Gimme Shelter - The Lagrange Point Vol. I, Iss. 19

Welcome to issue #19 of The Lagrange Point! Big welcome to the latest subscribers. If you need a primer on what this e-newsletter is, check it out here.

Thank you for signing on, and please, continue to spread the word to others!

I know I had promised a direct follow-up on my post about Trump's election win, but it's been diverted as I deal with some issues around my living situation. More on that topic below.

LET'S DO THIS.

In This Issue

Distant Early Warnings

• Check out Quebec's first Indigenous-centered and created video game!

Crafter's Corner

• Warhammer: the Old World - Halfling State Troops

Rantables

• Gimme Shelter — A Resident of the Permanent Renter Class

Guys, did you know Canada makes pretty cool geek things? And in particular, did you know Indigenous creators are making GREAT geek things? Read on...

Kicking things off with some neat Kickstarters, we've got a new release from Raid Press, Blackmouth, a dark fantasy graphic novel by Kyle J. Smith and Katie Sawatsky, a pair of comic creators based in Toronto. This book, subtitled "The Witch's Mark," is the first of planned trilogy that takes place in the titular mining town of Blackmouth, which is haunted by the presence of a nearby malevolent Witch. Sounds like they dug too greedily and too deep. The Kickstarter wraps on Nov. 21.

Meanwhile, over on the west coast, another Kickstarter is in progress for Boundary Studios, a Vancouver-based game studio. They are fundraising for The Erebus Accord, an action-RPG that feels in the vein of SCP. The team at Boundary says the resemblance is accidental, and they were drawing inspiration from Whedon's "The Cabin in the Woods" for their plot, and "Enter the Gungeon" for visuals. It promises a lore-rich, action-filled experience!

Winnipeg-based author Nisha J. Tuli concludes her steamy fantasy-romance series, the Artefacts of Ouranos, with Tale of the Heart Queen on November 26. The final book sees Lor on the run from the Aurora King, with her personal freedom on the line, and perhaps the fate of the entire world of Ouranos. Okay, so I haven't read these and have no idea what any of that means, but I understand that BookTok LOVES these novels, so they'll be all over it. Check it out!

For the first time in Quebec's history, a video game centered with Indigenous perspectives and created with a mainly Indigenous team has been published. Two Falls — Nishu Takuatshina has players explore a 17th century Canadian wilderness with the intertwined adventures of Jeanne, a shipwrecked French woman crossing the Atlantic in hopes of starting anew, and Maïkan, a young Innu hunter who is trying to discover what is disturbing his native forest. The game is now available on Steam and will be coming to PS5 and Xbox X/S.

Embarrassing fact about myself: I have never actually finished a complete Warhammer army.

It's honestly not THAT embarrassing. I think a lot of GW fans encounter this difficulty, especially when they pick one of the "horde" style forces as their army of choice. It's just so many miniatures! It feels daunting.

But I have decided it's high time I finish up at least one. I'm starting with my old Empire army, painted in the colours of the province of Averland. Because Averland is adjacent to the Mootland, home of the halflings, it felt appropriate to include some of my vintage halfling minis as State Troop blocks.

These are painted to what I'm calling my "tabletop standard." Not so perfect as a character model, and certainly not to the detailed standard of some of my inquisitor pieces or others. But en masse, they look decent. And a few actually look quite good individually!

It's also been a little while since I worked in 28mm, and working with these little guys made picking out details even more challenging. You can see a loonie in the second photo there for scale.

One thing I've found helps speed up the process for regimental blocks like this is painting in a single colour across the entire group, then switching to the next colour, and so on. Some hobbyists call it "batch painting." These two groups of State Troops took about ten hours all told. Next week, I'll be painting my two Halfling character minis!

While I was in Morocco a month ago, I received an email from my landlord. I won't go into details, because this has led to an ongoing dispute that is still being worked through right now.

What I will say is that over the course of that month, it's been difficult at best to focus on anything else. I've become a ball of anxiety as I worry over whether I'll be forced out of my home, and into a nightmarish rental market where I'd end up likely paying about $500-700 more per month, or I'd be left with little option but to seek refuge with family or friends.

My situation is hardly unique. Canada has seen increasingly large numbers of people forced into a situation of perpetual home fragility. We are at a record-low level of home ownership, with a stunning 33 percent of households now living as renters. In B.C., we lead the country in renters who are living dangerously close to poverty, with some of the largest rent increases nationwide. Provincewide, 16 percent of us are spending over half of our paycheques on rent.

It's all adding up, along with other warning signs such as the increase in billionaires' wealth, to a fairly obvious disparity between an elite ownership class, mainly represented these days by REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts), and a permanently disenfranchised and rudderless renter class.

See, the thing that I really need to drive home about the past month is the sheer feeling of helplessness. Again, while I can't get into specifics, suffice to say that the matter before me emerged out of what any sane person would otherwise consider a triviality. What my landlord has decided to take issue with is something which I know for a fact no homeowner would ever have to deal with.

And it could, potentially, render me homeless. I am fortunate enough that I have certain contingencies. My family would take me in in the most dire circumstance. I have a modest pension. An RRSP. A TFSA. I have some financial assets to draw from.

But regardless of this privileged safety net, it nonetheless illustrates the fragility and sheer unfairness of the tenent-landlord relationship. I frequently see online complaints about how landlords are not given enough rights. What rights are these, I want to scream. The right to exploitation? The right to derive personal wealth in a manner which, quite frankly, is not actually creating market value or capital, but merely cannibalizing it and repackaging it in a format that does not actual result in a product or service, but instead in a form of legalized serfdom?

You might think these terms are hyperbolic. But consider how utterly in control of your home you are if you actually own it. At worst, you may be trapped in a mortgage, which, in a sense, can feel like you're living in a landlord relationship with a bank. But a bank cannot one day march into your home, deliver a notice that they think you're making too much noise, or that you haven't cleaned enough, or that they want to use your home for their twice-removed great-aunt, or any number of other situations.

A landlord can do all of that, and worse.

So far, our governments have been completely cowed to tackling this problem at its root cause, content instead to blame it on immigrants or a lack of housing supply. Factually, we have quite a bit of housing, but so much of it is tied up in webs of REITs and corporate interests that it sits unused and unoccupied, sometimes for months, as they write it off as a personal income loss, thereby saving a mint on taxes.

The real solution, and one which to date I have only seen addressed by the Green Party of Ontario, is to address the other end of the spectrum from supply: access. To tackle this, governments would need to admit that there should be reasonable limitations placed on how many homes any individual or corporation can own.

At minimum, there should be punitive and scaling taxes to dissuade this kind of exploitative behaviour, where a basic human need becomes a commodity to be hoarded and plundered. Taxation of empty homes, multiple home ownership and foreign ownership is one way to start.

I am doubtful we'll see this kind of action, because far too many of our politicians, across the spectrum, are themselves multi-home owners, and of those too many are themselves landlords, and therefore inclined to protect their own self-interests.

Nevertheless, it must, inevitably, come to pass, or else we can continue to expect rising interest rates, unattainable home ownership, and eventually, a collapsed economy, as lower classes ultimately are unable to afford to purchase most consumer goods, and in time, there is nobody to sell anything to.

For my part, this has been one of the most challenging and awful months of my life. And I have no idea if, to borrow a Simpson's meme, this is simply the most challenging and awful months of my life...so far.

As with my housing situation, I can only exert so much control. The rest, I suppose, is in the hands of wealthier individuals. And so, perhaps, is my fate.

That wraps up issue #19 of The Lagrange Point! If you enjoyed this little e-newsletter, please consider subscribing, or, if you're already subscribed, sharing it with a friend or family member!

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Until next Monday, thank you for reading!

-Tim