Last week, a friend of mine, who was not much older than I passed away in his sleep from a heart attack. I had been friends with him since I was a teenager so the sudden passing of him came as a complete shock to me.

I have been wanting to write things about him on here, but I cannot bring myself to do so and I think it’s because there’s something looming over me. I feel awful about making this open because I do not want his death to be about me. But maybe I should say what is on my mind? The timing feels bad, but I also feel the need to let this come out.

For almost two years, I have resided in my apartment alone with my cat. I love my cat, but she is a terrible conversationalist and my extroverted self really thrives on having other human beings around. I don’t lament the reasons for how I ended up living alone, but I think the pandemic and the consequences it has had on my socialisation have manifested in my inability to meet people who could be a potential “nesting partner” so to speak.

I’ve never really lived alone for extended periods of time and when I last did live alone, I at least was able to have friends over or I was not home enough to worry about the lack of another body sharing that space with me. What is different now is that I don’t go into my office that often (twice a week really) and there are days where the lone human interaction I get other than from the rectangles that I stare at all the time are just the nameless people I share my apartment building with.

In my life of not sharing a home with my family, I have spent seven of twelve years with someone else. Three of the five where I haven’t, I always had friends or family coming over, partners who’d spend time at my home or at theirs, or I’d be in the office every day and there would be ample opportunity to see folks after work. The pandemic really put a kink into these options and it has been incredibly painful for me to deal with.

I’m not single. I am dating a wonderful girlfriend locally and have a not-so-serious relationship afar, but none of them are potential nesting partners. The death of Twitter, the shift from my being “very online” to basically not, and lack of travel aren’t really the sources of my problems, but it’s the lack of meeting new folks and being able to socialise without the anxiety of finding myself as ill has taken away my ability to meet new people.

My most serious relationships came from socialising locally and while that is of course not a requirement for me to end up dating towards that partner desire, I cannot argue with its purported success rate–even after splitting, I am still good with two of the past three nesting partners I have had.

Why I am so fixated on the lack of said partner comes back to my friend’s death. What if I were the one to have had that heart attack? Nobody would know for days.

Dying alone scares the hell out of me. It is not something I make that open, but if anyone ever asks me for my number one fear, it’s literally that.

I feel devastated for his wife I should add. This was far too early and they had only been married for just under seven years. He meant so much to her and to have him just die at middle-age without any real warning is something I cannot comprehend. They should have been able to go into retirement together.

I’m seriously going to miss this friend of mine. He had been around for a lot of things in my life and the same for his. And now, I am saying goodbye to him. So many people left messages on his Facebook wall and so much support has been given to his widow. He had people who cared about him deeply.

So while I feel selfish for posting about this on the eve of my friend’s funeral, I just cannot shake these feelings off and just want to vent this out to the world. It isn’t a pity plea or anything, but I sometimes feel that I should make others aware that the cool stuff I share on cohost is often missing the realities of my personal life.

I also know many, many people care about me and many of you are probably reading this.

One of the things I decided last year was to give more to myself rather than to others. I realised this hard during an event last summer that I really don’t do nice things for me. It’s hard because I want everyone around me to be happy, but I think it has come at the consequence of my happiness being pushed aside.

So I quit being a lead and started to socialise a lot more. However, unlike four years ago, the world has an invisible threat that prevents me from being as “care-free” so to speak in terms of seeing everyone I know and love. I know that with time I’ll met this special person, but it’s not going to be as easy as I would prefer.

Not everyone new I meet is going to be intended to be that sort of relationship either I must add. I am also demisexual and demiromantic so it’s a quagmire for me to grasp what I am feeling when it comes to other people. It’s all shades of grey when it comes to romantic feelings and it often sucks.

Anyway, sorry for the real talk and I hope nobody thinks less of me for venting this out into the open. I guess I just want people to know a side of me that I keep under wraps.

Aside from his cryptic racism towards the Japanese, one of the things that stood out in Great Ace Attorney’s prosecutor, Barok van Zieks was his consumption of an alcoholic beverage in the courtroom. This is a departure from the norm in Ace Attorney games as the joke in Japanifornia is that everyone consumes grape or tomato juice, but since we’re in Victorian England, temperance was forgotten and we got this world instead.

So was the beverage he consumed? Let’s check the the Ace Attorney fandom wiki for an answer:

Prominent among his bizarre bench behavior was his habit of bringing wine, though he only rarely actually drank from the chalices that he poured into. Instead, he smashed them wantonly to intimidate the defense and emphasize his points. When the court proceedings required van Zieks to change tacks, he would fling his bottle into the gallery behind him with little regard to whom it might hit. Over three cases that he prosecuted against Naruhodo, at least three bottles and nineteen glasses were broken. Despite all this, the prosecution’s bench and van Zieks’s clothes would remain immaculate.

The thing is: based on how the bottles would break upon hitting the oil lanterns, it would be impossible for it to be wine as the flames emitted indicated that it was something with a higher alcohol content. Simply put: wine cannot be set ablaze.

Throughout Adventures and its sequel, Resolve, I annoyingly kept watching him toss a bottle of his “precious vintages” behind him towards a lit flame and upon collision seeing it catch fire. Red wine would match the colour of the contents of his “hallowed chalice” which would put it as low as 12.5% ABV (alcohol by volume) to as high as 14.5%, although it is said it could peak at 20%. Even in Victorian England, this would not be much different.

For an alcoholic beverage to catch fire, it needs to be at least 40% ABV, but in personal experience, it should be around 60% for it to do anything substantiative. As this article puts it:

Don’t bother trying to light a floater of any alcohol under 40 percent alcohol by volume. You can get a little action in the 30-percent range, but it’s not worth the trouble.

One little tangent here: an aluminum can with a volume of 355 mL filled to the top with 5% ABV beer would contain 18 mL of alcohol. What makes this cool is that a typical can weighs about 14g, so if you take that 18 mL and convert it to grams, it comes out to 14g as well.

Anyway, since wine cannot be set ablaze, what could it be? Could we just increase the alcohol content of wine to something like 40%? Well, yes, we can. Let’s talk about brandy.

Brandy is distilled wine, but unlike its origins, it contains anywhere between 35 and 60% ABV. It was popular in Victorian England and like wine, was stored in casks, which van Zieks had plenty of. Being that it was 40% it could catch on fire.

However, what makes this disturbing is how he consumed it. It is hard to discern, but his goblet probably held about 125 mL if we just opt to use this as a reference. At 125 mL, that would be about 3-4 shots of brandy, which is quite a bit. Controversy about this measurement aside, but being that the CDC states 1-2 drinks per day is safe, he is exceeding what is recommended as a single shot is that one drink.

Basically, this implies that van Zieks is super unhealthy and is probably a functional alcoholic. Considering his backstory and the era it takes place in, it sort of tracks. Great Ace Attorney does take place a century after the gin craze, a time period where the consumption of gin by the pint was not unheard of, so maybe it would also track that this man would consume his brandy in such a manner.

In any event, last night, I tried congac for the first time and I can safely say that I don’t think I could consume it the way he does even if I really wanted to.

---

Commercial Drive and Broadway circa 1940s with a street car 5 going downtown and an interurban going to New Westminster (City of Vancouver Archives)

The intersection of Commercial Drive and Broadway is today a major interchange station between SkyTrain’s Millennium and Expo lines, and the rapid bus 99 B-Line. Historically, this area has been of major importance the two BC Electric Railway’s interurban lines which served east Vancouver (the Central Park and Burnaby Lake lines) merged with the street car serving Commercial Drive to then feed into downtown.

However, this produced a major choke point as having three different rail services interlining on a single street created serious congestion challenges for the BCER. A solution proposed in the 1920s was a proposal to extend the Central Park line from Victoria and Hull all the way to Main Street.

Map showing railways around East Vancouver (City of Vancouver Archives)

Walking along Commercial as it bends to become Victoria

This would have extended the line northwest along the curve where Victoria turns into Commercial, then crossing Clark and Broadway, with a tunnel under St. Catherine’s Street, then following along E. 2nd Avenue until finally turning to cross False Creek, then finally terminating at the Great Northern Station located at Carrall and Keefer.

A very failed attempt at overlaying the old map and the current state, looking at Commercial and Broadway

Same process but looking at the rail yards in and around Pacific Central and Terminal Ave

Overlaying the map from the 1930s on something modern takes a lot of guesswork as you can tell, but this gives you a pretty good idea of what the Expo Line could have been.

Lakeview station which was then a community garden but has since become housing

With the onset of the Second World War and decade-later closure of the Central Park line, these plans were never meant to be. The modern Expo Line now turns away from what was then Cedar Cottage (now a community garden) and crosses over Broadway and Commercial to follow the Grandview cut towards downtown.

That said, with the extension of the Millennium Line to Arbutus, a tunnel is now going to grace the neighbourhood of Mount Pleasant after all.

This was an article originally posted to cohost.org/VancouverTransit but moved here due to the site’s shutdown.

I haven’t written a retrospective on a departing year in quite some time so since I haven’t done one on cohost, I figure this is a good place to do so! I’ve broken this down into individual sections.

I’m going to miss stuff but whatever. I put the fun stuff at the top and not so fun stuff at the bottom.

Travel

After basically not leaving the country or province in 2020 or 2021, I visited places this year!

Two trips to the Washington DC and Northern Virginia area and then a trip up to Boston. One thing I did that knocked off something on my bucket list was taking an Acela train from DC to Boston–this took about 7 hours.

COVID is still top of mind and I look forward to when I can ease up on some behaviours when being away from home, but I am not going to make any predictions for when this might happen.

Stuff I watched

I watched BBC’s Sherlock (I know it’s over a decade old now), Saki (an anime about mahjong), Akagi (another anime about mahjong), the Evangelion rebuild movies, the Ace Attorney anime series, and Danger 5.

My favourite movie this year was Everything Everywhere All At Once. It’s probably the funniest and heart-warming movie I have seen in years. If you haven’t watched this movie yet, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Twitch

I stream on Twitch and made a goal for myself: get 1,000 followers.

As of my writing, I am around 935, but I am up from 650. It isn’t 1,000 as I hoped, but honestly I am glad to have seen my followers go up that high! I just like having people watch me and it means a lot to have new people come on over. It is not an income source for me and never will be, but it’s just nice to put on a show and play games or write code.

When I get to 1,000, I promise I will play the Harvey Birdman Wii game. I have the disc ready to play whenever it happens.

With the tech side of things, my streaming set up was also greatly improved. I got a new microphone and audio input set up so now my mixing is pretty good (thanks to @wuest for harassing me to finally do this), fixed my lighting so my green screen works better, and I finished the year by getting a Stream Deck which makes doing stuff so much easier.

Some games I felt like were a lot of fun to stream this past year:

• Final Fantasy VII Remake
• Dark Souls III (paused for now but will come back to it)
• The Great Ace Attorney
• Sealed Bite (which I did as a speedrun for Flame Fatales!)
• NieR: Automata (still need to finish)
• It’s A Me! (@Hempuli, this game was fucked up okay?)
• This coming April, I am doing every stream as anime themed–I am calling this “Anime April”. I am slowly compiling a list of games using an anime licence so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Games I played

I am ignoring Ace Attorney as I have given the game its own section.

Final Fantasy VII Remake was an absolute joy to play. I bought it for PC and played through it over the course of two weeks. One thing that stood out: I couldn’t tell what was a cut scene and what was actual gameplay. The engine is that good. I am super curious to where the story goes because it has definitely deviated from the original source material.

I cannot wait for the full release of Sealed Bite. It has been delayed a few times, but it has been a blast to learn how to speedrun. You can tell that this game was inspired by Celeste and has borrowed some mechanics from it.

The verdict is still out on my playing of Disco Elysium. I like it so far, but it’s not pulling me in as well as I hoped. I plan to continue my streaming of it in the new year.

I started to play Dark Souls III after hating DS1 a lot and being told to skip DS2 to play this game instead. My responses so far have been to laugh off my deaths so either the game is more entertaining for me or I have changed as a person and I am okay with not doing well.

Ace Attorney

My friends have had to endure a year of me talking about Ace Attorney. I have gotten a tattoo because of Ace Attorney–the yatagarasu symbol which is located on my hip. I have logged around two whole weeks of playtime in Ace Attorney games. I am almost done playing all of the Ace Attorney games.

Have I mentioned I have become an Ace Attorney fan girl?

I’ll be writing about this sometime later when I finish the Great Ace Attorney: Resolve. For now, all I can and will say is that I love this series despite some of the problems games outside of the original trilogy have.

I have plans or a retrospective on these games sometime in January or February.

Frame Fatales

I did two in-person Frame Fatales events this year as a lead and I have no regrets. However, I decided it wasn’t for me as it was a lot of work and was exposing some flaws in me that I felt needing addressing–this is covered in the next section. I’m still on to help out for future events, but there are more ready people to take on roles.

All said, in the past three events I have had a significant hand in, we raised nearly a half million dollars (US) and I am not going to ignore that.

Mental health and relationships

One of the things I decided to do after I ended a relationship late last year was to just not date. It wasn’t as if I had no interests in anyone or lacked opportunities, but I was so unsure to what I wanted and who I wanted to be in any sort of romance I engage in. I am demiromantic so my ability to fall in love is complicated and fraught with internal and external struggle–then add polyamory to the mix to make things harder.

I realised during this time that often I am not nice to myself. There have been times where I have failed to advocate for the things I want and need and that led to some serious shortcomings in past relationships, leading to heartache and problems.

This boiled over during the summer when in succession I had a friend pass away from a brain tumour, another relative pass away two months after one died as well, an encounter with someone I hadn’t planned for but knew was coming, and two weeks of travel for Flame Fatales 2022 and vacation with no ability to decompress from everything beforehand. All of this in a six week period turned me into a real mess.

During a ride I took from Washington DC to Boston via Amtrak’s Acela service after Flame was over, I decided to do things for myself. I wrote a portion of a visual novel story (I am still at this) and watched as the American east coast go right by. It was a rail trip I had on my list of things to do for a very, very long time and I feel like it was a turning point for me: it was time for me to do things for me and to let people into my life again.

A few weeks later, I had a minor operation and went off of my ADHD medication as I figured it would interfere with anaesthesia. Something that had been on my mind prior was how I’d cope without it during that time and instead of discovering how dysfunctional I was without it, I came to realise that I had become a shut-in. I wanted to see people and I wanted to socialise whereas before there was an aspect of me that was shuttered.

I’ve since changed my ADHD medication and I feel better with respect to my attention span and to how I interact with people. Is it the right medication long-term? Time will tell, but I think my previous medication had caused me to create problems for myself and others.

I’m dating again and I am not rushing into anything, but I do hope that 2023 means I will find that partner I can see myself living with. Christmas this year was spent with the family for the first time since 2016 and I think it was the best one I have had since I was a kid. I feel like my mental health and my relationships will be healthier in the new year.

Next year

And on that note, 2023 is going to be a good year for me. There are factors not in my control which mean that it won’t be a great year overall as I cannot anticipate what the world will be like this time next, but I think that what I am doing for myself will be good and that is the important thing.

I want to share what good I do for me with others as well. I hope that I can build on that mindset and that everyone can benefit as much as possible.

---

Gilmore at platform-level

If you were to pull up information about the Millennium Line, you’d soon come across its opening date of January 7th, 2002. With that known, you’d then say that every station opened then as being the oldest.

This assumption is fairly safe as the line itself is a relatively new railway. Unlike the Expo Line, much of the initial alignment did not make use of a another railway’s existing or former right of way. This means that stations such as Sperling-Burnaby Lake or Lougheed Town Centre have no real historical reference.

However, this is not entirely true for all of the stations which opened in 2002.

A view towards a right of way crossing at Gilmore and Henning

The BC Electric Railway used to run a similar line to compliment the Central Park line named the Burnaby Lake line. It ran from New Westminster at the same spot the Central Park line did and merged with the street car line on Commercial Drive just its sibling.

At some point, I should write about the Burnaby Lake line, but the point here is that the Millennium Line does intersect with the remnants of this line.

Gilmore station as viewed from the same spot

Today’s Gilmore Station is located at the intersection of the street bearing its name and Dawson. It’s probably one of the weirder stations in my opinion not because of anything other than its ceilings resembling curved plywood. I guess one can just go across the street to the Home Depot to pick up replacement panels should any of them fail.

However, the station’s previous incarnation was fairly unassuming and significantly more rural.

Map showing GIlmore on the Burnaby Lake line (City of Vancouver Archives)

The original Gilmore Station from the Burnaby Lake line days was too at Gilmore and Dawson. It was to serve the swampy, agricultural area known as Still Creek. I could write extensively about the history of Still Creek, but really that was just it.

As part of the shutdown of the BCER in favour of trolley and diesel buses, it closed in 1956.

Interurban travelling along the Burnaby Lake line (City of Burnaby Archives)

The main difference between the BCER station and the one we have today is where the current station stands. However, the original station site does continue serving a public good.

View of the Gilmore Pump Station approximately where the original Gilmore station stood

On the site of the original BCER station is Gilmore Pump Station, which while does not serve rail traffic anymore, it does serve a function to make sure that if you were to come downstairs from the Millennium Line, you don’t encounter a giant puddle.

This originally appeared on cohost.org/VancouverTransit but has been moved here due to the site’s shutdown.