Rereading THE DROP is a strange sensation. I wrote this short story when I was in teacher’s college, training to become an employee in a career that I hoped (hoping, still) would help support my writing habit. And yes, if that reads like an addiction, it should. THE DROP is about many things: teenage life, both what I was seeing at the time of my placement, as well as my own high school experiences; the addictive pleasure in writing and telling stories; and finally, THE DROP is about social media, probably more so than anything else. I have no aversion to social media. I feel like I need to preface this post by saying just that - at the moment, I’m steering clear of Instagram and Facebook to focus more on Twitter. It’s a purely selfish task, one that might seem silly to some, but entirely justified to others. I want to build a social media following by ignoring an established following I have elsewhere. Focusing on Twitter gives me the opportunity to become connected with you fine peop

                 There exists a whisper here in The Yukon Territories, a whisper that tells of a place that no longer exists.   The whisper travels through cities and towns, warning of a dreadful fate for those who don’t listen and those who show no respect for the land.   It became a rumor that none can confirm, but it brings with it curiosity regarding its legitimacy.   This place was known as Kwanlin Falls, and I can confirm that it did indeed exist, because that was my hometown.             Kwanlin Falls was a small community roughly a hundred kilometers outside of Whitehorse, and there were no more than five thousand residents that called it home.   It was a generational town where everyone knew everyone else; where it was rare to get a new resident, and even rarer for one to leave.   I was the first person to leave the town in over fifty years, something that was still talked about as town gossip.   My parents lived there their entire lives, as did my grandparents and their par

                                                           Lets “Drop” the act: social media is a stain Toronto Star Editorial column by Lou Amy Few would argue against the impact social media has had on our lives. Children post. Teens tweet. Young adults smash. Adults share. These acts have become so engrained in our lives and have manipulated our entire routines of life to a point of ethical and moral dilemma. People are more obese, on average, than any other generation in existence. This has lead many officials to question the use of technology like cellphones and laptops and how early child rearing should introduce these tools. There’s no doubt technology has changed the name of the game, but to what degree of impact do we start worrying about its effects, particularly on our mental health as well as physical health? Thankfully, that level of concern has reached its boiling point with the release of The Drop - the latest app from developer Mapple - which quite horrifically simulate

(Promotional poster for His Dark Materials series two. All rights reserved for the BBC and HBO.) Picking up Philip Pullman’s first installment of the His Dark Materials series at such a formative age changed the nature of storytelling for me. The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights for the English folk) dealt with themes far beyond the comprehension skills of a twelve year-old boy. Even still, the adventures of Lyra Belacqua captivated me. Her journey took her to worlds far beyond my imagining - down the river with the gyptians, through the skies with Lee Scorseby in his balloon, and traversing the icy wastelands of the Arctic, where talking polar bears were only a secondary danger to the grotesque incisions taking place by far more insidious monsters. Those monsters were human beings. More specifically, human beings that believed in an authority that paralleled an organization eerily similar to one I had grown up with my entire life. That organization was known as the Catholic Churc