Down with Borscht

Almost all superfoods have two things in common. First, marketers would have you believe they offer unique nutrients that help people live healthy lives. Second, no individual on this green earth truthfully enjoys all of the diverse foods that fall into this category. My personal nemesis is beets; I don’t like ‘em, I hate ‘em, basically, I’m saying I could do without ‘em

Game designer Justin Gary feels me. He created a card game base around getting rid of your beets and passing them off to others so that you can eat ice cream. Don't even get me started on the abomination of beet ice cream.

Proponents of beets say they’re good for you because they contain nitric oxide, a chemical used by cells to communicate with one another. Some health experts claim nitric oxide helps to speed up recovery time, and improve blood flow to your muscles. However, there are plenty of edible foods that you can eat to get nitric oxide, walnuts, collard greens, broccoli, lettuce, lean meats, red chili peppers, and kiwi fruit all include the nutrient. Or you could just take the supplement, because why would you eat beets?

My bias doesn’t come from a blanket distaste for taproots. I snack on carrots, crunch through turnips, toss radishes in my salads, and spice things up with a little bit of parsnips. There’s just something about beets that turns my palette.

It’s a holistic dislike. No one element makes me loathe the vegetable. Beets seem to always have this viscous film surrounding them; almost like the mucus a snail secretes. Then, when you bite into the damn things the texture is mealy, a combination that seems to run congruent to the laws of molecular bonding -a mouthful of unnatural pondering. You can’t argue that the colour can be off-putting. Cutting the things up leads to your kitchen counter looking like a set from the third season of Dexter. And who doesn’t like it when their dinner smells like burnt dirt?

My verbal response to people who ask me whether I'd like beets in my meal.

It could be that it is just a cilantro effect. You know those weirdo friends who hate cilantro on anything because it tastes like soap, so we all have to settle for mediocre salsa and guac at Mexican get togethers. Maybe I’m the beet weirdo, ruining my friend’s Ukrainian pierogi dish, or watering down their enjoyment of sour soups.

That’s not to say I’m not a cordial dinner guest. “Sure Nonna Castellano, I’d love another helping of that beet salad,” I say through my best fake smile. “No, the borscht isn’t too hot Baba Pavliuk. No, it isn’t too cold either. No, it doesn’t need more salt… it’s perfect just the way it is.”

If you like beets, that’s fine, but please keep them away from me and my fellow hater’s plate.

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Tristan is a level six wizard imbued with an enchanted Staff of Intelligence. The charming hybrid of punk, geek, and hippie culture. An avid writer, and even more avid reader. His focus covers topics like pop culture, history, politics, gaming, and science fiction.

Sometimes you’re Just Lazy

Procrastinators need to be more honest with themselves.

When I was very young, I used to catch scorn from teachers for my scholarly sloth. When I say “I used to,” I mean that it happened on the regular. I really took the lessons of Huck Finn to heart, except my fishing hole was located three feet in front of our home television screen. It wasn’t long before parents and instructors alike adopted the same exasperated shrug I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing.

Something miraculous happened when I neared the end of my public school years though. You see, it wasn’t that I lacked discipline, or that I needed to prioritize my time better. I found that I’m a creative learner, a purposeful-pupil of the loitering art, a fast burning match… with a very long wick. Webster’s defines a procrastinator as someone who “puts off intentionally and habitually.”

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“You see, it wasn’t that I lacked discipline, or that I needed to prioritize my time better.”

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But under this new definition, I was something else. Proponents of the new philosophy will tell you that this isn’t a character flaw, that it’s simply a process certain individuals preserve and maintain energy levels. These individuals depend on anxiety to pile up until it pushes them over a cliff and into excellence. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here’s a TEDx Talk about it… there are several of them. 

The fact is, there is some truth to this. Many of us procrastinators have a hard time focusing on tasks without the looming stress of deadlines. Left to our own devices a thousand-and-one different aspects compete for our attention in the space of an hour. Even so, it doesn’t mean that procrastinators won’t use the energy excuse to explain away bad behaviour, milking that soybean until it’s little more than dust.

I’m not saying this natural phenomenon of energy conservation isn’t a real thing. It’s just that we tend to cling to this excuse far too much. Sometimes we really are putting things off. Like not doing the dishes your partner has been nagging you about, turning in assignments we know we could have done better on, or never really starting those big projects our imaginations are always dreaming up. If we were to apply the book, bell, and candle to our own motivations we’d get a few points into the book before realizing the ever-present truth; sometimes we just need to buckle down.

It’s important to remember that it’s only going to get more difficult in the future. When this new view of procrastination came into the culture -or was rediscovered depending on who you ask- educators and employers never had the foresight to imagine the arrival of things like social media. Huck Finn never had to contend with Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Widow Douglas blowing up his newsfeed. The things that compete for attention have grown exponentially. It will be a monumental task to finish a report for work in the evening with a virtual headset, an arms-reach away, that can take us to Fiji… just until we really find that motivation. The sooner we stop making excuses and start developing the behaviour we’re always putting off the better.

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Tristan is a level six wizard imbued with an enchanted Staff of Intelligence. The charming hybrid of punk, geek, and hippie culture. An avid writer, and even more avid reader. His focus covers topics like pop culture, history, politics, gaming, and science fiction.

Why Pokemon are Pretty Terrible

It’s not that the entire franchise is based around foisting cheap plastic toys and video games on undisciplined parents who refuse to say no. If that were true, I’d have a beef with every cartoon series launched between the 1970s onward. It’s not that the series, after 22 years in production, has exhausted the premise of children collecting colourful monsters in a make-believe sport. It’s not that the Pokémon Company plays it so loose with the licensing that they’d make Walt Disney blush. It’s that the whole damn organization is built on a plain of sand.

I was 12 when the franchise was first brought to North America in '96. In my own community, the television series was the vanguard of this cultural revolution. Gameboy’s Red and Blue were still a couple years out. The trading cards would wait on advantageous corporate partnerships before reaching Canadian cafeteria tables and playground pavement. This then, is maybe why I am less inclined to enjoy the pop culture artifact than my younger millennials peers; as Pokémon’s weakest leg lies, by a large margin, in the anime series. Perhaps if I was born a few years later, and been fully immersed in the movement I might have been more inclined to enjoy the series.

Is this fan art or a still from the first season of Pokemon? I can't tell. Photo courtesy of imgur.com https://imgur.com/9d47P

What is so terrible about Ashe’s adventure on screen to become pokémon master?  If I were to make a checklist of all the terrible things creators can do when crafting a children’s cartoon series I’d end up with a lot of checkmarks on that list. Shallowly written characters – check. Terrible drawing – check. Annoying voice actors – check. Cheap animations and transitions –check. Bad art design –check. There are some exceptions however, the pokémon themselves are often drawn and animated well, this is to be expected considering they are the driving point of merchandise, but it doesn’t help when their actions are on a background of neon intestinal lining in strobe. It’s like the Pokémon Company decided that they would take all the lessons, knowledge and technique that had been developed since the 1960s Speed Racer, throw that in a garbage bin, and light it on fire. This is what grinds my gears so much. Pokémon, for many, is their first experience with Japanese animation, and its poor quality will turn away swaths of people. Those creepy, unrealistic, vertical eyes staring out into nothingness cannot be erased from history.

My peers at the time were split between YTV adherents, and those of us more focused on their burdening puberty.  I myself fell into the second category. This meant that my experience with the clash between Pokémon and Digimon was a tertiary one at best. Even watching the two out of the corner of my eye, hanging out at friend’s houses, while I thought about the girls in my class, I could tell which was the better production. Digimon’s art was far superior, they even managed to incorporate cutting-edge CGI. The characters were well developed, and I didn’t feel like stabbing my ear with a pencil when they talked.

Truly Pokémon is evidence of the marketing adage, first-mover advantage, where the first product to market gains the largest piece regardless of quality. Pokémon is the McDonald’s of pop culture; lots of people enjoy McDonald’s. In this case, I want something of better quality.

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Tristan is a level six wizard imbued with an enchanted Staff of Intelligence. The charming hybrid of punk, geek, and hippie culture. An avid writer, and even more avid reader. His focus covers topics like pop culture, history, politics, gaming, and science fiction.