Calgary’s downtown has the world’s longest network of elevated hallways and bridge connecting buildings. Beginning in the 1960s, it’s grown to around 16 km (nearly 10 miles) of designated path and enclosed bridges over city streets.

Imagine a second city, built 15 feet above the ground, entirely climate controlled year round. It has benches, tables, chairs, restaurants, shops, and the occasional green plant or water feature.

The Plus 15 was the subject of a year 2000 film by Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns. Called waydowntown, it’s about a group of office workers who make a bet on who can go the longest without setting foot outside, since the Plus 15 makes this somewhat possible.

24 years later, the network has evolved: grown in length, and almost certainly changed in character, especially post-covid. The office vacancy rate hovers around 20%, and the city has put a lot of money into office-to-residential conversion (this is extremely challenging, especially with skyscrapers built in the late 20th century, like almost all of Calgary’s). Here is an excellent video on why it’s such a difficult task.

Since I’m chronically online, I browse reddit a lot, and found this post about the possibility of a run through the Plus 15. It would be great fun for the novelty, but it was pointed out that the nature of the network–where each building is privately owned, while the bridges are public, and the hallways are public easements–would make it an absolute nightmare to organize.

My biggest question, though, was… how scenic would a tour through the Plus 15 be? Would it be full of unexpected surprises? Would it be a level of nothingness to rival the Worst Hike in the World? I needed to find out.

I managed to convince my friend Luke and [other] Jon (who, in turn, convinced his brother Chris) to take a little walk with me. It would be simple: every single path and bridge in the Plus 15.

At 11am on December 20th, we set out from Calgary City Hall. It would be a largely rambling walk, more exploratory than record-setting.¹

We head off going north, crossing a bridge over 7th Avenue and the C-train tracks. The trains run on the street in a dedicated transit street.² We’re then greeted by a sign that says “No video or recording”, which is surprising, because it’s nothing more than a bland corridor and dusty empty display cases. Luke tells me that the building used to be the booking facility for the police, where people who were arrested were “perp-walked”. So the sign makes a little more sense.

Taking the little spur into Bow Valley College’s campus, it dead ends, we snap a pic, and backtrack to head westward. The Castell building, the former Central Library, houses a surreal and eerie hallway. The deserted route is enclosed on both sides, with only frosted windows that face into the building (currently occupied by the University of Calgary’s architecture school). The few bright colourful splotches on the wall do nothing to distract from the generally depressing vibe.

The term “liminal space” is very popular today, at least in my circles. Wikipedia calls them “[…] empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal. Liminal spaces are commonly places of transition […]”. We’d quickly find that the Plus 15 was full of these liminal spaces, even on a workday. Many of these places we saw today were perfectly forgettable.

We cross a bridge, then go inside, then outside, then inside, then cross a bridge. Other than some memories from Luke and Jon, there’s truly nothing going on: no one in sight, and only a locked door to a sad-looking rooftop patio.

Here, we have to go outside to continue onward. We leave the Andrew Davison Building (at one time, the main cop shop, and today, suspiciously devoid of signs or signs of dilapidation), and cross the street to get to the park where there’s an open-air bridge where we can continue on.

There’s a big sculpture in the park, usually called the Family of Man, of a bunch of giant naked people holding hands or whatever. It sits in front of the derelict education centre, once home to the public school board. Strangely, the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) still uses the statue as their symbol, and even more strangely, the fun story of the statues is almost completely forgotten. Here’s a link to a CBC story on it; basically it was made by Spanish sculptor Mario Armengol for a “Britain and the World” exhibit at Expo ’67 in Montreal, then bought by a mysterious businessman, donated to the city for the tax write-off, and then assembled in front of the education centre based on best guesses, where the anatomical correctness caused a stir. Finally the CBE adopted it as their logo, before abandoning the area for a new building south of downtown in 2010, leaving the building vacant for the last 14 years. But the statues are still here.

We duck into a hotel to continue onward to the Harry Hays Building, the home of the federal government in Calgary. It’s a rather unassuming, fairly low building, off to the side of downtown near Chinatown instead of being close to the oil company headquarters or the halls of civic or provincial power. Other than getting passports renewed, there’s really not much there for the average person. Hitting the end of the line, we turn back.

Next is the “First” building, formerly the Telus building, and before that, the AGT (Alberta Government Telephones) building. Stripped of all its neon signs today, I remember it best for Christmas lights that are turned at night: cartoony trees and a flickering candle. Today it appears to be less desirable space, and it’s fairly quiet.

The next three hours are a blur of extremely uninteresting hallways, repeating cafes and restaurants, and a variety of holiday displays. We have entered the downtown core: where all the money from the oil pumped up north ends up. The ambience is best compared to that of an airport: you have plenty of windows, but are cut off from the outside world. Uniformed security guards are everywhere, so you don’t need to watch your possessions too closely. The climate is completely controlled, and the environment is immaculately clean.

I start taking pictures of wet floor signs and variations of the flooring³ to keep from going crazy. We pass by several repeats of local and international chain restaurants. Similarly, the lunchtime crowd I see in the hallways seem to merge together into a mass of humanity. I poke Jon whenever I see someone wearing a fun sweater, because a deviation from the norm is really that noticeable. Everyone around us dressed in business casual or similar: High heels abound and button downs, blazers, and brogues are the norm.

On second thought, an airport is more interesting because of the wider cross-section of humanity you see: there are far more families and seniors, and people passing through from all over the world. Sure, it’s a school day, and it’s fairly cold and icy outside (fairly few residential buildings are connected to the Plus 15, and Bow Valley College students don’t seem to venture far in the network), but people-watching is much more fun at the airport because of the sheer variety. Here, it feels like a repeating loop. Not boring per se, but something that takes far more effort to see beauty in.

We stop for lunch, and jokingly ponder when the impeccably dressed security guards dressed in blazers will ask us to leave. It may be casual Friday, but I came ready for a warm weather hike: jean shorts, t-shirt, bucket hat, hiking boots, and stick out pretty obviously.

Also noticeable is the abundance of small, family-run, non-chain Asian restaurants in the +15, and their unusual opening hours: one is only open Mon-Fri, 10-3. They are entirely reliant on the work lunch crowd, and must have been hit hard during the pandemic when many offices worked from home. I think about how remarkable it is that I am seeing these restaurants for the first time–I used to work on the east end of Downtown, and usually walked outside on the city streets.

Highlights here include a low door to a parking garage (“parkade” in Calgary parlance), and a helpful guy wearing a jacket saying “information technology” down the sleeve telling us that it was dead beyond this hallway. He was right. The west part of downtown feels moribund, with empty storefronts everywhere. The foot traffic drops off to almost nothing.

Amec Place might be a rare bright spot, for how sheerly anachronistic it feels. There’s a lobby with a kind of glossed up tile you don’t really see anymore, and planters and a fountain break it up. So far, we’ve seen a few green walls, but they turn out to be illusory: real plants, but preserved and not living.

Part 2 coming soon!

1. I thought about doing some planning to find the optimal route, since the problem very much resembles a classic problem for computer scientists: the Chinese postman problem (named in honour of, but not using the name of, the Chinese mathematician Meigu Guan), which, is solvable rather simply with a few caveats. I’ll add a post about my attempt to find an optimal route using the R programming language. ︎
2. the talk of the town is currently the proposed Green Line, which is hard to see in any other way than the provincial government holding the city hostage, but that’s for another day… ︎
3. It’s mostly tile, with some carpet. I don’t recall any terrazzo. ︎

[This post is about the day that Glitch failed, and how that failure created the opportunity to make Slack. We're sharing it here (out of chronological order) to mark 12 years since the famous pivot.]

“We have to shut down the game.” Stewart Butterfield said.

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked exhausted. The result of years of long days and short nights pouring all of his substantial creative energy into Tiny Speck and the game it was conceived to create: Glitch. 

He also looked resolved. He had tried every option he could think of to keep Glitch alive: alpha and beta releases, launches and unlaunches, new features, a completely overhauled new player experience, elaborate collaborative modes of play, invite campaigns, generous credits to existing players, and clever storytelling in the press. 

None of it was enough.

The quirky game populated by a far-flung community of players had absorbed his time since 2009. The company had attracted a team of 40 artists, engineers, game designers, animators, musicians, writers and in-game guides to build and tend to the world we had collectively imagined.

It was now late 2012. On a chilly November morning, Stewart and I walked along the seawall in the politely trendy Yaletown neighbourhood of Vancouver. I had been surprised by his invitation when I arrived at work that morning – I joined the company 8 months earlier and was not accustomed to coffee walks with our charismatic CEO.

He explained that despite all of our efforts, there just wasn’t a viable business for Glitch. It was expensive to build and keep online, and we had not attracted enough players to bear that expense. Moreover, with the rise of smartphones and the incompatibility of our Flash-based game with mobile, we didn’t have an easy way to meet new players where they were spending their casual gaming time.

“If we keep going as we are, we’ll burn through the rest of our money in a few months and be left with nothing to show for it,” Stewart explained. We walked in silence for a few paces, the low clouds dull and drizzling overhead.

I hunched into my rain jacket as I realized what this meant. My colleagues and I without a job. Tens of thousands of players abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of hours of collective creative work lost. Another failed startup. Fuck.

“But if we stop now, we can use that money to build something else,” Stewart went on. “I think the tools we’ve built internally could be useful to other people.”

“Our IRC server?” I asked, feeling a combination of skepticism and confusion. Why would a game company make chat software? And why would anyone pay for the unpolished conglomeration of tools we had glued together to solve our own problems?

When I joined the company, I’d been given a crash course in how we worked together. No email. Everything happened in IRC: a chat protocol from the late 80s. We had a server set up with channels based on topics of discussion: #general for company-wide chat, #deploys for new code releases, #support-hose for inbound customer support requests, and so on.

Alongside this we added a few other things we needed. A simple FTP server which posted uploads into the #files channel. A system that wrote our chat logs to a database so we could search them and read old archives.

A set of integrations that posted updates from other systems into IRC: whenever a new user signed up for Glitch, or bought credits, or wrote in for support, it showed up in a channel. Whenever we deployed code, or got a new review on the App Store, or tweeted from our Twitter account, it showed up in a channel.

Taken together, this allowed us to communicate in real-time, share files, find anything we’d ever talked about at the company, and keep track of everything happening with the business – all while avoiding the unique 21st-century hell of email reply chains and fragmented organizational knowledge.

At first it felt awkward, but within a couple weeks I couldn’t imagine using anything else.

It was a system only a nerd could love. It was quirky and technical. Most things didn’t have a GUI – instead displaying everything in text. You had to set up your own clients or bookmark webpages for each of the subsystems. It was held together with custom scripts and cron jobs and ugly SQL queries. It worked just well enough to serve our needs, but no more. Every ounce of energy we had was going into trying to make the game successful. These tools were a means to an end.

Without missing a beat, Stewart launched into a reasonably well-rehearsed pitch. “It’s all your team’s communication in one place, synced, searchable, and available wherever you go.” With one system we would replace email and basic file hosting, and allow a single point of integration for all of a team’s messaging needs: both between humans and between people and computers. “We’ll get rid of all the stuff we’ve duct-taped together and start fresh, but keep everything we’ve learned,” he said.

“I’m thinking of calling it Slack,” he added, making a gesture as though gently pulling and loosening a string between his thumbs and forefingers. “We can come up with a better name later.”

Stewart and his co-founders Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov had made up their minds to close the game and embark on something entirely different. He had already pitched this idea to our investors and they were on board – a sign of their continued belief in his leadership and track record of correctly predicting trends.

It sounded crazy to me. But I had also seen enough in my brief time working with the four of them to sense that if anyone could pull it off, it might be this group.

“We’re asking a few people to stay on. I’d like you to join us.” Lacking anything insightful to say, or any other handy job offers, I accepted.

“Good. But before that, let’s get a web page up so that we can get everybody another job.”

Glitch was an unusual, clever, heartfelt game. Within the realm of Ur, dreamt by eleven magical Giants, players created playful new identities for themselves. They designed and clothed their avatars to their heart’s content, delighting in new hats and a rainbow of possible skin tones. They crafted working music boxes and decorated their architecturally-unlikely homes.

They planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers – including plausible Nietzche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts.

It was, in a word, preposterous.

It also meant a great deal to those who discovered and adopted it. It was an online place with a unique community. Glitch’s players identified with the game’s pervasive sense of humour, its gentle pace, and its weirdness. Mostly, they identified with each other and came to pass the time and make something new together. There was no way to win the game. And because of that, you couldn’t lose.

It was Butterfield’s second attempt to make an online game. In 2002, he and the co-founders of Ludicorp had launched Game Neverending, a similarly lighthearted game that allowed players to traverse a simple map, visiting obscure locations and leaving notes for others. It built on the mechanics of earlier eras of text-based networked games, but focused on the emerging possibilities of new spaces for social online play. Though Game Neverending and its esoteric goals were shelved after a couple years, an offshoot of the effort would lead to the team’s first major commercial success: Flickr.

In the early aughts, the combination of growing availability of consumer-grade digital cameras and home internet connections provided an opportunity. Flickr was created to allow people to upload and share their photos on the web – something taken for granted today but novel at the time. This was an era before the dominance of social networks (Facebook had yet to hatch across American college campuses) and smartphones (three years before the iPhone, when most Blackberries had abysmal cameras and worse cellular bandwidth).

Recognizing this opportunity and sensing the transformative potential of popular access to digital photography, Butterfield and the Ludicorp team launched Flickr in early 2004. Digital photographers flocked to the platform, rapidly making it one of the largest photo-sharing sites on the web. They built enduring communities around camera gear and common interests. People tagged their photos, added annotations, and – miraculously by today’s standards – had substantive and generally positive conversations in comment threads.

For a while, Flickr became the de facto photo layer of the internet: powering blogs, institutional collections, and enabling pro photographers to share their work in full resolution. The combination of timeliness, superb user-centered product design, and the nurturing of a new community resulted in a hit. Flickr became an essential part of the “Web 2.0” renaissance in the wake of the dot-com bubble.

Flickr’s success quickly attracted acquisition attention from other consumer Internet companies: Yahoo most of all. In 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr for about $25 million dollars, incorporating it into their eclectic portfolio of web services and replacing the nascent Yahoo Photos product.

For a period, Flickr continued to grow and thrive, rapidly expanding to tens of millions of users. The growing prominence of smartphone cameras brought a new type of mobile-first photography to the platform, and the continued investment in the community by pros using high-end gear cemented the site’s importance for serious photographers. The site’s “Interestingness” algorithm surfaced the most compelling content to draw in new users.

But Butterfield was miserable. Yahoo’s idiosyncratic and sprawling set of online properties and incoherent response to changing trends left Flickr adrift. Yahoo’s search business was being decimated as Google’s engine redefined online search. Two enormous shifts in people’s online behaviour – to social media and mobile phones – were largely missed by Yahoo. Sharing and tagging photos on Facebook became one of its killer features, and the centrepiece of much of its early viral growth. Flickr’s position in the marketplace was reduced as these trends swept the Internet and drove people’s attention away from websites toward social networks and apps.

As soon as his vesting period was up, Butterfield left Yahoo, penning a legendary resignation letter criticizing the company’s strategic disorganization with his signature sardonic wit.

“I don’t know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know that my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing, and not entirely because of my advancing age,” Butterfield wrote. “I will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love.”

Five years after launching Flickr, Butterfield found himself back in Vancouver. Shortly thereafter, his co-founders Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov would leave Yahoo to join him in his new venture: the humbly named Tiny Speck. This time, he thought, they would make the game work.

When Stewart and I arrived back in the office that November morning in 2012, I looked around at my colleagues as they drifted in. As a gaming startup, hours were characteristically shifted. Many folks preferred to work late and sleep in, nursing productivity out of the creative hours after sunset. I hung my rain-beaded jacket beside the enormous amethyst geode that stood by the front door.

Stewart bee-lined for his office to prepare himself for the announcement he was about to make. I went to the small kitchen for coffee, listening to chatter about the new user experience we’d recently released, and the upcoming features the team was working on. The office – cluttered with video game figurines and toys, art sketches on the walls, and a model of Glitch’s evil Rook hanging from the ceiling – felt surreal and sad. I thought about the people in our San Francisco office going about their day, and the same weight the company’s co-founder Cal Henderson would be carrying there.

I sat at my desk and began to think about the task Stewart had set: he wanted to make sure everyone had a job. He had convinced dozens of people to join him in making Glitch – asking some of them to move around the world – and felt direct responsibility for their well-being now that we were shutting the game down.

What he had in mind was simple: we’d call it “Hire a Genius” and list the photo, skillset, and contact information for everyone at the company. We would pair a link to this page with all of our closure announcements and press releases. I got to work building it out, dropping in my colleague’s photos and adding the info I had available. We’d fill in the rest later, once everyone knew they were now on the job market.

It wasn’t long before Stewart called us together. The SF office dialed in to the big TV in the lounge, and co-founder Eric Costello called in from his home in New York. Forty or so faces turned expectantly to Butterfield. The emotion in his voice was apparent from his first words. “This is a horrible day, and I’m so sorry,” he said. Realization spread across people’s faces as they understood.

Stewart explained why we had reached the end of the road, and what we had to do next. We would announce the closure of the game to our players, sharing a FAQ to answer their most urgent questions. We would refund all purchases in the game dating back over the past year. We would put up the hiring page for everyone interested, and make calls and introductions on their behalf to find new work. We would release all of the game’s assets – including code, artwork and music – into the public domain (much of which has since been reconsituted into a playable version of Glitch by the Odd Giants project!).

The team’s response was emotional: shocked and sad, overwhelmed and confused. As the reality of the situation settled in, some degree of relief was also apparent. Many of Glitch’s staff had been pouring their heart and soul into the game for years without finding that magic alchemical combination that turned an idea into a success with its own momentum.

Somebody got out a bottle of whiskey. We ordered pizza. Everybody stayed at the office. People hugged and cried and shared stories. Someone suggested releasing all of our half-baked experiments and unfinished features to our players. This idea took hold and the creative wheels started spinning. The afternoon and evening had the mood of a family wake for a lost loved one.

We closed down Glitch a few weeks later. The End of the World party was well-attended by thousands of players, saying goodbye and exchanging contact information, taking snaps in their favourite locations, and mixing and mingling with Tiny Speck staff. On December 9th 2012 at 8pm, the game’s servers were shut down and Ur went offline.

Our colleagues at Tiny Speck finished their jobs shortly thereafter. Our once-bustling offices were empty. Chairs haphazardly pushed into corners. Dead batteries on desks. Filing cabinets dangling open.

The few of us who remained put our heads down and started digging out of the hole we found ourselves in together.

Within a month, we were living on our first prototype of Slack.
A year later, we launched the product to the world.
5 years later, we took the company public.

A version of this post was originally published on https://www.johnnyrodgers.is/.

Burnaby Mountain is a little slice of nature in the city. But how did Simon Fraser University end up on its peak?

The post How did SFU end up on top of Burnaby Mountain? appeared first on Better Columbia.

Yes, the votes are finally in, and I lost by 36 to 45.

It feels a little inappropriate to use percentage points to analyze a race where less than 100 votes were cast in total, but that's 44.4% to 55.6%, an 11-point loss. The closest analogue in provincial politics would be Bronwyn Eyre, the former MLA who just lost Saskatoon Stonebridge by a nearly identical margin, 43.4% to 54.3%. Now I have something polite to talk about if I ever meet her!

That's enough votes that I'm not embarrassed, and in the world of municipal politics I think it's not a bad performance against a 21-year incumbent. Here's my campaign story:

The Paperwork

If you've never done it before, running for office usually carries some kind of signature requirement.

To get on a federal ballot, you need 100 eligible voters... but you're encouraged to collect 150, because there is no post-submission appeal process if any of your signatures are found to be invalid. Just imagine collecting 150 signatures on behalf of the Liberal Party in Weyburn! This mighty task is the greatest preoccupation of dozens of paid organizational staff come election time, and only a few parties have the resources to send those staff into every single longshot riding in the country. I personally gathered about 60 nomination signatures in my 2021 campaign.

At the municipal level, this task is much less onerous. Please flip open your copy of the Local Government Election Act, 2015 to Part VII, Section 67(3):

Val Marie is DEFINITELY:

• not a rural municipality (yes, really: RMs are their own distinct category, it's a Saskatchewan thing)
• a place with less than 20,000 people (19,880 less, in fact)
• not divided into wards (entertaining as this would be)

That means five signatures - an easy hour's work. With 4% of the electorate contacted already, I was feeling good.

The Long Month of October

In Canada, federal and provincial elections can be called by the executive branch at any time - and must happen automatically if a major deadlock emerges (if you ever wondered why we never deal with government shutdowns). In contrast, municipal elections happen on a fixed schedule, proceeding every four calendar years come hell or high water. (This philosophy is employed in the U.S. at all levels of government.)

What if a dysfunctional town council collapses halfway into its fixed term? Municipalities are "creatures of the province" with almost no guaranteed rights that cannot be stripped away by provincial legislation, and it is the province's thankless job to intervene.

In Saskatchewan in 2024, the provincial election happened to be called for October 28, while all municipal elections happening across the province were set for November 13. This close-but-not-exact overlap created an obnoxious time crunch for many, many politically involved people. In my own case, I was working as campaign GIS lead in Regina for all of October, so municipal politics were necessarily second priority.

After knocking a hundred doors on the 28th for Joan Pratchler (who, ahem, ended up beating a sitting cabinet minister by 7 points), I was finally free to go home and do the same thing in Val Marie.

The Platform

Val Marie, with its resident population of 120, has a very small tax base. The village government has very little leeway to spend money on anything other than basic services, so most options for a policy agenda are off the table. Why did I even put myself out there if I don't expect to have much power? My personal reason: tourism development requires that the village show up to professional stakeholder meetings sometimes, and with my day job sales experience I know that I'm good at leaving a positive impression on rural development types.

In a tiny community, I knew that everybody would already have some idea of who I am, so I thought I would re-iterate the personal basics:

• I'm here by choice
• My map business is a full-time thing
• I'm a volunteer museum chair
• I like to apply for grants

I also had the full endorsement of the runner-up from the 2020 election, who said that he had been the subject of unjustified rumours that he supported an expensive new water system (something which has proven to be a painfully high per capita expense in nearby Mankota and Climax). This proved to be the case on the doorstep, as multiple voters still remembered the water system gossip four years later.

I think Val Marie's appeal as a community has basically nothing to do with our water infrastructure, and there are so many other business development ideas that would be cheaper to try first. So I made sure to add a final line item into my platform:

• Very specific fiscal conservative pledge

At the start of the campaign, I knew that I had probably only ever spoken to about half the people in town, so I decided to get whimsical with a more personal back side of the flyer. Here are the basic messages that I hoped to re-iterate:

• You already know my family isn't from here, but I'm still a prairie person
• My business is successful
• Did you know I CONSTANTLY get asked about copyright traps?? Seriously, this comes up SO MUCH.

In the end, this kind of thing probably only changes 1 or 2 votes, especially in a tiny social environment where both candidates are already known to everybody. But it was honestly just fun to try and use my political skills in a non-partisan environment, and nobody could accuse me of not running a full-scale campaign.

Financial audit

The flyer ended up being my only campaign expense. I still have a few left over!

Total campaign expenditures: $155.23 ($4.31 per vote)

Sadly, just giving a $5 bill to every likely supporter would be very illegal.

Ten Miles from the Border

For a couple days around the U.S. election I finished all of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective and drew 30 neurotic little depictions of my own face from memory, but otherwise I did not manage to change out of my pajamas or get any useful work done, so the effective campaign period was really a little shorter than two weeks.

Data Operation

With my flyers going out on the Friday before election day, I was free to spend the Remembrance Day long weekend canvassing. Uh-oh... there's a catch!

Section 53.1(1) says that the council may provide for the establishment and maintenance of a voter registry. Well, Val Marie doesn't.

Provincial and federal canvassers work off a big central voters list, maintained with data from the relevant election agencies (which collaborate with the CRA, so file your taxes correctly). Among its other uses, this crutch is an essential part of my electioneering social routine because I'm really not good with names. There was only one thing to do next.

Fearlessly hit the doors anyway? No, let's just make our own voter registry!!

With the help of five volunteers, I called a data meeting where we simply went... street by street... block by block... house by house... naming every resident in every building, from memory. I was really curious how accurately this could be done, but after two and a half hours, we were at something like 95% completion and estimated an electorate of 128 people. (More than our census population? Yes, any Saskatchewan resident who owns property inside the municipality can vote for mayor.)

In addition to being a useful social tool - because I was not about to open every conversation by asking "I'm Alex, who are you?" - we also used the list to do a rudimentary tiering operation, estimating the likelihood that every individual person in town would vote for me.

Canvassing

It took two afternoons to hit every door in town, and I took a third afternoon to try all the uncontacted Tier As again. This pushed my contact rate up to an even 50%, which is great but could definitely have been improved with more lead time.

Most people do not make up their mind about politics because their door got knocked on once, but the data collected is a useful way to identify the needs and priorities of the general public, and it's also a great way to predict how the election will actually go.

Compared to my federal experience, I was shocked to discover that nobody would directly tell me that they were going to vote for my opponent - it just wouldn't be polite in a small town! I ended up getting all of four explicit negative responses. When you canvass for the NDP, this is much less of a problem. I realized early on that it was probably safe to assume that every single "undecided" voter was going to show up and vote for the incumbent.

With voter contact done, here's how things stood the night before the election:

For your reference, this is the NDP spreadsheet code: a 1 has explicitly said that they will vote for you, a 2 is a likely supporter, a 3 is undecided, and a 4 has explicitly said that they won't vote for you. Easy!

First of all, it was frankly incredible to see our tier list hold up this accurately, given that it was literally created off the top of a couple people's heads.

This put me on track to win 80% of A's, 45% of B's, and 10% of C's, provided that you assume...

1. ...that I had recorded a representative sample of the electorate.
2. ...that I was accurate at differentiating 2's and 3's.
3. ...that nobody was lying to my face.

Three risky assumptions in politics, but if they all held true, then our simple tier model returns 64 votes for me (yay!!) against 55 votes for my opponent. In practice, I think 2. and 3. did hold up, but with such a tiny campaign, I assumed that my canvassing efforts were disproportionately reaching my own people. When I went to bed before the election, the most optimistic thing I was willing to believe was that the race was tied.

Election Day, November 13

In Saskatchewan, it is legal for a municipal candidate to spend all day watching people vote at the polling place! I decided to give this a shot, because with a 50% complete canvass sheet in my hot little hands, I would be able to cross names off the list and plan a bite-sized GOTV operation to go find any supporters who were late to show up. My colleague, the 2020 candidate, kindly tagged me out so I could go on a lunch break.

The Race for School Trustee

If you're an avid reader of my blog, you'll recall that the mayoral election was held concurrently with a contested school board election. With different franchise rules (anybody living within thirty miles of Val Marie could vote for public school trustee), this meant there were two separate tables inside the municipal hall, each independently checking voter ID.

Name recognition seemed to be a problem for school trustee... which makes sense because we live in an electoral subdivision with three schools, and neither of the two candidates were associated with ours. At least twenty voters declined a school ballot because "they didn't know either one". (The incumbent, Susan Mouland, had paid the same $18.14 as me to get her flyer placed in every mailbox in town two weeks previously - a great illustration of the limits of postal advertising.)

In practice, although the eligible electorate was much larger, only about five people came out from the countryside to vote for school trustee without being allowed to vote for mayor.

No such problem for me, every single person who walked in the door requested a mayoral ballot. I was the star of the show!

The Day Drags On

Turnout was very healthy. In fact, every single identified supporter voted without needing that 7pm follow-up! A great problem to have, so my GOTV operation ended up amounting to nothing. Parks Canada has a very large footprint in Val Marie, so there was a big rush starting at 4pm when many of the scientific staff get off work.

The final turnout for the municipal election was 82 votes. With no official voter registry, it's impossible to calculate turnout by percentage, but that's 69% based on my personal voter list, and a whopping 82% of our census adult population (math problem, guess how many adult residents they counted in 2021). In the end, there was a significant undervote for the council race on the same ballot, so I really was the star of the show!

At the end of a very long day of sitting on my butt, I was pessimistic: every single one of my identified supporters turned up, but there were quite a few people coming to vote who I hadn't been able to contact. In particular, I realized that I had made very few contacts inside the assets department of the Park, which is in charge of doing all the blue-collar stuff that keeps our local tourist attraction functioning. When these younger people started to show up at 5pm, I started to expect a close loss.

The Count

If you've been following all these numbers really closely, there was one pair of spoiled ballots for Mayor and Council: somebody had written some initials in the corner, seemingly by accident, but this is clear grounds for rejection under Canadian election law. I would like to remind all my supporters to not draw any identifying marks on their ballot!

Drama and excitement as the doors finally closed at 8pm. I overdramatically shook the box and said "It sounds like I'll lose by 7 votes", the signed seals were ripped open, the ballots were dumped in a big pile, the counting sheets were readied... and the count was tied until the halfway point!! Finally, Roland Facette pulled slightly ahead by a couple votes, and I realized the narrow lead was going to be insurmountable. I said some kind words to Rolly and wished him the best for his latest term. (With no recounts on the table, all of the election workers seemed very happy to finally go home.)

Things I Learned

• I never wanted to say it, but I thought this race would just end up being a census of old families vs. transplants. Wrong! It's fair to say that I did better with newcomers, but during voter contact I was surprised on both counts by a number of exceptions.

• I had been wanting to meet everybody in town for years anyway, I just knew that I was never going to do it unless there was some kind of challenge behind it.

• I identified 36 1's and 2's, and I ended up getting 36 votes.

• The Sask NDP typically gets 15 or 16 votes in the Val Marie polling place, so I can now officially call myself an electoral overperformer. Thank you, thank you!

• Actually, there were multiple partisan NDP supporters who did not support my mayoral campaign.

• Traditional field strategies are a very effective basis for predicting the result of a small-scale election.

• Nobody mentioned either my known affiliation with the NDP, or the fact that I was visibly married to another man when I first moved to town.

• Losing was a relief. There is nothing like talking to every voter in town to make you realize that being elected to any public position is a solemn and terrifying responsibility.

In the end, it really was about the friends we made along the way: I was able to mobilize eight volunteers and I could have had access to even more, except there is absolutely no practical need for a large volunteer operation in an electorate of 118. My people were really passionate... and therefore tended to be more eager to get on my spreadsheet, it turned out.

Having lost a few races in my life: if you expect politics to satisfy your desire for fame and fortune, you'll run out of motivation really quickly, but working with a core group of dedicated people who like the things you represent is usually enough to keep me going. Thank you to everybody who has been a part of this community over the years!

If you’ve been following the Do Shit series for a while, you should be able to do a lot of shit by now. We assume you’ve gotten your legal status squared away, successfully filed your taxes, gotten housing benefits, joined a union, and been checked for breast cancer. So hopefully things are pretty ship-shape.

Even so, feeling truly at home in Iceland can be more of a long-term project. Maybe people clock your accent and immediately start offering you noob advice you learned years ago. Or maybe you’re trying to work on your spoken Icelandic, but people switch to English the second you open your mouth. In these cases, it could be good to “pass” as Icelandic. And guess what? We’ve got some advice for y’all on how to do exactly that. So here are a few things you can try to vanish into the crowd, and pass as a native islander.

1. Always use the absolute maximum allowance at the duty free
You can start blending in as soon as you set foot on Icelandic soil with an extravagant trolley dash at the Duty Free store in arrivals. This is a place of true joy for Icelanders. Alcohol — and especially hard liquor — is prohibitively expensive in Iceland due to sky-high taxes, so you’ll see Icelanders absolutely maxing out their allowance. Couples and families will have a trolley that looks like they’re opening a bar. It’ll be stacked with trays of beer, whisky, and wine or aperitif. They probably have some útlönd contraband hidden in their case, too. Top up your trolley with some doorstop-sized bags of liquorice and a roll of snus, and you’re good to go.

2. Don’t queue for anything, ever
Something else you might notice Icelanders doing — or rather, not doing — is queueing in a traditional fashion. While English, Americans, and people of many other nationalities are overly polite, fastidious, habitual, natural (read: obsessive) queuers, often asking, “are you waiting?” before falling neatly into line, Icelanders have no such qualms about getting served. Stride boldly into any establishment like it’s your house, plaster a big grin on your face, and exclaim “HÆHÆ!” towards nobody in particular at high volume. You’re Icelandic, baby.

3. Eat ice cream outdoors in the dead of winter like a maniac
There’s a certain gung-ho “fuck it” attitude towards winter in Iceland. You’ll hear people saying, “there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing” — and they’ll mean it, too. In the dead of winter, when there are only a few hours of sunlight and the temperature hovers around zero for months on end, you’ll see Icelandic families standing outside of any ice cream place in town, dressed like the Michelin man and chowing down on a gelato as if the winter isn’t even happening. If you wanna pass as Icelandic, bundle up and join the throng.

4. Learn how to pretend it’s summer
Summer is a fleeting thing in Iceland that’s kind of half season, and half religious belief. After six months of the pitch dark, icy, storm-lashed shitshow that is the endless winter season, Icelanders are absolutely desperate for summertime to arrive — so much so, they’ll try to will it into existence. In that spirit, throw on a pair of shorts and some sunglasses at the first sign of blue sky in April or May, and go marching around town like you’re on a tropical beach holiday. Learn to steel yourself and pretend you’re not absolutely freezing. Whip out the barbecue in your back garden and try to quickly char some pulsa (or pylsa, depending on which camp you belong to) before it starts snowing again. It’s all make believe — but whatever it takes to stay sane, y’know?

5. Áttu kaffi, AEÐI!, svona, og hérna, HA?, jæja!
Even if your Icelandic isn’t stellar yet, you can freewheel your way through some conversations with just a handful of common buzzwords. Upon entering any room, from a library, to a gas station, to someone’s house, immediately utter, “áttu kaffi?”, your under-caffeinated eyes scanning the scene hopefully. If there is indeed coffee, exclaim, “ÆÐI!” and go get some. If someone says something to you, say, “HA?” and then mumble, “já… nei… og hérna…” as if you’re slowly processing what’s been said. A couple of progressively quieter, “jæjas”, you’ll be free to sidle away.

6. Have kids first, then get married
If you really wanna commit to the bit, few things are more Icelandic than having kids by accident then getting into a relationship as a result. It’s a bit more forward than dating traditions elsewhere, which usually involve, you know — having a coffee, going to the museum, escalating to a dinner date, and that sort of thing. In Iceland, it’s more, have kids first and ask questions later. Good luck with that, Íslendingur.

Learn how to do more shit here.

The post Do Shit: Pass As An Icelander appeared first on The Reykjavik Grapevine.

Local artist Jyhling Lee has created a stainless steel sculpture informed by an origami bowl for an "iconic"  street in Downtown Toronto.

Reflector is a mirrored sculpture approximately 5 metres by 3 metres tall that sits on a corner of Queen Street West in Downtown Toronto, a major thoroughfare through the city and one of the "most iconic" streets, according to the team.

The sculpture consists of a series of angled planes clad in mirrored stainless steel that form a half circle and meet the ground at several spiked points.

Its shape was informed by origami folds, which Jyhling Lee has referenced in past works, such as her sculpture Origami Goose.

"My initial folded paper origami studies were of bowl-like forms which could offer an experiential space within and around its form, as well as being self-supporting," Lee told Dezeen.

"What began as a more enclosed bowl was opened up – towards Queen Street West – to create an invitation for the public to enter the sculptural space to interact with its interior, as well as its exterior."

Lee also chose the mirrored steel surface to accommodate a "human attraction" to the reflective surfaces.

"There is a refined beauty, awe, and precision to working with this material and a human attraction to mirrors and reflections," she said.

Its steel form is "highly" durable and will be resistant to corrosion and rusting, according to Lee – and also easy to clean.

Lights around its base are programmed to turn on at sunset and off at sunrise.

Lee created the sculpture to reflect the lively energy of Queen Street West, which she has been familiar with since childhood.

"Queen Street West is one of Toronto's most iconic streets and I have known this stretch of Queen Street since childhood," said Lee.

"Reflector has been inspired by the energy and dynamism of this place, and its presence serves to amplify and celebrate this as a new community landmark."

Commissioned by Queen Street West Business Improvement Area (QSWBIA) and the city of Toronto, the sculpture is intended to serve as an interactive public artwork and an "inhabitable environment", according to the team.

"An unexpected surprise of the sculptural space is its unique acoustical properties," said Lee.

Jyhling Lee is a Toronto-based artist and founder of Figureground Studio, which focuses on site-specific artworks for the public realm.

Elswhere in Toronto,  Grimshaw created a series of pre-fabricated bridges to connect the city to urban islands and Agency—Agency and SHEEEP designed stormwater gardens for a linear park underneath an expressway.

The photography is by Kurtis Chen

The post Jyhling Lee creates origami-informed steel sculpture for Toronto appeared first on Dezeen.