[PHOTO] Aura, looking up, March 2014

I’ve taken several pictures of the Aura mixed-used skyscraper on the northwestern corner of Yonge and Gerrard. (See these photo posts from February 2012, April 2012, August 2012, September 2012, and March 2013.)

It is so beautifully high.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily notes the growing Saudi-Pakistan alliance, something increasingly aimed against Syria (Pakistan is training an armed force funded by Saudi Arabia).


• The Big Picture shares 17 pictures from Ukraine.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster suggests that we now have the beginnings of a model for the formation of planets around pulsars, with debris from the supernova explosion spinning towards the pulsar and condensing into planets.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a study suggesting that photosynthesis is possible on worlds locked into 3:2 resonances about their local sun, i.e. rotating three times on its axis for every two orbits around the sun.


• The Financial Times' World blog wonders if Venezuela might follow Ukraine.


• A Fistful of Euros' Doug Merrill notes that Ukrainian revolutionaries are just beginning the real work.


• Marginal Revolution notes the writings of an economist employed by Facebook. What does he do?


• John Moyer, still in Iceland, meditates on solitude.


• Naked Anthropologist's Laura Agustín takes issue with the term "loverboys" used to describe studies of transnational prostitution.


• The New APPS Blog considers what it means if animals feel love.


• Justin Petrone, writing about the noise surrounding the Ukrainian revolution, argues in favour of radical skepticism of both sides as likely to lead to the truth.


• Strange Maps considers the various plans for partitioning California into smaller units, including the most recent one.

[NEWS] Some Tuesday links

• The Globe and Mail notes that the Ukrainian revolution isn't so popular in Ukraine's second city of Kharkiv, largely Russophone and Rusasophile.


• Al Jazeera profiles the first generation of children born into the large ex-Yugoslav community in the American city of St. Louis and examines the ongoing persecution of Sikhs in Afghanistan.


• CBC observes uproar on Prince Edward Island about changes in employment insurance requiring people in the more prosperous area of Charlottetown to work more to qualify, and reports on a worrying polls suggesting half of Québec's non-Francophones are considering leaving the province.


• National Geographic chronicles the stress on water reserves in Jordan placed by the huge influx of Syrian refugees.


• The New York Times features an op-ed suggesting that the European Union should signal to Ukraine that membership is possible.


• Open Democracy notes worries in Tajikistan that the withdrawal of foreign troops in Afghanistan will leave it exposed to instability there.


• New Europe observes that, in fact, hordes of Romanians and Bulgarians haven't overwhelmed the United Kingdom.

[URBAN NOTE] "Freedom to Read and Reconsider at the Toronto Public Library"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn explains how the Toronto Public Library responds to requests that particular books be withdrawn from circulations. (Apparently Canada's better than the United States, owing to the protection given library collections by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the strong opposition of professional library associations to censorship.)

Since 2000, around 100 requests for reconsideration have been filed—and only nine items have been removed. The most recent title to be pulled, Date Rape: A Violation of Trust, was withdrawn from the video collection in 2012 because it, “while well-intentioned, reinforces stereotypes and lacks diversity and is, therefore, not appropriate as an educational tool in Toronto’s multiracial and multicultural environment.” Other titles have vanished for reasons including libel threats, unreliable accounts of Romanian history, bad advice on passing business accreditation exams, outdated information on dairy farming—and being poorly produced knockoffs of Pixar films made by the highly esteemed Video Brinquedo studio (What’s Up: Balloon to the Rescue).

Other reconsidered titles find new homes within the library system. Tintin in the Congo, for example, which features controversial depictions of Africans, was moved from the children’s collection to the adult graphic novel section in 2010. Not all suggestions from complainants can be acted upon: one 2003 complaint about eye weekly urged the library to provide copies sans escort ads. And in 2006, a patron requested that a rabbi review the content of Sarah Silverman’s film Jesus is Magic.

The most popular requests for consideration between 2000 and 2013? It’s a tie between Maxim magazine (2005 and 2006; one request suggested users be IDed lest it fall into the hands of innocent youth) and Robert Kaplow’s The Cat Who Killed Lilian Jackson Braun, a raunchy parody of The Cat Who… mystery series (2005 and 2007).

Library staff have not noticed trends in the complaints, and are proud of how few requests for reconsideration come in. Vickery Bowles, director of Collections Management and City-Wide Services, feels this reflects Torontonians’ “appreciation for the breadth and depth of our collections and the fact we are living in a large urban setting.” She believes that the public senses that “intellectual freedom in the public library setting is very important” and that the widest variety of available materials should be offered.

[LINK] "Rise of the Gaymers"

Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Kurt Soller has a nice article talking about LGBT (well, mainly male gay) computer gamers and their increased visibility.

(As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that Soller didn't mention the playable same-sex romance in Mass Effect 3. That got a lot of, well, play.)

In Looking, a new HBO comedy about gay men in San Francisco, a handsome, single nerd named Patrick goes on dates with a series of thirtysomething professionals. During one particularly awkward dinner with a doctor, Patrick explains what he does for a living and is met with a sneer. “Isn’t that just a bunch of kids playing air hockey and going down slides?” the doctor asks. “How old are you?”

Patrick is a video game designer for a fictional tech company. He spends long hours creating products like Naval Destroyer (which he refers to jokingly as Anal Destroyer when his mostly straight co-workers aren’t around). He’s part of what, in the real world, is an often-mocked, but hugely profitable $5 billion industry in the U.S., at least when Economists Inc. last measured it in 2009. The field employs 32,000 people, according to the Entertainment Software Association, and midlevel workers such as Patrick can make a decent living of more than $100,000 a year, plus bonuses when their projects ship.

The bulk of this work occurs in the Bay Area, one of the gayest places in America, and there’s no shortage of LGBTers working in technology. Yet Looking, which premièred on Jan. 19 and has averaged about 400,000 viewers weekly, according to Nielsen (NLSN), marks the first time guys such as Patrick have been portrayed in a TV series. “In our culture, oftentimes we view being gay as one very specific thing,” Jonathan Groff, the gay actor who plays Patrick, says of Hollywood’s tendency to stereotype guys as fashion mavens or one-liner-spouting sidekicks. Groff did the appropriate Silicon Valley research to get into character: “There’s a real community of gay gamers that connect and have parties and hang out with each other.”

It’s fitting that this group of gay gamers—or gaymers, as some call themselves—first coalesced behind the comforting remove of a computer screen. The website gaygamer.net was marginally popular when it launched in 2006; many of its ardent fans have since migrated to forums on reddit.com, where obsessives of all stripes can form subreddits, or digital communities, around virtually anything. On one called r/gaymers, about 32,000 subscribers offer device recommendations, share baked-in codes that make attractive characters go shirtless, and recruit teammates to play new MMORPGs—massively multiplayer online role-playing games—such as World of Warcraft or the Final Fantasy series.

“Gay geeks have been fighting for their own space,” says Matt Conn, 26, an independent game publisher, who points out that game plotlines are overwhelmingly heterosexual, and players online have a locker room habit of ribbing each other with homophobic epithets. “They want to express their fandom and their geekdom and say this character is hot without a bunch of people calling them f—– or making them feel like crap.” When the website Gamers Against Bigotry was founded in 2012, it was quickly hacked and defaced with similar insults. In 2006 a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study of 10,000 gamers concluded that “mainstream gay culture and media is not supportive of video games. Then you have the video game culture that is not supportive of gay culture. So you have these people stuck in the middle who have this double-edged prejudice.”

Conn joined Reddit in 2011 and realized there were “tens of thousands of people” like him who “shouldn’t feel like they’re alone.” He formed a Facebook (FB) group called SF Gaymers, through which he planned public meetups in San Francisco’s Dolores Park, where a few hundred acquaintances would get together and discuss their preferred video games while playing analog board games. Soon he realized that, like Comic Con or South by Southwest, what the gaymers were looking for was their own gathering.