Canada's 2021 COVID-19 Special Edition Snap Election

It's the big day in Canada this September 20th, 2021, as voters decide who will govern the nation through whatever the next years have in store. Oh yeah, and there's a big pandemic. And literally everyone is going crazy. There's anger, bitterness, and increasingly unhinged people all over the streets, the internet comment sections, the sidewalks outside of hospitals and the sidewalks outside of restaurants. Trudeau got gravel thrown at him, and a lot of abuse, at several campaign stops. Libraries aren't even safe. People are getting run over on the side of the road, like animals. The stakes have never been higher, and yet nobody knows what the hell, and even the smart money's confused.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for an election mere weeks (was it weeks? really?) ago there was a collective late-summer sigh in the air, as Canadians of all political stripes wondered why the hell he couldn't wait until after the global pandemic had subsided a bit more. The last election was only two years ago, in October 2019, which feels like a million years ago, so there's strategies at play here that most won't be able to grasp until the dust settles. The reason Trudeau called the election? To cement a legacy that his backers hope will keep Canada on the path forward... to the future! For everyone! (We have our doubts, too.)

The Overdue Watch_Dogs 2 Review Nobody Asked For

Capturing the zeitgeist of the mid 2010s is a tough prospect. The indy music revolution was dying, dubstep was a joke, EDM had finished merging with top 40 pop, the problems of the 2000s were almost far enough the past that you couldn't reasonably get angry about them anymore, and data was the biggest business there was. 

Computers were interwoven into everything so that everyone was finally using them, generating reams of data that could either save us from ourselves or sell us deeper into consumerist bondage, and moreover, the biggest developing narrative was how computer companies were controlling and selling user data.

That ongoing story, by now, sometimes seems so old as to be quaint. Occasionally the embers of resentment are fanned back into flame by documentaries or particular revelations, but the terms of service are often a trifling speedbump in using anything digital. The majority of us have welcomed the digital world with a weird blend of weary mistrust and gee-whiz enthusiasm.

We pay our personal data sacrifice so we can access the bonanza of the digital frontier, and mountains of e-waste are the new burgeoning concern. Each electric car that's saving the world's atmosphere has other steep environmental and social costs which it's profitable to downplay... and all those chips put into disposable products end up in landfills.

2016 was a busy year, with many alarming events, during which I still posted on this blog (but with a decreasing semi-regularity), but it also brought the world the underappreciated open world hacking game Watch_Dogs 2, which was almost immediately (and if you consider No Man's Sky, unfairly) overshadowed by pretty much every other title from 2016.

It was the sequel to a much-maligned game I never played. In 2020, I got a free copy from the Epic Games Store, which wouldn't install through that launcher, so I had to delete the package from my pitifully overcrowded SSD, then install it through Ubisoft Connect. I wasn't off to a good start, but I was in the mood for some open-world hacking excitement. 

Watch_Dogs 2 mostly delivered on the excitement and the hacking, with some interesting and welcome surprises, and some expected shortcomings. Want to read a big ass review that nobody asked for about one of the least-talked-about games of 2016? Then you've come to the right blog!