I'm at the church/cabaret/library rollerskating night

B R

B R

— 4 min read
I'm at the church/cabaret/library rollerskating night

Spring break - semaine de relâche or maybe congé printemps - is weird as an adult but I really needed the break.

The break coincides with Montréal en Lumiére, the big winter festival. We went out for Nuit Blanche specifically, an evening where the city stays open all night - bars, the metro, etc - with free live music in Place des Arts and events all over the city.

"Subconsciously or consciously, have you always wanted to roller-skate in a library?" The Goethe Institut is willing to lend you skates and have you go at it, but by the time we got there the line was around the block. Next year we'll show up earlier.

Place des Arts was packed! Hey is that a church or a cabaret on the right? Both.

I got a question from someone about how I pull media (with attribution!) from places to put in the blog. And hot on the news that every streaming service is deleting everything and lost media is exploding, I thought I would do a little PSA for the free and open source tools I use for this: yt-dlp and FreeTube.

The latter is a simple client for Youtube that makes it suck less and lets you archive videos you like. The former is a little harder to use, but can pull videos from almost anywhere. That's how I got these clips out of these tweets even though Twitter is run by one of the dumbest guys alive and doesn't allow proper embedding anymore.

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Here is Werner Herzog, recounting the languages he speaks. French is one, but he expresses some reluctance to speak it.

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Watched Dune 2. It's really good.

Later in the week, we hosted a game night with some folks from class and it was lovely. There was a little bit of lively debate at one point between a local Montrealer (or Montréalais) and a recent Iranian immigrant (finance PhD candidate) on the merits of socialism - or what that even means to either of them - that remained cordial because this is still Canada. I engaged little initially and instead surreptitiously started everyone taking a turn playing Suspend:

Buy Melissa & Doug - Suspend Game
This thing is great because it barely requires the rules it has and you can set it up and get people to take a turn without them even realizing they are starting to play a game.

Speaking of games: been putting a lot of hours into Elden Ring - some of which aren't even just accidentally leaving it on overnight. There is a seamless multiplayer modification out now that makes it properly playable with friends and it's been a blast.

It works perfectly except occasionally forgetting to render the horses, as seen here with "Weapons Master V" riding seemingly nothing.

My partner had a birthday on the break and expressed a great desire to watch some live music. What we found was just about perfect.

The audio is not super great on this but their stuff on Apple Music is divine.

The culture here is a bit different on this; despite the 20$ CAD cover, a good portion of the crowd were talking away during the performance. And this was no shoegaze ambient stuff we are talking about - as one friendly gentleman who excitedly tried to translate the vocals for us - "true poetry".

You may be pleased to know that the tradition of bands from Montréal to have 17 members and 8 hour sound checks has survived the cancellation of Arcade Fire.

I could feel the energy and need to share the work radiating from him: "Oh you don't have to do that" "Oh I know I don't, but I am". This is the art/culture/community stuff you will miss forever unless you try to learn French in this city. It's not the only reason I am learning it, but it's not nothing.

Dog picture.

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