May 24 Pictures

The longer I have a camera the more I start to love it, between the two BBQs I was invited to I was able to get a few cool shots in.
Great weekend.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Rap Accents

This was pretty hilarious, the first time I watched it I kept on thinking Oh please do Canadians, please, please do it. 

須藤元気

I really like World Order, I have no idea what the songs are about but the choreography in their videos is nothing sort of amazing. This video showed up in my youtube feed yesterday and I thought it was really cool, hope you like it.

(Yet another cool reason to love Japan)

itap of my window

Today I tried to read the manual for my camera because I always bitch about RTFM issues at work but the whole thing made very little sense to me, I think learning how to use this is going to be a lot of trial and error. I took this last night from my window, I thought it was kinda neat. 

 

hipster_conversion_process: 96%

I went and picked up a Cannon Rebel t3 today, I've been trying to find some ways to be a little bit more creative so getting a camera that shoots video in 1080p as well made sense to me. This snail is the first thing I shot.

The Warmest Part of the Winter

A long time ago I knew a girl named Ruby, she was a pretty mixed up person but she was also a real sweetheart. I feel weird talking about the nature of my past relationships so I’m not going to get into that here, but every once in a while I’ll think about her and wonder where she is now, if she’s ok or if she fell back into old habits. It feels weird missing the people you never really got a chance to know that well.

Skyline

     When I was riding to Pickering today I was listening to a new album from Yann Tiersen called 'Skyline.' The whole album reminded me a lot of Mogwai's more mellow stuff, (if you like music that puts you in the mood to walk around at night while you reflect on your frustrated romantic efforts, Mogwai is a great place to start.) You know when you hear the first couple lines of a song that you haven't heard in years but in your head you're like oh my god, I totally know this song and its going to bug the shit out of me until I find out what it is? I had the same feeling when I heard the 8th track on the album called The Trial.

     I had to pause the music and concentrate for a while to try and remember that the song was called, I couldn't remember the name of the song but I was pretty sure Sage Francas used the same track in one of his songs. When I got back home after dinner I looked it up and, yup, I was right, the song was by Sage Francis and it's called The Best of Times.

Here's the song:

       Its kinda interesting now that I'm reflecting on all of this. The only reason I know about Yann was because as I was walking from the subway last night I was listening to an NPR podcast with another song from Yann's new album. I liked the song so much that I downloaded the album after I got home but when I was listening to it initially I wasn't really paying attention to the lyrics in the song, I was too busy feeling happy. I had good music, I was walking back to my own apartment, the moon was breathtakingly beautiful... I just felt really good about my self and the song really seemed to fit my mood. I didn't know that this new artists had worked with an older one that I liked as well however, when I first heard The Best of Times, it was the worst of times. Things had gone down the drain with Vanessa, school hadn't worked out, I had no job and no sense of what I wanted in life. Songs that are hopeful in nature aren't very helpful to people who feel like they have very little to be hopeful about. 
      I always associate songs with how I was feeling when I first heard them. Like a G6 reminds me of driving around in the summer with the windows open and feeling free, A Rush of Blood reminds me of the first time I was dumped and how I felt like I'd never be the same, The Best of Times reminded me of post breakup woes and feeling like I wanted to die. I guess what I find interesting is now that I’ve heard the original track that Sage used in on this new album, an album I really like, I feel like my memory has been upgraded. Instead of associating Sage’s song with a really low time in my life, I’m going to associate with a good time in my life. 

TV Girl, I love you.

TV Girl is the greatest band ever.

       Well, maybe not, but they're pretty high up there in my books. TV Girl is Trung Ngo and Brad Petering, they're based out of California and.... thats pretty much all i know about them because their Bandcamp and last.fm page don't really have too much information. The first song I heard was If you want it, I didn’t know it at the time but all the samples in the song are from a Tod Rundgren song called Hello its me. (Warner didn't like them sampling it so they made them take it down for a while.) The best part about this band is they give most of their music away for free, if you head over to their band camp page you can grab their new mixtape for free! How cool is that?

      

     Its hard for me to put what I like about a band or a song into words sometimes. Liking the lyrics because you can relate to them is simple enough to explain, but sometimes music just has some ineffable quality that I like about it. I think one of the things I like about TVG is how the music sounds retro and new at the same time but saying that doesn't feel quite right because not all of their songs have that low-fi sample feel to them. I like how the tone of the songs are completely mismatched with the lyrics, its an interesting contrast to have a very up-beat and jolly tone for songs that are normally pretty sad in nature, its almost comical in a certain way. Either way, I high sugest you take a look into TV Girl, its hard to find great music these days and its even harder to find great music that's free.

Me on Meat.

     Let me first start off by saying how much I love eating meat. If I could only eat steak, bacon, goat and salmon for the rest of my life I would die a happy man, although I guess I’d probably die a lot sooner if I committed to that diet. For breakfast today I had three eggs, five strips of bacon with some toast and last night  all I had for dinner had two salmon steaks, nothing else. Meat is tasty, meat makes me happy, meat smells good and sadly, I think eating meat is immoral. I’ve been chewing on this idea for a while now, (huur huur, get it?) so earlier this week I decided to shared my thoughts on the topic with Facebook and it turned into an interesting debate, and I’d like to address some of the points people made after I clarify my position.

     My basic argument is that to knowingly causing harm to beings that can perceive harm is not morally permissible if it can be avoided. I’m not trying to argue that morality is completely based on personal perception of harm or even that my argument above can be universally applied in all matters of morality, but it in simple day to day life I think one ought to cause as little harm as possible. Under this logic its still ok to eat meat if you’re starving and have nothing else to eat, its still ok to kill someone who’s going to kill you, its still ok to run over animals on the road if they get in your way and you can’t swerve to avoid them but its not ok to eat cows if you could eat something else instead and be just as healthy.

     If I could rephrase something I heard in a podcast I think I might be better able to make my point here. Most people don’t feel bad for kicking a stone while walking down the street, the rock doesn’t feel any pain and moving it doesn’t rob it of its rights or its interests. You can do whatever you want to a rock and feel ok about it because a rock isn't alive in any measurable way. Now, consider how people treat insects. If you’re walking along the street you’ll eventually come across some type of insect in search of food. Some people might step on the bug out of an overzealous sense of self protection but I think most people would try to avoid the bug if it were easy enough to do so. If someone was to crush a bug by accident the event would most likely not cause them too much distress because most of us don’t grant insects a very high moral status apart from what they do as a collective at the base level of our ecosystem. (Meaning swatting a mosquito on your arm is ok, spraying DDT in a swap to annihilate the local mosquito population is not ok) Generally speaking though, killing an insect in its own habitat doesn’t cause us much distress because we don’t think of them as beings with autonomy or moral status- we think of them as mindless lower beings driven purely my instinct without awareness of their own personal interests.

     Now compare all this to how we treat dogs. Most people agree kicking a rock is fine, stepping on an ant is fine too but think of the things most people would do to avoid hurting a dog while walking on the street. Most of us recognize that dogs have some moral status and personal interests. If you accept that dogs have interests (eating, smelling dog buts, not being harmed, not being afraid,) then you’ll probably do what you can reasonably do to protect the interests of a dog, in this case this mans not stepping on them as you walk along the street. In many societies we’ve even granted some animals legal rights. 

     My biggest problem is that the way we (as humans) treat animals is very inconsistent. We have selectively bread some to be cute and fluffy and we’ve selectively bread others to become obese parodies of their natural selves. While all of this was 100% necessary in the past, (I could never argue that humans could have become what we are now without the use of animals,) I feel like its time we start to week our selves off our dependance on the consumption of meat. The way we arbitrarily say “you can eat this animal, but you can’t harm this one” makes very little sense to me. Dogs have interests that we protect but so do cows and pigs and to me there is no moral difference between eating a dog and eating a pig.

But Matthew! Won’t that logic lead you into an infinite regression? Sure animals are conscious on some level and are interested in self preservation, but you could also argue that plans unknowingly are interested in self preservation because some plants are toxic and have thorns. 

Well, no, I don’t think so at least. Plants evolved fruits because it was beneficial for them to have their seeds spread out over longer distances via the poop-chute express. Eating things with seeds in them was how the plant became so popular in the first place, so case closed on infinite regression. 

Early humans were able to evolve larger brains because of the meat that they were able to scavenge from other animals kills. Not eating meat is un-natural.

I feel like my logic still prevails here. If you’re starving an all you have to eat is meat then thats morally acceptable, but even if I was to accept this argument I’d be giving my self license to club some douche-bag in the head with a buffalo bone and rape his girlfriend. Simply because we survived in the past in a certain way doesn’t mean its acceptable to live that way now.  

If we could synthesize meat in a lab with stem cells people could ethically eat meat.

I agree. Growing meat in a lab looks very promising to me, I’d be first in line to try that out.

This next comment was cut and pasted directly from the comments to my Facebook post

"Since when was utilizing natural power hierarchies to satisfy biological needs immoral? I'm not saying we should water-board our beef, but this growing human guilt for causing death in abundant animal species is childish innocence. Vegetarianism is not globally sustainable, it introduces unnecessary complexity into nutrition and it fails to consider the collateral effects on animal populations caused by human civilization (ie Vegetarianism doesn't stop roadkill, habitat destruction). Vegetarianism based on moral premises is just a comfort blanket for the guilty-privileged."

I think it became immoral when we had the effective means to sustain ourselves by other means and I don’t think its childish to avoid death if it can be easily avoided. I would argue that vegetarianism is vastly more sustainable too, consider how much food a cow is fed before its brought to market, sure we don’t want to eat grass and corn all day but the land that’s used to graise those animals could be used in other forms of food production and then fed directly to people.  Furthermore, asserting that its our right to eat animals simply because it is natural for us to do so seems again to be very inconsistent. It is ‘natural’ to grow beards, never cut our hair, have vast quantities of un protected sex, smell like ass and die by the times we’re 30-40 years old  but we’ve evolved past these things. We suppress many parts of our inborn nature because its inconvenient in modern society, so why not extend or self written modern nature to protect animals as well?

But then, theres this. 

I feel like meat is just too good to give up and that living a vegetarian life would become boring right after I started. Going to a barbecue and eating a vegetarian hamburger while all my friends are eating big juicy steaks sounds like my own personal version of hell. Have you ever a vegetarian hamburger? They taste like shit. Actual shit.  

I feel like its unrealistic for me to say that I'm going to become a vegetarian because its terribly socially inconvenient for me and frankly, vegetarian food sucks. I do plan on cutting down to only eating meat 2-3 times a week. I guess we'll see how it goes.