Tag Archives: 2012

Teleportation & Animal Kinship

Re-Skilling in a Virtual Reality …

I’ve never been a gamer. Aside from Mahjong Solitaire and the occasional click through Minesweeper I’ve never been tempted. Perhaps it’s because I already spend the majority of my day staring down a computer screen, so when I earn a free evening or weekend I prefer to debate philosophy with my sweetie (e.g. “is there objective truth?”) or sip a crantini while reading Can-lit.

But.

A casual conversation with my friend Kate introduced me to Glitch, a multi-player virtual world created by Tiny Speck where players “learn” skills that allow them to interact in progressively more interesting ways with the pigs, trees, barnacles, fireflies, etc. that populate the game. (Note: I’m justifying this blog post with the “skills” bit.)

My alternate personality, phase 1: Mellow Yellow, the Bootlegger.

An innocent foray into this alternate universe one evening led to Glitch becoming my new favourite past-time. (Along with Twin Peaks, courtesy of Netflix.) Within a week I’d logged 11 hours as a glitchling and found a new passion: bootlegging, courtesy of a virtual still and backyard patch of potatoes and corn. Now, three weeks later, I’m at level 19 and am mastering Teleportation III, which will make it even easier to move from my homestead in Groddle Forest to the Community Herb Gardens and the caverns of Ilmenski Deeps where I can collect the guano I need to make Raw Bio-Organic Carob-ish Treats.

Anyhoo.

Here’s why I think I have fallen in love with a computer game:

  1. Intellectually stimulating down-time.
  2. Community & Eco-ness.
  3. No pixels wasted on cleavage or muscles.

Elaboration follows:

Intellectually stimulating down-time

My alternate personality, phase 2: Mellow Yellow, the Heather Avatar.

Glitch offers interactive escape. Unlike TV, which is passive, Glitch requires that you interact with its virtual world (at your own pace and schedule). Every time I play, I do something new. I’ve gone on a vision quest, hunted down eight ghosts, attended a farmers’ market and crashed a party for miners. (I’ve also re-learned a whole lotta polysyllabic words that I haven’t heard since UVic. Glitch is a logophile’s dream.)

As you explore the world of Ur, learn more skills, finish more quests, and interact with its various inhabitants, you earn “experience points.” So true to life. So true.

Because of little touches like that, I often get the feeling that there’s some intellectual in the backroom, giggling. Why else do I have to stomp grapes to redeem myself when I “die” in the game? What’s up with that? Glitch’s founder, Stewart Butterfield, has a Masters in Philosophy from Cambridge. I can smell his brain when I walk the desert streets of Xalanga and am almost overwhelmed with Ancestral Nostalgia.

One last point under this bold heading … I have yet to find a typo in Glitch.

Community & Eco-ness

Yes, I said it: there’s a farmers market in Glitch. It’s organized by an everyday glitching, not Tiny Speck’s programmers. There’s also a grassroots-founded community kitchen and a welcome wagon. Community gardens and communal Machine Rooms are part of the landscape.

Another cool community-building strategy: the quests in Glitch encourage and reward cooperation. You can give gifts and “bestow random kindness” on your fellow players. And if you’re a newcomer to the game, watch out: you will be inundated with presents from the veterans.

The Glitch “community” extends to its flora and fauna: trees must be “pet” and watered to stay alive. A “save the wood trees” (this is not redundant in Glitch) movement began because some plank-greedy players were clear-cutting.

There is a bizarre, logical-if-you-don’t-think-too-much interconnectedness in this virtual world. For example: to make cheese you first massage a butterfly, then milk it, then shake the milk and compress the resulting butter. Note that you have to massage a butterfly first: you must give before you can receive. You can also get meat from pigs without having to kill them, as long as you pet them nicely first.

Cleavage-free avatars

Most computer and video games I’ve seen feature practically bare-breasted women with DD-cups, and men whom I doubt read novels. Why would I want to play a game like that, where I get points for killing people? As you’ll note from my portrait above, glitchen look more like kids playing dress-up. And there are some very cool clothes to dress up in.

Come to think of it, Glitch is a lot like the golden days of kindergarten. You can dress up, explore amazing new worlds, make friends, and do pretty much anything you can imagine, from teleporting to making potions to starting a business. You can also bootleg hootch and mix martinis … it’s no wonder I’m hooked.

From Penthouse to Farm

How two government yuppies found their way back to the land

In the spring of 2007 we decided that our city life would not be enough, no matter how many karaoke parties we hosted.

Brock and I were renting the penthouse of a twenty-second storey building on the West Coast: if there was a perfect place to be, this was it. Our balcony was the size of most city dweller’s condos, with an uninterrupted view of the Georgia Strait and Beacon Hill Park.

Part of our penthouse balcony/deck.

We were in our late twenties, had university degrees and good government jobs, and had found each other: we’d done everything we’d been told to do, and were living the dream.

Or at least, the dream we thought we were supposed to have.

That winter and spring our pastimes included:

  • preparing decadent breakfasts of bacon, eggs, potatoes, fried tomatoes and toast;
  • topping one another’s record Tetris scores on our old-school Nintendo Entertainment System;
  • bottling wine at the U-Brew in Cook Street Village and then drinking too much of it; and,
  • hosting music jams with left-leaning friends, then picking fights with them over Victoria’s homelessness problem and how it should be dealt with.

We were high-income government yuppies with time to kill until our thirties and, presumably, parenthood.

For me, the warning sign was my constant napping. Saturday morning, breakfast eaten, I would wander into our bedroom and lie down in the early sunshine, then sleep away hours at a time. I had nothing better to do.

Brock, meanwhile, spent his weekends rescuing sickly houseplants that our neighbours routinely left by the green garbage bin in the underground parking lot. He bought fifty-pound bags of soil and fish fertilizer and lugged them via elevator twenty-two stories up to our balcony. On weekend afternoons he attended dying poinsettias, amputating diseased limbs and shuffling them into and out of the shade.

And then everything changed

One March morning, with twenty-four hours of nothing looming ahead of us, Brock said: “I think I want to be a farmer.”

I immediately agreed. We began stalking real estate listings. Brock’s poinsettias died while we spent hours reading aloud issues of Harrowsmith, noting which artichokes grew best in our Vancouver Island climate. I became passionate about bees. Over dinner one night, after great debate, we decided we were emotionally strong enough to kill our own turkeys.

An early model of what became Makaria Farm (not to scale).

Meanwhile, Brock’s dad noticed a ten-acre piece of farmland for sale just south of Duncan, about fifty minutes north of Victoria. We made an offer, and took possession on June 1. We spent that first day wearing a trail around the fence line. From decision to ownership, it took us five months. Brock quit his government job to be a full-time farmer a year later.

10 acres of undeveloped land in the Cowichan Valley. We started our farm here in 2008.

Farmer Heather gets freaky

I should clarify that I’ve never much liked dirt, bugs, or physical labour, so when I imagined myself as a farmer the fantasies usually involved me supervising chickens with a glass of sauvignon blanc in hand. Maybe I’d bake an apple pie on the weekend and sell it at the farmers’ market, where some discriminating chef would sample a slice and offer to pay our mortgage in exchange for my pastry crust recipe.

Brock, on the other hand, had worked a few summers on a dairy farm and grew up on his parents’ hobby farm: to some extent, he understood the work ahead of us. He eased me into our new life with a casual suggestion: “Hey, maybe you can be in charge of growing freaky plants.”

I was sold. The seed catalogues were full of Purple Haze carrots, pink popcorn, neon green peas in violet pods, metre-wide pumpkins, and loofah, to name a few. I imagined a produce revolution. “Kohlrabi” would become a household word. Children would eat their vegetables.

To find the truly freaky vegetables, I sought out the heritage section of the seed catalogues. Here, I learned that carrots originated in Afghanistan, where they were red, purple and white. The white ones were most common, since they stored the best. In the seventeenth century the Dutch introduced orange carrots and encouraged their production as a patriotic act.

That went against everything I had believed, carrot-wise.

During this kinky affair with the freaks of the veggie world, I discovered I liked growing things. On my 28th birthday I did what I have done every April 12th: exactly what I wanted. In 2008 that meant mixing potting soil with my bare hands in our front yard and transplanting my 75 growing tomato babies into gallon pots.

My tomato addiction

Ah yes, the tomatoes. Perhaps the most obvious result of my newfound love for farming was the very, very large family of tomato plants I produced our first year. The six starter flats of seeds hadn’t seemed unwieldy by our kitchen window in February, and once they’d graduated to four-inch pots Brock just built me a shelf to keep them on. But by April they were gallon-pot sized, and needed more light than our windows provided.

One weekend, like other expanding families, Brock and I built an addition onto our house. The four-by-six space was wrapped with greenhouse plastic, with two levels of shelving and hay bales on the bottom for insulation. With my tomato plants inside, we no longer had to shuttle them into and out of our home every morning and night. We continued to water them frequently, and soon found bright yellow blossoms and even some small green tomatoes.

Then it was May, and Brock said it was time to plant them in the ground.

I’d forgotten about this stage. I wasn’t prepared. We’d spent months protecting the vulnerable plants from cold snaps and window drafts, carefully maintaining ideal moisture, light and nutrient conditions. It seemed cruel to launch my babies into the cold hard reality of the fields. Compromising, I agreed to plant out the token hybrid variety, Early Girl.

I was tired that day after a week of office work, but I resisted Brock’s offer of help and carried ten pots out to the designated row, where I pruned off their bottom leaves and buried them up to the neck – a handy tomato trick I’d learned from Brock’s dad, which encourages root growth along the buried stem. Tucking my young plants into their cold spring beds seemed like a significant act, at the time.

Eventually I cut the apron strings and planted out the rest of my tomato herd. They survived two frosts, a windstorm and some trespassing slugs. The months passed. One Saturday, using the tomatoes I had grown from seed, I taught myself to make salsa and can. (We have yet to die of botulism.)

Black Krim tomatoes were my favourite variety. I loved their smoky, full flavour.

Finding happiness on the farm

That summer my love affair with freaky vegetables continued. I ate purple carrots, my banana melons blossomed, and I coveted the lemon cucumbers a farmer friend sold at the market. I made a few apple pies, and the neighbours raved about my pastry crust.

Eventually I learned that, to unwind on a Friday evening, all I had to do was pour a glass of sauvignon blanc, wander outside, and watch my tomatoes grow. I no longer spent the weekend napping: there was too much to do.

And now: it’s been almost five years since we walked onto our farm. Instead of a twenty-second storey view of ocean and sky, we look out on acres of tilled soil and the brightest stars I’ve ever seen. The other day a friend’s Blackberry vibrated: I thought it was a cow mooing. For fun, we visit the organic produce section of Duncan’s grocery stores and compare prices to our farm stand.

After moving to the Cowichan Valley we’ve met many people who grew up on farms and chose a desk job to escape the unceasing labour and the unpredictable weather. I laugh at our decision to give up our lazy days, our willingness to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and our naivety. And I envy those who benefited from 4-H clubs in their adolescence: they know how to properly care for a chicken, when I had to learn from Google and library books.

Brock recycles old boots to amuse the neighbours.

What if this doesn’t work? If we’ve misjudged the need for a new generation of farmers, or the hard work required, or simply can’t make our mortgage payments, we can reevaluate and move on. Until then, we routinely share the best days we’ve ever had, with Brock slowly transforming our land into tilled rows of delicious organic vegetables, and me spending my evenings and weekends learning how to make cheese, bread and jam, pickle beets, wash eggs, and perform the unlimited other tasks that contribute to our farm lifestyle.

These days, when we eke out time for the occasional party there is no karaoke. But there is often a bonfire, and a sky full of stars.

Some of the amazing tomatoes we grew at Makaria Farm.

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Originally published by The Winnipeg Review on January 18, 2012.

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