The domain ydolon.com has moved, and it has a new blog of its own hosted in a place other than wordpress.com. I decided not to export what was already here in order to start fresh, and with a slightly different objective. So this is farewell.

See you at saychan.com and ydolon.com.

To my friends and family: You reap what you sow. I appreciate and love you, but one can only ignore so many offenses before getting extremely aggravated.

Facebook’s Like feature came as a way of telling your friends, acquaintances, and your favourite people that you liked what was going through their mind. Facebook is a huge network, and is bound to have right about every type of person that could possibly exist, and while that makes the community incredibly diverse, it is also a perfect place to herd people into doing something. More than once I have seen an artist or the administrator of a page asking something from their followers – both good things and bad things.

Something I have seen on the rise though, has been people mimicking other people’s conduct.

I had noticed it was happening more and more, but it was not until a little experiment I made last week that I noticed something was definitely wrong. After noticing there were some people that made a habit out of liking my status updates, I decided to post phrases and comments that I knew were morally incompatible with those people: I was already expecting them to do it, but it still surprised me to see them act… they liked things they should not have liked. After poking and wandering around other profiles I noticed that seldom do people disagree with others, and while this might be attributed to friends being respectful towards each other (yeah, right…), it is pretty obvious that people have found a new way to stop thinking.

I would like to believe that in a normal conversation an idea is brought up… Some people will agree with it, others will not, and some others will voice no opinion of it; A conversation on the Internet is a little different in that there are people who have an opinion, lurkers, and trolls. Now, the Facebook behaviour I described is just terrifying: Forget having an opinion, Facebook is 5% trolls, 90% likers, and 5% lurkers/newbies/annoyed people like me.

So what is wrong with liking your ideas? Would you rather have me NOT liking them?

I would rather have people telling me why they like or dislike my ideas. After a week of having Christian-Catholic people pretty much telling me (see: Like) that church burnings and CP are absolutely cool, I have no doubt that either people just randomly like my statuses or they have successfully stopped processing the information I hand them out.

I can only hope they are just morally obscure.

This week the fridge at the apartment had been a rather unpleasant and depressing sight. Something needed to be done.

While it is easier to go to a supermarket or to the Maisonneuve market (which is closer to me), it is always much more fun to head over to the Jean Talon market in Montreal. Both winter and summer have always great sights to show, but summer is particularly colourful, and the weather makes navigation through the market incredibly easy.

Being the amateur photographer that I am, it is funny and frustrating when a hundred pictures turn into seventy, and those seventy pictures end up being six pictures in a post. Never again will I criticize concert photographers who deliver one or two pictures per event set.

Here are the other five pictures that made it here:






If you are ever in Montreal you must have a peek at the Jean Talon market (just take the orange line to… Jean Talon), especially in Summer. Great place.

Some things first…

Back in May 2009 I found myself with a four day pass for an event I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to attend, after merely months of listening Industrial music and coming from a background of Metalhead close-mindedness, I stood for hours during sets at Kinetik Festival 02… I can only say I was shocked. Fast forward to November, and I was already listening to many kinds of Electronic music (most of it was EBM). I picked up a couple of band names and decided I was going to make music with them… but I hadn’t really given all of that a decent thought. Anyway… ten months and six domains later I have finally figured something out. I am finally going to feed my own hunger for music and have fun experimenting at the same time. After giving it a lot of thought I decided to carry on with three of about seven different projects I created; three is a reasonable number considering I have little to no experience with the genres I am playing with… I will be listing them as soon as I start completing songs.

On another note, I have purposively slowed down my posting speed because… I will be erasing this blog soon. The domain ydolon.com will be used for a new blog (and probably a fully functional website) in late September or early October, so this place won’t get that many updates in the meantime. Sorry about that.

I will also (once again) stop being incredibly active in places other than twitter and last.fm. I am terribly behind my book quota and am actually trying to get some things done for a book (books) I would like to have published. Sorry for you MSN fiends… there are many matters that I must attend, and they will not be reflected online in any way… for the time being.

It all began when he proposed a week before graduation, to everyone’s surprise there was no baby compelling him to take this course of action: There was only love. She was aiming for med school while he enrolled in an Art History program. Things rolled nicely even after they married: She had a part time job in a retail shop in the outskirts of town while he spent afternoons with his band Mannequin Voice. The band used to play a few gigs every couple of months whenever a band member or a friend of his needed someone to liven up a party a little. They were proud of what they were doing back then.

Back then, when they still had an ounce of pride.

Things went completely FUBAR (or maybe really good) when a local promoter saw they had something to offer and booked them as the opening act for a relatively large and popular band in the scene.

They destroyed the stage and conquered the crowd.

Even the headliner didn’t see it coming.

From that point on they were booked in almost every local show, and soon they found themselves playing in neighbouring cities every weekend. Things were going great for the band, but not so much for the band members. With loans piling up and no jobs to get rid of them, things were going not so good… especially for frontman Tony, who was always the one to place money in dangerous spots first, and the one who had to endure the hardest parts of parties and public attention.

But this is a story about Olive, so let’s go back to her.

After the initial success of the band Olive decided to drop out in order to manage the band and make sure whatever money they were going to get was not going to the wrong places, and for a while it worked, but someone can only avoid certain vices for so long. Soon the happy couple were the official partying members of the band.  The madness never seemed to stop.

I can still remember the looks on their faces when the band’s first country-wide tour became a reality.

Playing gigs near home now seemed relatively cheap compared to what they were spending in this so-called tour. The expenses got to their point where red numbers was all the band came up with… and still, the happiest people in the van were Olive and Tony… always Olive and Tony.

The band got nation-wide attention with the small tour they pulled off, and it was not long before some corporate incubi set eyes on them. A contract was signed, a new tour was booked, and everything was great for the band, except the part where their manager was spending all of their new money for herself and her junkie, but indispensable, husband.

Something needed to be done.

I was the one who came up with the idea.

Luring a perpetually drunk person out of her safety zone isn’t exactly the most difficult thing to do, but it took all other three members of the band to entertain our dearest Tony (I am in the band by the way). The original plan was to make her drink beyond her own limits and then leave her to drown in her own vomit, but we thought that the sight alone would make Tony walk away from us, so we had to go for something a lot less dramatic and a thousand times more discrete.

I had gone through it a thousand times in my head and the execution of the plan was easier than I imagined it would be. A couple of drinks and a little push was all it took to make her fall to unconsciousness: down some stairs and into sleep. She was still knocked out when I was done with the hole… so down she went, and on top of her went five feet of dirt.

So it was easy.

She had spent and stored most of the money we were given in who-knows-what, who-knows-where; for everyone it was fairly obvious that she had run off with the money, which was a relief because I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

Tony grieved her for about half a year, and he wrote our label’s current best-selling album of all time in his grief. He was mostly sad for a long time, but as soon as I saw him flirt with a random girl at a show, I picked my laptop up and searched for a new manager.

Let’s hope this one doesn’t take the money.

Growing up in a developing country is completely different from what all media in developed countries and the internet would like people to think. Services are better, people have more money; technology, goods, services, teevee shows, movies… most consumables are exactly the same. The difference between news/Hollywood and the real world? The bad guys have military equipment, and they are more organized than any other group of people in the world. They are my definition of evil.

My mother and I were peculiarly interested in moving to a different place, and thanks to our personality traits (not giving a shit about distance related to friends/family) and our inexistent fear of change, we began the big move approximately two years ago. Our country of choice: Canada (ou Québec pour les séparatistes /me sticks tongue out). Procedures: Easy. Starting anew: Not so cheap… I will leave all that information for a different post or conversation.

Back to the matter at hand: Living in Montreal has changed my way of life not so much in the “I have been magically turned into something else” sense, but in the sense that I can do more things thanks to the short distances and the lack of crime in the street. Just today I took the subway, had breakfast with mom, walked for a while before heading to Montreal’s international Dragon Boat Festival, then went for another stroll to take pictures, headed to Concordia University to the world premiere of The Shrine (very good horror flick), and then rode a Bixi back home. It took me about eight hours to do this, and I know for sure that back where I am from it would have taken me a whole weekend to do something similar.

Summer has been particularly fun with all of its festivals and activities. Pay Montreal a visit during summer, and you will find there are WAY TOO MANY things to do.

I must admit I am a heavy reader most of the time, and when my currently reading pile looks like the one above, I know I am in trouble.

Reading has been an activity I have enjoyed for many years, where a lot of people are keen on searching and dowloading PDF files with whole books in them (illegally and for free! yay!) I just cannot love paper enough. Some books in my bookshelves are older than my parents and their brothers and sisters, and I could say they are exquisite possessions.

For the last five or six years there hasn’t been a single month without new arrivals on my collection, and the amount of books I read every year are mostly satisfying (I was kind of disappointed with my +80 books in 2009 though). In my case, the problem with book reading is book-buying. I am not the kind of person who usually buys books without liking them, and I even though I re-read books on a regular basis, there are always many books that I completely forget about. Libraries are a place I do not frequent a lot, but I admit it is nice to have a taste (a preview) of things there.

So I buy a lot of books, and my usual problem is that I buy more books than I can read. I stopped buying large amounts of books about ten months ago with the purpose of reading what I already have before beginning something new, and I still have a long way to go! Books are the third or fourth thing I spend most money on (the others being food, rent, and music), and while my mind says I am still missing a lot of books, my bookshelves and the books in them say I have enough reading material for a couple of months.

I know a lot of people have the same problem I have – buying/obtaining more books than they can read, and my only piece of advice is doing as I have done: DO NOT buy new books until you are done with all the ones in your collection.

Comics and manga are ok though, I know how frustrating it is to not have a published volume. Plus, they can be read and re-read in a very short time and are relatively cheap.

Book-buying. YAY!

(Continued from THIS post) …the path I decided to take was almost coming to an end, and wow! Was glad I was almost done: the heat from the orange line malls and buildings killed whatever joy I had when I started this.

These last pictures were taken from Place Ville Marie to Montreal’s Eaton Centre, Place Montreal-Trust, Carrefour Industrielle-Alliance, Les cours Mont Royal, and Peel metro station – the end of this short loop.

(Continued from THIS post) …this batch of pictures were taken from Place de la Cité Internationale through Place Bonaventure, Montreal’s Gare Centrale, and Place Ville Marie.

Not much to do around these areas… except working, traveling and shopping (sounds like life for most). The weather was surprinsingly nice, and it was good to see some people… for a change.

Click here for part four.

My “let’s defeat heat today” purpose was obliterated in this part because all the low ceilings, and the amount of windows (at the very end of the gallery) made the environment very dry and warm.

Click here for part three.