Don't mess with his funky flow

I credit my friend Sage with getting me into one of my favourite shows of 2015: Steven Universe. It combines all my favourite things: fantasy, adventure, mystery, clever dialogue, and WOMEN KICKING ASS.

Female identifying sentient rocks to be exact

I wasn't originally interested in the show despite the abundance of GIFs I kept seeing from my Tumblr friends. I was incredibly obsessed with Gravity Falls and didn't want to go down the rabbit hole with a new show. But Sage kept pestering me to watch it so he'd have someone to talk to about it.

And I really liked it! I went through every available episode throughout the summer and continue to rewatch episodes I've enjoyed. I really love how much the show focuses on the strength and beauty of femininity, the value of friendship and family, and the joy of being yourself and fighting to protect that. 

According to Wiki: Steven Universe is "the coming of age story of a young boy named Steven, who grows up in the town of Beach City living with three magical humanoid aliens, the Crystal Gems: Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl. Steven, who is half-Gem, goes on adventures with his human friends and helps the Gems protect the world from their own kind."

Each episode is 10 minutes and has filled me with wonder for that reason. I can't believe how this show can be so emotionally complex with only 2 seasons of 10 minute episodes. 

A message from Steven's mother to Steven aka the episode that broke my heart. 

This generation of animation that believes its audience can handle this complexity is just killing me with its greatness. 

My favourite part of this show has to be the fact that the most respected warrior in the galaxy with a legend that precedes her is a 7 foot tall woman in a wedding dress that loves pink. No, my favourite part of this show is how the Power of Love will kick your ass. 

I am made of love and it's stronger than you 

There is basically nothing I dislike about this show. Even the stuff I thought I'd dislike like the songs were things I came to enjoy.  As a child, I thought to be "girly" was the worst and this show made me realize that "girly" is just as or even more bad ass than lone wolf toxic masculinity. 

This show also blows me away with its positive representation of not only women but people of colour and general body positivity. ARGH THIS SHOW. It cannot return quick enough. Go watch it, I'll wait here and we'll talk about it later.

Awasis.

I was never as lonely as I felt when I was the only little Native girl in the world that liked Batman (or so I thought).

I wrote my short film Crash Site because I wanted a movie about a bunch of nerds that were either Native girls or girls of colour. I also wanted a Native super-heroine that was shy and from a reserve. I designed Maggie Thunderbird with my good friend Kelly Tindall and I was speaking to him about creating a pitch so we can get her an actual comic book! Here's hoping.

Maggie Thunderbird as designed by me and Kelly. 

I continue to be blown away by the response Crash Site has got. It's wonderful to know that other people want Native girls being nerds and being awesome. But I hadn't seen Crash Site with the audience I intended it for: Native kids. 

Cue my friend Cella and her mum, Silvana, asking me to speak at Strathcona School to their kids Grades 1-6. I showed the movie during the assembly and spoke to a group of grade 5s afterwards. I was nervous the night before as I knew how I reacted when I was a grade 3 kid and some loser came to speak to us at my school. I was ready to be thrown out because I was so boring. Yeah, there was a bit of unrest when I introduced the movie but once the movie was halfway through, the kids were quiet, laughing at the right moments, and enjoying everything.

Two parts that blew me away though were when Cella told me about hearing little girls being horrified at a character telling her sister, "You can't act like an Indian fresh off the reserve" and overhearing another little girl trying to repeat the Cree lines after she heard them. But the best part was when I got to talk to the kids of Grade 5 about the movie and what they thought about it. A bunch wanted to know if I was going to make it longer. One kid wanted me and Kelly to make the comic book. And they all wanted to know what I wanted to make next. The teacher mentioned that the kids had been thinking of questions to ask me all week and she had hadn't seen them so focused for a guest.

It was great to hang out with a bunch of kids who were as nerdy as I was when I was their age. I loved cracking jokes about nerd memes and talking about Spiderman with them. And seeing their excitement to talk about making and acting in their own movies was infectious. I had a great time! And I felt really touched when they asked if I could send them a link to the movie.

Even though I am still terrified of being run out of the school cause I'm so boring, I would still like to visit another school. Here's to Native nerds!

 

Stronger Together

I'm a huge Superman nerd and will get into huge nerd arguments about how awesome he is. As a girl, I loved that he could fly. As an adult, I like that he's an endless fountain of hope and optimism in a world that tends to value anti-heroes.

I was also a HUGE fan of the Helen Slater version of Supergirl.

I always wanted to do that dip your hand in the lake as you fly over it thing.

So when I found out that there was going to be a Supergirl tv show. I was like, meh. Gotham turned out to be this batshit fanfic straight out of the mind of a 13-year-old girl and Man of Steel made me hate where DC was going with Supes so I had little hope for it.

Until I saw a Supergirl photoset on tumblr and saw that HER SHOES WERE SENSIBLE. 

So I watched the pilot and was charmed by her dorkiness, her optimism, and her sweetness.

Then I found out that this show is wall to wall women and I was down as hell for it!

AND HELEN SLATER IS HER MUM

I'm only two episodes in but I just went hard on that show. I love its celebration of femininity, that Kara has so many awesome women in her life, and that being a "girl" isn't a negative thing. She begins to take it and own it.

I also really love her relationship with her older sister and the season-long subplot related to her Kryptionian aunt's relationship with her birth mother. Kara and Alex's relationship is so refreshing and multifacted and ARGH THIS SHOW GOT ME SO HYPED.

But my favourite thing so far is the value of help to Kara. Kara tries to get all Superman in her first few outings as Supergirl and she ends up causing a mess of things. So she gets help from her friends James, Wynn, and her sister. In the second episode Kara tells James,

"Back on Krypton no one was their own man. Growing up I was taught that to accept help from people is not a shame, it's an honour."

AND I LIKE THAT. She's not just a refugee alien and one of the last of her kind that must go it alone. She's going to get help and be better for it.

SupergirlFanaticsTumblr

There's an unabashed sweetness about this show that I'm just loving. And it reminds me why I like the House of El: they inspire you to always aspire to be better. And this show is unabashed with its positivity, which I think people are missing the point of. It's not Gotham and it's not Daredevil. It's a show about a woman that wants to make things better. It's a show about women helping other women. AND I AM ONLY TWO EPISODES IN. ARGH I AM SO HYPED.

The Female of the Species

 I am a massive Sherlock Holmes nerd and nothing gets me annoyed than when I tell people that and they'll inevitably say, "Oh, do you watch Sherlock?"

Pinterest

I've seen Sherlock and enjoyed it at first. But then I realized that Sherlock's Sherlock is a really big douche. I didn't like that he lorded his intelligence over everyone and absolutely everyone was inept when he was around. I also didn't dig that Watson had absolutely no reason to hang out with him or be his friend.

Watson in the stories has always been a valued partner to Holmes. Holmes even told him:

"It makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely."

Which, coming from Holmes, is a big deal. Holmes's relationship with Watson is one of the biggest weakness of Sherlock but it's one of the biggest strengths of one of my favourite shows Elementary.  

In Elementary, John Watson becomes Joan Watson, played with intelligent adorability by Lucy Liu. This caused a bunch of people to freak out when the show first premiered cause how DARE they make a white man an Asian woman! HOW DARE they not make her a solider! HOW DARE she not be a doctor (even though she is).

But Lucy quickly usurped Jude Law's position as my favourite Watson in fiction. And it's not just because of her fabulous Joan Watson wardrobe. 

Though I do try to steal her style

But she's such a great character. She starts the show as a disgraced surgeon turned sober living companion assigned to Sherlock Holmes after his stint in rehab. By season three, she's an NYPD consultant who takes over for Sherlock after he disappears to London and is probably just as good as he is at deduction. Together, they're unstoppable, working together as a great team that compliment each other perfectly. 

And the relationship between Joan and Holmes never goes anywhere near romance, which is amazing! They value each other, they deeply care about each other, but when someone mistakes Sherlock for Joan's boyfriend, she reacts with annoyance and mild disgust. He looks out for her and she looks out for him. They're family. Their relationship is how I imagine Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr's Watson and Holmes would have started their relationship. 

I also love that she doesn't take any crap from Holmes. When he tries to get her to pour him a cup of coffee by rudely holding his mug up, she tells him to do it himself. Or one of my favourite situations is when they have sneaked into the morgue and Sherlock is trying to convince Joan to dissect a body, which she isn't going to do. He starts to dissect the body himself but he keeps mucking it up so she takes over. 

Sherlock: That’s lovely. You’re really quite skilled, Watson....

Joan: No! I am dissecting a body in the middle of the night. We are not having a moment.
 

This show treats female characters so well that I just love when they add new women. I hope they bring more Ms. Hudson into the show (played by the amazing Candis Cayne) and after the amazing Kitty Winter arc, I really hope they bring her back. 
 

And Sherlock. He is a real person in this show! One of my least favourite things about Sherlock Holmes adaptations is how Sherlock gets away with acting like an insufferable know-it-all. Sherlock is an ass in Elementary but people call him out on it and he does try not to be so much of a dick (which he is). I like watching his growth on the show. His change from the person who tells Joan he doesn't need her in season one to the person who tells her he's better when she's around.
 

Maybe I'm biased cause I think Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller are great actors but it's a legit awesome show. I've got about 10 episodes to finish in season 3 before season 4 starts on Thursday. I hope they bring back Ms. Hudson! 

Keep Winnipeg Weird 2: The Tunnel of BEER

Winnipeg has a weird history of underground tunnels. In a city that spends 9 months of the year covered in endless winter, I could imagine how a tunnel connecting buildings and heated with steam would be a wonderful alternative. The Pantages theatre had an attempted tunnel to City Hall that had been planned but ended as the Sand Room in the latter’s basement. The University of Manitoba has a network of tunnels that connect most of the major buildings to one another (the bit between the Fletcher Argue-Liz Dafoe Library and Duff Roblin is particularly scary) as does The Health Sciences Centre and Downtown Winnipeg.

However I’ve heard weird rumours about underground tunnels that have been out of use since at least the 40s located in the older parts of Winnipeg, connecting the oldest buildings in the city. The Free Press did an article a few months back gathering the various hearsay and rumours about these tunnels focusing on the tunnel system that (supposedly) connects most of the buildings in the Exchange District.

In my research, I’ve found mention of a tunnel that connects the Hotel Fort Garry to the Manitoba Club and Union Station. The Fort Garry was one of the first major hotels in the city and due to its proximity to the rail station, has had guests of very high statuses. Charlie Chaplin, however, stayed in the Windsor Hotel down the street when he was in Winnipeg. From what I gathered, the Fort Garry tunnel was used to transport guests to and from the hotel in the winter and also used to get dirty linen to the hotel from the Manitoba Club. I also read various accounts of the tunnel being used illicitly to secretly transport prostitutes from the train station to the Manitoba Club with the tunnel being haunted by a prostitute strangled and walled up down there. Security guards at Union Station can’t say for sure if the tunnels exist as the basement of the station is a labyrinth of entry points that have been out of use for a while. If the tunnel is there, it’s been closed up for years and may be flooded and unusable.

The Exchange Tunnels are the ones I hear the most about. Their primary use was for transporting goods in the winter and may have also been used to transport booze during prohibition. These have also been boarded up with the only entry point being the still used storage area that opens to the street near Main and Bannatyne. These tunnels were used by Al Capone during his time in Winnipeg.

The tunnel system I was most surprised by was the one connecting the Legislature building with the Vaughn Jail. It was used to supply steam heat from the power plant between the jail and the Leg as well as power the elevators within the Legislature. Later, it was used to transport mail by air tube. It was also supposedly used to allow politicians to escape angry mobs during the Winnipeg Strike. Like the other tunnels mentioned here, it's locked down to the public.

There are loads of underground secrets in Winnipeg that I couldn't find any information of. I've heard a lot about an old movie theatre under the Radisson hotel on Portage as well as a pool hall and second bar under the Windsor Hotel that was used during Prohibition. Here's hoping somebody can point me in the direction of these secrets.

Spiritied Energy! Or "Keeping Winnipeg Weird!"

I've heard all kinds of spooky stories about my fair city. From the secret Prohibition tunnels under the Exchange to the haunted Fort Garry Hotel, I've heard them all. So I decided to start a series focusing on the various paranormal and supernatural history and stories I can unearth about Winnipeg and the Province of Manitoba.

The first topic of this series shall be the Pantages Playhouse Theatre located on Main and Market.

 January 24, 1914, Winnipeg Tribune. Picture from West End Dumplings

I was originally going to keep this series based solely on research I had done on the topics I will cover. However, I couldn't start this series without mentioning my own interactions with weird Winnipeg. I started working at Pantages Playhouse Theatre when I was 21. I got the job through a former friend and just loved the place. During my time there, the front of house manager was this lovely woman named Kym who I continue to keep in touch with. The Pantages was the stage for a wide variety of shows: from cultural events to bodybuilding competitions to little kids' shows. I started as an usher then became an assistant bartender. I loved the latter more as being an usher meant being yelled at by late patrons who couldn't be seated until an appropriate time during the show. Being an assistant bartender meant lots of coffee making, ice cream stocking, and drink pouring.

The Pantages is classified as a Canadian Historic Site as it is one of the few surviving and one of the best preserved vaudevillian theatres in Canada. The theatre was built over 1913 and 1914 and opens on February 9th 1914. The Pantages chain was widely known for its Vaudeville performances and Winnipeg was used as a proving ground for performers and thus had many great acts travel through. As a classic film nerd, I was really blown away by the history of the teen-20s era Winnipeg. Kym told me how Buster Keaton had performed at Pantages as a part of the "Three Keatons" act he did with his family.

Picture from West End Dumplings

I'm unsure if it's still there but, during my time, there was a room that Kym called the "sand room" just off from the heating/utility room in the basement near the rehearsal hall. The Sand Room is exactly what it sounds like: a room filled with sand. I was told it was originally meant to be a tunnel connecting City Hall and the theatre but had been stopped before it could be finished. The freezers for the ice cream were kept down there.

One night before the show, I was down in the sand room with an insulated bag gathering ice cream for the freezers near the bar. I hadn't bothered to turn on the light in the room and left the heater room door open and used the light from there. I was leaning into the freezer when I felt something nearby.  I climbed out and looked about the sand room and saw the outline of a person standing near me. It was like if you traced a person and cut the outline out of paper except it looked like a person.

I zipped up my insulated bag and hauled buns out of the room.

I saw shadow man one more time before I left Pantages for other jobs. We were having some sort of formal gathering in the new lobby area of the theatre. An added portion was built on the side of the old Pantages and it's pretty stylish. We were setting up and I was asked to grab a mirror from backstage. Rather than take the back stairs, which would have been long and winding, I took the direct route through the fire door into the theatre itself and climbed the side stairs onto the stage.

I still nerd out over the stage at Pantages. I've only been up there maybe three times but it's always a hoot. The eerie blue "ghost light" behind the stage was my favourite thing. I was told by a friend that the ghost light is a theatre tradition and it is always on. Whenever I was backstage, I would always sneak a look at that old bulb lit up eerily.

My shoes clacked on the shiny stage and I grabbed the mirror from the side stage and headed back towards the fire door. Something like a distant foot stomp got my attention. The theatre is incredibly quiet when there's no one inside even with the lobby filled with people. I knew I was by myself. We weren't going to use the theatre for the event. I heard the noise again and something caught my eye from the balcony. I looked up and saw the shadow outline standing in the balcony, looking at me. I could feel my spine curl in on itself at the thought of having to go under the balcony. I clutched the mirror tightly to my side and power walked off the stage, up the side aisle, and out the fire exit door. The whole time I felt I was being watched.

Other weird things happened during my time there. If you were by yourself in the dressing rooms back stage, you always felt like someone was in the next room. Once I had put aside some drinks in teh storage room to take to the bar, would get side tracked with something and I would come back to find them in a completely different place.

I never felt threatened. It was a lot like when I knew my sister was trying to freak me out by hiding in a closet or something so I was hyper vigilant for the sound of her giggling. I hope the shadow man is freaking out a new generation of ushers and bartenders.

Check out West End Dumpling for a historical and less paranormal look at the theatre

"Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland, in search of our better selves."

So I've become obsessed with Mad Max: Fury Road. If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out.

It's always good to see films or read books that inspire you and Fury Road totally got my brain. It got into my brain for other reasons unrelated to how awesome it is.

As a woman of colour, I felt that I couldn't write anything "problematic" as I've lived a lot of the  experiences I tend to write about. Seeing Fury Road made me realize that just because I had been a victim of sexual assault didn't mean I was above using the horrible tropes associated with sexual assault in fiction. A screenplay I've been writing involved a scene where a character's sister is about to be raped in front of her. I thought that, because the character was female and her sister was saved, that scene would be ok. But then I started thinking about why I was using a rape of one character as a crime against another person. It bothers me when a woman's rape is a crime against a man in her life in various stories, films, whatever so why was it different in this case where the person in the woman's life was another woman?

One of my favourite bits about Fury Road is that the villain is a sex slaver and it has no on-screen rape. The wives' pregnant bellies, the chastity belts they cut off in one scene, and their obvious disgust for the villain implies a lot without the "titillating" shots that a lot of action movies show of sexual violence. You don't need to be shown a horrible act to know it's horrible yet a lot of movies will throw sexual violence into your face. I looked at my own stories and decided I needed to change some stuff.

I'm trying to be aware of how something can effect others. I hate when Native people are portrayed negatively so what gives me the right to not do good for someone else in a marginalized group. I've been struggling with this as I write a superhero story about a group of teenagers who, much like the X-Men, develop superpowers as they grow. One of the characters is Bronwyn: a young trans girl with the power to shape shift. I was just thinking about how it would feel to be a teenager, a horrible situation to be in already, with the power to make yourself over as you see fit. How about if you were trans?

Again though, I'm trying to be aware of the horrible tropes that have invaded my brain through bad movies and books. Media doesn't exist in a vacuum and I'm always trying to remain vigilante of what I do.

GIF Credit to Furioas on Tumblr

.....What are you still doing here? Go see Mad Max!

LLAP

I've mentioned numerous times that I'm a bit of a Trekkie.

 Marooned on some sort of ice planet. I think they call it 'Winnipeg'

I adored The Original Series as a child and felt like a grown-up when I watched The Next Generation. I've also mentioned numerous times that I was a huge weirdo as a child, never quite feeling comfortable in my own skin and annoying everyone with my anger at myself for not fitting in.

It's why I identified with the characters trying to find their humanity. I loved Data as he tried to learn what it was to be a human being. And I loved Spock as he dealt with his nature as a Vulcan and how that was at odds with being a human as well.

Leonard Nimoy died today. For some reason, I always felt like he was above death and would always be here. As I was cabbing it home with my mother from a doctor's appointment, I read on Facebook about Nimoy's death and told her about it. I also started to think about how his character helped me out as a little girl. I posted my thoughts to Twitter:

 

I've always wanted to speak Cree. It was the secret language of my parents and grandparents, used when they talked about money problems (which was a lot) or about the behaviour of my sister or I (which was also a lot). And despite how my grandmother and grandpa give me everything I ever whined for, Cree was never allowed. When my dad would sneak a few words to me to repeat back, my grandma would laugh her ass off at my poor pronunciation and shame me into never wanting to try again.

It makes you feel like an alien in your own family. I'm not sure how my sister feels about it but I imagine it's similar. There was a gap formed between our grandparents and us. Never being able to communicate and being treated differently because we were different. Internalized racism or just wanting to talk secretly without kids listening, it was negative. I always loved listening to my mom speaking to my grandmother in rapid fire Cree and talking to my Dad about Cree words and feelings that didn't have a translation into English. 

Cree was my human side and English was my Vulcan side while never being very comfortable with either. My interest in science fiction is largely because of my background as an Aboriginal person. Since I lacked stories about Native girls, I took what I could from the heroes I found dealing with similar situations to mine. These heroes were often found in sci-fi. I can understand why Trekkies are so hardcore with their love and devotion of the show because a lot of fans are as emotionally tied to the show as I am.

Plus Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home was like the best movie ever. 

So I thank Leonard Nimoy for his portrayal as Spock. For helping this once little and always weird Native girl feel that her feet being in two worlds wasn't always going to be a struggle. You could always be two and one at the same time. It's only logical.

Fascinating

Lots of love to you, Mr. Nimoy, as you return to the stars.

 

EDIT: Updated to add this lovely article from Buzzfeed