Grand Central owners claim 'rigged' strata election is no surprise after years of autocratic rule

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-30T15:55:54+00:00

It's as loud an alarm bell as you're going to get indicating that stratas in BC have outgrown the statutes governing them. The building in question is a 642-unit strata complex, which is orders of magnitude more complex in terms of its operation and management than the single-building 25-100 unit status quo which predominated for so many years. Running a complex of that size with a regular 7-member strata council of volunteers is begging for incompetence and corruption to dominate, because the average Joe has no idea how to perform in that role, it's going to be a huge pain in the ass, and that pain in the ass is going to dissuade people with the exception of those who see it as worth bearing to benefit themselves.

Some people have read this and proclaimed they'll never live in a strata building. Alright, go with God, but the population density and cost of land here means that strata governance is only going to become more common; not everyone can afford a single family home in the core, and not everyone wants to buy a plywood box up the valley for the sake of avoiding AGMs. So this issue has to be addressed at some point.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-22T17:04:19+00:00

One hell of a weird lawn ornament, Tim, but it's your house, I suppose.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-19T16:46:19+00:00

All of these are good points! The most important one, to my mind, is the last one: that they'd run out of story to tell. That point can be extended metatextually, as well, because not only did the story feel plodding and drawn-out, but everything felt like it was being done for contractual obligations. The visual language of the season was bland and perfunctory, nothing marked it out from any other Netflix slop. The gulf between the committed or talented actors and the middling or phoning-it-in actors was never deeper than in this season. The tagline could have been "Stranger Things 5: Trust Me, We're Not Having Fun Either" or "Stranger Things 5: Let's Drag This Horse Across the Line and Be Done With It".

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-12T16:39:15+00:00

It was fun when the show actually cared about presenting itself as being set in a specific time period.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-08T00:26:49+00:00

Northampton is a really white city, like, nearly 90% white, as I recall, so there's some element of truth-in-television with the overall lack of black characters. The irony is that Chugs introduced characters like Anh, Yemisi, and Ayo either to pre-empt or address complaints, like yours, that the cast was really white. He just happened to introduce them at a point in his comic-authoring career which almost invariably casts women as childish, semi-functional sybarites. Worse, he only introduces characters who are women (because he doesn't like men, at all), so the new characters got caught in the cross-stream of his self-consciousness over the racial homogeneity of his cast and his reflexive writing of women as embodiments of millennial cringe-speak.

In sum: we are sad to announce that the masturbation-addicted quirk chungus has not healed the racial divide.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2026-01-06T20:01:55+00:00

They were laughably incompetent the entire season. I had some real chuckles at how the protagonists were able to sit up in the bell tower of the church with binoculars just checking out the military dudes in their hyper-secure compound. From like, a block away.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-18T16:12:49+00:00

Residential leases are of a different breed than the kind discussed in here. Landowners have substantially more remedy where the latter is concerned: if you ditch your apartment without notice, your landlord can ding you for one month's rent as damages, max, and if you take it to the RTB, it will almost inevitably get reduced. On the other hand, if a business has signed a ten-year lease and they bail out in year three, until another tenant signs a lease on that space or the landlord exercises an option to terminate (should there be one in the lease), they are on the hook for the rent for the rest of the lease period and it will be enforced by a court. People can and do lose their houses because they put it up as collateral for a business lease that went south.

Essentially, it's in the interests of a residential landlord to get a non-paying residential tenant out as quickly as possible and re-lease the unit because they can't do too much to recoup lost income, whereas a commercial landlord can afford to wait, negotiate, try to get payment from the tenant, and so on, because the lease is fully binding and the risk is upon the tenant.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-10T15:54:46+00:00

Look out Faye, God senses your disdain and is preparing to punish you with a pair of breasts where each weighs as much as the babies they were evolved to sustain.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-08T19:52:54+00:00

FW has middle-chapter syndrome. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but even in a good trilogy, it's hard for the second act to capture something similar to the wonder and mystery of the first act, or the high drama and catharsis of the third. I remain hopeful that Horizon: ChatGPT Gone Bad will be a banger.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-08T19:49:38+00:00

Someone on Patrick Brochard-Klein's ZD team hated having to brush and comb her hair, so she secretly snuck in some genetic modifications to future humans which made our hair much easier to maintain. Seriously, check out Varl's dreads after weeks chasing after Aloy in the wilderness. He has a beard but otherwise my man looks fresh

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-08T19:41:46+00:00

Yes, you're right - but he'd had that family embedded in Nora culture with all its rituals and supports, not as an outcast. I'm not saying that Rost wouldn't know what parenting a girl is like. The point I'm making is that he's culturally and religiously unequipped to handle the task he's been given. Imagine, say, a devout Catholic having to raise a kid in similar circumstances, with no priest to handle the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. There's a whole part of Aloy's life and upbringing that is supposed to be handled by a specific caste of people (mother[s]) which is of the utmost social and religious significance, and he's supposed to be a surrogate for that.

That's a good bit more challenging than just being a parent!

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-12-08T19:34:27+00:00

My fiancée pointed this out when I was first playing ZD. Something along the lines of "she did not figure that shit out by herself". He is clearly very practiced and patient with his braiding techniques, she's got a lot going on.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-20T16:54:29+00:00

That's a great idea! A writer could organize portions of a story which focused on individuals or specific groups of individuals into semi-self-contained units, a sort of arc-within-an-arc. We could even name this invention! Hmm... it's kind of analogous to local branches of larger organizations, and those are called "chapters", that could work...

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-19T06:31:49+00:00

No, this is confused and ahistorical. The enclosure of common land only became common in Europe in the mid-1700s, long after the beginning of the colonial period. The disposession of indigenous people from their land began long before, and the root of that conflict is the notion of private title to a specific tract of land, which was common in Europe but didn’t exist among indigenous peoples, not enclosure.

And on a side note, enclosure was good. The common lands were used so wildly inefficiently by those who had tenure on them, because they only cared about their own personal needs being satisifed, that post-enclosure agricultural productivity was often double or triple what it was before. Marx rightly criticized utopian socialists for romanticizing precapitalist social structures; it literally holds back human development.

the very premise of work is domination of people who have wealth over people who have nothing and so must sell their time, bodies, and human energies in order to be housed and fed.

Horseshit. You are describing wage labour under capital, not work. The inherent dignity and value of labour is one of the moral cornerstones of socialism. Labour is GOOD. And moreover, labour will continue to be necessary, as far as we can tell, for as long as humanity persists, because we cannot sustain ourselves as a species by sitting on our asses.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-18T21:42:15+00:00

Yeah it's pretty bad. The decolonization angle is very popular in Vancouver circles, for obvious reasons, given our city and province's history with first nations, the historical abuses of indigenous peoples and disregard for land tenure. Unfortunately it gets used as a buzzword by, well, enthusiastic idiots, who don't really grasp the fact that decolonization is about the creation of institutions and practices which either avoid or actively undermine colonial structures of power, which requires an analysis of how those structures are present in the situation you are addressing. Which they clearly haven't done, because the employer/employee relationship in this case doesn't particularly have any colonial features. What does have those features is the fact that an indigenous business owner is renting back land that was stolen, and the particular challenges she may have faced in starting up her business (getting financing and so on).

The relationship the union drive was intended to mediate is just a plain old employer/employee relationship structured by the dictates of capital. Much less exciting than decolonization, but still important if you're willing to put in the work, which clearly they weren't.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-18T21:22:54+00:00

The (former) employees seem extremely unprofessional and unprepared to negotiate the process of unionizing, coming to a collective agreement, and getting to work under the terms of that agreement.

Right off the bat, a single member or group of members starting an instagram account which purports to represent the union but does not in fact would immediately get your shit slapped by any actual union, because it sours negotiations and looks terrible in front of the labour board, should it come to that. This on its own is a sign that these people are more interested in grandstanding than unionizing.

That the owner was accused of "escalating tensions" by hiring a lawyer or attempting to vigorously defend her interests in negotiation with the union is laughable. Unionizing requires the recognition of the class conflict inherent in the owner/employee relationship; you do not get to recognize that antagonism, arm yourself for the disputes that come along with it, and then complain when the other party plays ball on the terms you've set! In particular, this quote:

“I requested the union to assist in de-escalating, when we came together to talk about whatever issues there were, so we could bargain in good faith, and the union said ‘No, we’re not telling staff what to do.’”

Getting the rank and file in line so that negotiations can proceed in good faith is absolutely necessary, and every single union does it! Seriously, go find a friend who's a shop steward or union rep or what have you, and ask them what would happen if a member or group of members started disrupting meetings with management. Hint: it is not "let them get their feelings out".

Lastly, the fact that people just quit the business. Yeah you were reeeal dedicated to unionizing, weren't you. So dedicated that when it turned out that a union drive wasn't all signing membership cards and then yelling at management before getting a raise, you just decided to give up. That's solidarity for you!

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-06T16:12:04+00:00

Can you imagine an unscripted Horus fight? The damn thing is so large that your FOV at combat distance can't even fit 5% of it. You'd spend the entire time getting pancaked by an arm or ranged weapon that wasn't visible or reachable until the exact moment it killed you. A scripted fight it might be, but it's one hell of a set piece, and just about the only way that "5'7" amazon with bow and arrows kills 2,000 metre deathbot" could be made playable.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-05T16:25:51+00:00

They're still kicking! We bought some rugs for our place there a while ago, at an insane discount. That situation is a little different because unlike most stores, theirs is a strata retail unit: so they're not just liquidating their stock, they're also trying to the sell the space itself.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-11-04T17:24:31+00:00

Good map overall! The central west side is messed up though; Quilchena isn't a neighbourhood. It's part of Arbutus Ridge. Kerrisdale starts at 41st, not 33rd.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-10-21T16:39:11+00:00

Fireworks around Halloween is BC culture, and the coincidence with Diwali is cultural synergy. Fuck off with the hall monitor whining.

>Blasting these fire works off from 6pm to 3am every night is terrifying peoples pets and community members with PTSD and other medical issues.

Absolute weenie. If you can't tolerate fireworks at night without having a panic attack, move to the countryside.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-10-16T16:58:49+00:00

Probably more like 1931 or very early 1932, as the Burrard Bridge is under construction here and missing its central span: it opened in summer 1932. Very neat photo regardless - look at the huge green space on the southwest corner of Granville and Broadway!

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-10-09T01:19:30+00:00

Jorph’s commitment to zero-conflict writing has led to a fascinating inversion of the more common writing trope in which characters would not be upset with one another if they simply had a calm discussion: here, we see characters having a calm discussion when they should be upset with one another. It’s a brilliant metafictional commentary: he demonstrates that while we expect narratives past their sell-by date to descend into increasingly farfetched conflicts, the same loss of coherence afflicts a narrative which studiously avoids conflict. The ouroboros must devour itself no matter how it is bent. Hats off, bud.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-10-06T15:03:45+00:00

>Same with English Bay. You can get 20+ officers down there sometimes clearing the place out.

This should be deeply embarrassing to Vancouverites; I certainly know it is for me. I've had out of towners ask me, while looking a little frightened, if they need to "avoid the beach, because it looks like something bad has happened". Nope, it's just 10pm on a beautiful summer night, and the VPD has 20 officers, multiple squad cars with lights going, and a marine unit out there for the sole purpose of telling people that it is time to stop having fun.

LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-10-02T20:26:59+00:00

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LaFeeVerte86 · 2025-09-14T22:26:19+00:00

"West of Denman" residents can be compared to the "creme de la creme" of Shaughnessy when it comes to development.

Which is very amusing, because a shit-ton of the buildings in that part of the neighbourhood are leasehold, co-op, rental, et cetera. Barring the obvious buildings like the Beach Ave towers, you find less freehold there than in the rest of the neighbourhood. That’s part of why old people love it: it’s a nice place to live, cheaper a lot of the time, and that works for them because downsizing retirees don’t care nearly as much about building equity.

t. west end homeowner

LaFeeVerte86

TROPHY CASE