dykes on Bikes opened the parade. They rode around in loops, swerving back and forth, waving flags and raising cheers from the crowd. There weren’t only Dykes on Bikes, however – there were quite a few gay boys riding scooters. I made a joke that day (and tweeted it, of course) that it was the Dykes on Bikes and the Fruits on Scoots. Hilarious! Rhyming is funny!

Anyway, a few weeks ago it occurred to me that I ride a two-wheeled machine, but I am neither a dyke on a (motor)bike, nor am I a fruit on a scooter. I, and some of my dearest friends, are queers… who ride fixed gear bicycles. Thus, Queers on Fixed Gears was born.

It turns out that riding in the parade with Dykes on Bikes is an open invitation – no paperwork required, just show up at the parade’s head at 11am. And so, we did. I got the movement going a bit late, so there were only three of us, but we rocked it sufficiently. After preloading with a Cranberry Mike’s Hard Lemonade, we bombed down to Robson and Thurlow to meet up with the parade. Upon arriving, we decided to stick to the back of the byke brigade (though I, always the attention seeker, wanted to ride at the front – I’m glad my more levelheaded friends held me back). We were met by some women who I assumed were organizers; they said, and I paraphrase, “If you’ve got two wheels, you’re in.” Right on.

The bykes started up and cloaked us with exhaust (*cough cough*) and we were off. We rode in three-or-four-block loops, back and forth, as the rest of the parade (headed by a police car) moved slowly behind us. I wove back and forth down the hill on Robson, tapering my speed off by pumping my front brake so that I didn’t cross the paths of too many bykes.

Still, I encountered a bit of hostility – one woman barked at me under her breath, “If I hit you guys it’s not my fault,” and a few others seemed to resent our ‘raining on their parade’, so to speak. One of my companions encountered a parade viewer, filming the event, who very clearly was “trying to film the Dykes on Bikes” and wished that we would “get out of the way”. A police officer asked us to ride on the sidewalk, please, to avoid “getting in the way”.

Overall, however, even with that hostility, it was a super fun and positive experience. More than one group of people were happy to see bicycles in the crowd – “I love bikes!” – and some of the Dykes on Bikes riders appreciated our changing up the usual pattern. For me, it was a political statement. I love to fight for acceptance of bicycles as a valid method of transportation. I love my bicycle. It gets me everywhere I need to go and I feel so damn good when I ride it.

What was even better, however, was the crowd response. I adored it – that high feeling I got from riding along with my hands in the air and hearing a cheer rise up beside me like a wave.

Next year, Queers on Fixed Gears will be riding in the parade again. You’re welcome to join us, even if you’re not queer, even if you don’t ride a fixed gear. I want it to be bigger and better next year. I want us to have a banner announcing our participation. I want you to start this ride in your local pride parade. Let’s start a global phenomenon.

The Warriors Race from morehartfilms on Vimeo.

A Vancouver team bike race inspired by The Warriors? Need I say more? I’m pretty pitiful when it comes to racing – I’ve been a bit bike shy since I got hit by a car, and I have yet to get over it (though it’s been a fucking long time) – but this is too good. I must do it.

Seems like The Warriors is on everyone’s brain, lately. Vancouver photographer Kris Krug did a Warriors-themed photoshoot with my favourite local band The Heard a couple of weeks ago. And the photos are excellent.