I had been mentally planning this angry rant about forced sharing on posts from Facebook. How Facebook seemed to be full of bullies. “If you don’t share this you are heartless” or “Repost or you will be poor your whole life.” or even “Share or Repost and Baby Jesus will bless you.” ~type things really bothered me this morning. All the way to the bus stop I was internally fuming about these posts. I have taken to unfollowing people that posts these.

Unfollow? What’s that? That’s where I keep you as a friend on Facebook, because I want you to get my messages that are for “Friends & Family” but I don’t read your posts, because they tend to annoy me. I had noticed that I never had this problem on Google+. Never had to unfollow or unfriend anyone on there, but I don’t follow many people there. But generally it is a much more positive experience there for me.

At this point I started to think back when FB started, how it was so novel that they took the functionality of “Yahoo-photos” and joined it with “LiveJournal”. There were no games, no memes, people didn’t take selfies every 10 seconds of their life. Life was pleasant. No, it was better than pleasant, it was good.

Some of you might not remember the websites I mentioned, so I’ll elaborate. Yahoo Photos was one of a few places you could upload pictures to the internet for other people to view. You had a limit of 1GB I believe, which was more than ANYONE needed. And you’d just send people the link to the album. This was the future or photo-sharing it was awesome. Yahoo no longer has a photo-sharing that I am aware of.

LiveJournal was and still is a place you can micro-blog (or write a journal) whenever you like and friends could read the posts. For a long time they did not have file storage for pictures, I believe that is no longer the case.

Anyways after this point of thinking about LiveJournal, I re-located my old LiveJournal (http://aetolus.livejournal.com) and read a few posts. This made me calm down, and remember some happier moments. I am reminded that I like to use my social media more to post things about my life, not to push an agenda, or to force people into feeling one way or another about topics. So I ask a favour of you all. Go to your own social media website, and review what YOU have posted in the last 6 months, or year. What does that tell people about you?

You can use Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal whatever, but look over your old posts from this year and ask yourself, is this what I want the world to remember me by? Is this really me? If you can’t say yes, then maybe you should change your posting habits, and if you are 100% happy with what you post, then I happy for you. I will still unfollow you if you try to push an agenda on me through the social media of choice.

The quote above, I have heard several times since moving back to Canada, 3 times in the last week alone. I sit and wonder, is there something in the water? Now don’t get me wrong, it is a nice city. My problem stems from the idea that a lot of these people can’t wrap their head around the idea that the world is so much bigger than Canada. So even if you feel that this is the best city in the country, you have no basis for it being the best city in the world. (I do not agree that Vancouver is the best city in Canada.)

The problem I see here, is the same problem I see when I travel almost anywhere. “My Country/ City /Province is so much better than the place I am now.” The problem with these people is that they have judged a place before they see it. And they can’t/won’t change their preconceived notions. And sometimes they are hard to change. I know that for me, before 2003, My idea of Los Angeles was the opening scene from Predator 2. Gang warfare on every street corner, the police fighting against the gangs, the citizens caught in the crossfire. What changed? I WENT to Los Angeles, and had a good friend show me around. It’s a pretty nice city. (I like it better than I do Vancouver…)

Another problem I see is lack of knowledge. The people I have talked to have all called the rest of Canada “Boring” with nothing to do. Funny That’s how I feel in Vancouver most days. Do some research, whatever you find “Fun” will be the same in every city across Canada, except maybe swimming in the ocean, which you can find on the Atlantic Coast just as easily as the Pacific coast. If you go to Montreal and want to go clubbing, find out about the club scene before you go.

And the last complaint I have no solution for. Vancouverites can’t stand the cold, and the rest of Canada is too darn cold. I actually love snow, and cold weather and was very disappointed to find both lacking here. I wanted to make snowmen with the kids, and take them tobogganing and have snowball fights. The simple joys of life for a typical

On the other hand I have seen a lot more negativity in Vancouver than I remember being in Canada since I returned, More people who are Health-paranoid, and yet Uber-caffeinated. I have seen more racism and sexism than I am comfortable with. The Racism is very sly and subtle but it oozes across Vancouver, the sexism is not so subtle. I have met a ton of pierced & tattooed people who swear their kids are not allowed to do either.

I sit and wonder, why this city is so different from the rest of Canada. I have always been proud of our Cold Winters, our multi-lingual & multi-cultural Heritage, our ability to welcome people from the world with open arms, and our ability to help each other when in need. Very little of each of these have I seen since moving to the Vancouver area. I wonder if when we return to Canada if this is the place we will settle, I hope we settle in a place a bit more Canadian, eh?

There has been a trend lately in North America to have our Superheroes kill. I find it sad, and feel that we have lost contact with what superheroes are, and why we have them. Superheroes from around the world have not changed their attitudes nearly so drastically as North American ones have. Some countries superheroes are very much based upon North American “Classic” ideology, and some have their own ideologies.

Recent “Heroes” that have immerged have been a lot more violent than I am comfortable with, and I think the one that disturbed me the most was a recent “Trans-media” series about Canadian heroes. The “Heroes of the North” is a video & comic series available online about Canadian super-soldiers. They state right in the first episodes that is what they are. They begin with origins, & have each character’s origin ending with them killing someone, sometimes a rival soldier (Non-super). But they define what I call super soldiers. They are not crime fighters, they are not there to help the population. They are created to defend the country from terrorists. That is a super-soldier. I may not like super-soldiers killing, but they do it for the defence of the country, and I don’t have to collect those comics or videos.

It really bothers me when superheroes start killing, though. Classic heroes like Batman or Superman, who both in their last reboots (Christian Bale Batman, & Man of Steel) killed. I don’t believe that any of the villains survived Batman’s wrath in those movies, and Superman would have found another way of dealing with Zod in the Man of Steel. Superheroes came out of depressions where the continent had so much crime that the regular people felt they had no hope, and were commonly committing suicide. Superheroes were people who had superpowers, sometimes that power was just caring, or money like “The Green Hornet” or “The Batman,” sometimes that actually had powers like “The Shadow” or “Superman” did. And yes, in the really old comics and radio dramas the bad guys died, but (from my research, if you see otherwise send me the cbr file) the Superhero did not kill them, they died trapped in their own evil plans. “Superheroes” are civilian, they help people. They stop criminals from hurting people, they let the justice system deal with criminals that have been stopped. They know that the moment they cross the line of killing that they are no better than the people they are trying to thwart. Superheroes don’t involve themselves in wars. The moment Superheroes act in war, they are super soldiers. And this doesn’t end well for us normals. For evidence of this take a look at Alan Moore’s “The Watchmen” or check out the movie by the same name, in which the Supers of America won the Vietnam War for the USA.

North American Super-heroes usually deal with internal problems. The Evil is human, and in modern times the evil is always major. Super heroes don’t stop crime anymore they stop super-crime. Police could stop a bank robber, Superman stops would-be-world-dominators. Where as in East Asia, the Evil is usually external, aliens, demons or monsters, almost never human. In Southeast Asia the superheroes defend the population from Supernatural evil: witches, werewolves, vampires and their like. Both East Asian and South East Asian heroes kill monsters and non-human threats to the world. They usually try not to, but to the populations of those areas, monsters need to be destroyed.

Now my experience with authentic superheroes from other countries is limited to a few sources. Cyber-6, and Captain Africa for example cover the European and African continents, but 1 hero does not a genre make. (Yes I know Cyber-6 takes place in Argentina, but it is written originally for an Italian audience). So it is hard for me to gather what the attitudes of the rest of the planet are towards Superheroes vs Super-Soldiers. I am open to learning however, if anyone wants to introduce me to a free comic (or one I can find for cheap) from the rest of the world. (And Captain Britain doesn’t count as a European Comic in my mind, as it is published by Americans for Americans).