Author Archives: Feisal Merali

Why Does Everything Have To Be A Side Hustle?

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Have you noticed that nobody really has a hobby anymore, instead now it’s a side hustle or social media project? Like people that game a lot will end up streaming, people that do arts and crafts will sell jewelry or prints, and people that cook will make cooking videos to share their recipes online.

It feels like no matter what, the idea of a time passing hobby is almost dead in today’s modern age. With social media being so prominent, and the cost of life being so high, it seems like everything you do has to be something that can generate revenue instead of something you do just for fun.

It leads into an idea that your personal life is no longer your personal life, but an extension of your LinkedIn profile. Something that can build your resume, a personal brand update, or money in general is seen as a waste of time. It’s almost as if when there is no yield, it’s a waste of time.

How many times have you heard from your friends when you’re making something that you should post videos on YouTube, or that you should sell it? I’ve heard it a couple of times, and it feels like I’m not allowed to do anything for fun anymore.

It’s almost as if my job is funding my hobby, which is for some reason, going to take over my professional career. I felt it lead to burnout for many of my passions, leading to me not wanting to actually do them when all they originally supposed to do was to be something that helps me unwind or kill time.

Two People Cooking, a Hobby That Has Turned Into A Business For A Lot Of People (Credit: 089photoshootings via Pixabay)

There’s easy ways to tell if you have fallen into this culture trap as well. If you have a premade template for your morning routine that looks more corporate than something that a normal human would do, or if you’re seeing if your friends have added value to your personal brand instead of just being your friends.

That’s not what a hobby is supposed to be, and seeing the death of it is sad. Bring back the time wasters, the things that we do for fun. Not everything has to be something that is done for money, or something that will burn you out.

Take a step back, and see what in your life you’ve industrialized as opposed to just do for pure enjoyment. That will save you both a headache, and a lot of friendships.

How Much Of Our City Are We Gatekeeping?

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Have you ever found a restaurant that you really enjoy, a hidden nature oasis, or a place that you really enjoy that you don’t want to share with others? Welcome to gatekeeping, something that has risen to prominence in Vancouver with the rise of the anti TikTok movement.

Usually the saying is sharing is caring, but lately due to social media and tiktok, it has turned into sharing is ruining. Whenever a restaurant gets popular on TikTok, the most common reaction is that it immediately gets flooded with customers that prevent regulars from going there.

Because of this, a lot of people in Vancouver are moving from posting publicly on social media to more private ways of sharing new fines. Some examples of the way that these hidden gems are being shared is private Instagram stories, and invite-only discord servers.

While on one hand that is really good for the business itself, it is not always the best for the consumer. It is always nice to see local businesses succeed, especially in a local climate where we have seen a lot of family owned businesses go out of business because of high costs and not enough customers.

The balancing act is how are locals going to actually still be able to go to their local favorite spot. There is an argument to be made that it is not ethical to gatekeep a local struggling business, but it is possible that the sudden influx of business will only be a flash in the pan, and the sudden rush will ruin the long term vibe of the community.

With the FIFA World Cup coming this year, the emphasis on gatekeeping local spots has only increased. There’s the expectation that there’s going to be large crowds that appear within our city, that completely take over everything that is both local restaurants and chain restaurants.

If you’re wondering if you yourself are being kept from certain locations, there’s a very easy way to tell. If you’re scrolling on social media, and see a place that is tagged as Vancouver, BC, you want to ask where it is. If you get a response that is a shush emoji or no answer at all, it is more than likely that you are part of the group in the city that is being gatekept from the spot.

If you really want to know if you’re in, the best way to know is if you get invited to one of the invite only discord servers, that hosts all of the hidden gems locally and in Vancouver and the Fraser valley.

What Can The Government Do For The Whitecaps?

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Among swirling rumors surrounding the Vancouver Whitecaps and their potential move to another city, Vancouver’s mayor Ken Sim has weighed in on the situation. Earlier today he released a message on social media regarding the potential move of the team, as well as the #SAVETHECAPS movement.

In his tweet, he was not timid, or fearful. Instead he was fired up and forceful with his tweet. Within the tweet he made quite a few points. He mentioned that the club has been a part of Vancouver since 1974, and called it a part of the foundation of Vancouver’s identity.

He also called for the transparency of the ownership group. He wants them to clearly state what they want so that they are in the city moving forward. This is especially interesting considering that the ownership group made their statement yesterday saying that they had fielded over 100 offers from local buyers, but not elaborated beyond that.

He also called for the Province and team to sign a bridge deal. This is especially interesting because BC Place is owned through a crown corporation currently, and would have the power to do so. This would allow for a stabilizing financial situation to be found while a permanent solution is found.

Lastly, the city’s mayor also mentioned that there is already what he calls prime space available for the team at Hastings Park for a new stadium, as well as financial district. With the last point he basically put the ball back into the court of the ownership and province to figure things out.

In terms of what the province could do for the team, they have already restricted what they are willing to do. Currently the Jobs Minster Ravi Kahlon stated that the province would not buy the team, so that option is already off the board.

The best band-aid fix that is open to them while a new soccer-specific stadium is being built would be to give them Primary Tenant Status at BC Place, as well as a better lease for BC Place.

This would mean that they would be able to install permanent branding at the stadium instead of temporary branding that comes down after each game, as well as giving the Whitecaps higher percentage of profits from food, beverage and sponsor income. Currently those sources of income are controlled by PavCo, the crown corporation that owns BC Place.

Will this be enough to spur more conversations with the province, and keep the team in the city? Hopefully, but with situations like what they are now, it is hard to say for sure.

EDM Has Taken Over The Festival Scene

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Have you ever taken a look at a music festival artists lineup and wondered what genres those artists play? If you take a look at festivals locally and around the world you will notice that a lot of the acts are actually DJs, or EDM artists.

Recently around the world electronic music has seen a resurgence in festivals around the world that used to be traditionally other genres of music. Of course, there are the music festivals that do stick to one genre traditionally and always will, but a lot of the more open festivals are seeing big changes.

From local festivals like Fvded In The Park to big festivals like Coachella, DJs have taken the main stage in droves, along with more festivals popping up that are only exclusively electronic music as well.

It isn’t like EDM doesn’t belong in the festival scene either. In the article that I wrote about rave culture, I mentioned PLUR, and how it is the overarching motto and lifestyle that people that attend raves follow, at least for the most part.

This motto fits into music festivals perfectly. Making sure that people are taken care of during festivals, as well as enjoying the moment with strangers without judging them. It doesn’t mention the fact that the music is high energy and fits the atmosphere of a music festival perfectly.

 

The most interesting part, is that for music fans in music culture, it has seen the revival of a lot of festivals. The most notable and local example would be Fvded In The Park. Prior to the pandemic, it was mostly a hip hop or rap festival. They may have had one or two DJ’s there but they were few and far between.

Last year, the festival returned with a heavy focus on electronic music. It was so successful that it pretty much saved the company that organizes the festival from going bankrupt. The community rallies around electronic music, and with the big names of the festival booked, people showed up.

Now this year, the festival is back and has even more big name EDM acts in it. It seems that they have let go of the past of being a hip hop and rap festival, and fully embraced the EDM scene.

It’s also the same thing at big festivals like Coachella. This year they had a dubstep show on the mainstage for the first time in a very long time. Times are changing within music festival culture, and music festival goers. It’s only time they can tell if this will continue, or if we’ll see a new genre take its place.

The Culture Of Trusting Peer Reviews

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How many times have you said you wanted to go out to watch a movie, only to be prevented because the movie has bad reviews on websites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb? Compare that to how many times you’ve watched a movie without a review, enjoyed it, and then gone back to see that the movie actually received poor reviews?

It is not only limited to just movies, but everyday products or experiences in everyday life. Everything that we see, do, or use is being reviewed, and we dictate our lives based off of those reviews. It could be a bottle of shampoo, a new snack that you haven’t tried before, or a new drink that you haven’t tried either.

It is almost as if we aren’t able to make a decision on a whim anymore, Instead we rely on the reviews and what everyone else says about the thing that we are looking at.

It could be due to a lot of reasons. For a city like Vancouver, we could be subscribing to this idea or this culture purely because of the high cost of living. We want to make sure that we are getting the absolute best bang for our buck, and not wasting money on something that will not give us the fulfillment or satisfaction that we are looking for.

And it isn’t that we are looking at professional reviews specifically either. It’s coming from websites like Reddit, or Amazon reviews where it feels like another person giving us advice on the product instead of a professional review, that can feel artificial or bought. It’s like we’re constantly looking for advice for something that we are looking at to purchase instead of looking for a robotic, professional review on a big name website.

That’s not necessarily saying that this aspect of our culture as a city is a bad thing. It can help us save money on purchasing products or experiences that just are not worth the money, but it has also led to the death of spontaneous activity or purchases because we rely so heavily on those reviews.

Will this ever change? Probably not. It may take a lot of time before we are able to fully trust our own instincts with a product or movie before we decide we don’t need to go look at a review. It might also take the cost of living to go down as well, but who knows when that’s gonna happen.

What Is Cancel Culture?

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How many times have you gone online and seen some kind of Internet personality or celebrity get called out, or canceled for something they said or did in the past? Even if it’s something small that is being blown way out of proportion?

welcome to cancel culture. Instead of using the Internet to communicate with others, people that are part of this culture will find any small thing that they can use to call out any kind of personality or celebrity to try to get them cancelled, or for them to leave the Internet. It’s almost as if the Internet has turned from a community to a digital courtroom in the span of mere seconds.

Some of the things that I have seen people get cancelled for are inappropriate comments or tweets about other people or races, cheating on partners, being abusive, or a whole host of other accusations.

I do want to clarify though, just in case the messaging is not clear, that I am in no way defending the people that are being canceled for good reason. I don’t believe that those people who use their platform to spread hate or pain to others should have a platform to begin with.

Sometimes though, cancel culture can go too far. Attacking people for small infractions or a small slight does not feel fair to them. It can ruin lives or livelihoods, for something that they potentially didn’t even do. The most common defense that people will use is that they were young or dumb, or they didn’t know what they were doing was wrong.

But in the eyes of public opinion, once they’ve been cancelled, they’re done. It’ll be hard if not impossible for those personalities to reclaim their previous standing or community that they had built because of the effectiveness of cancel culture.

The most interesting thought is to see how it will affect future generations. Will cancel culture still be the same? How much media training will we see future personalities have to prevent these kinds of cancel culture mobs go after them and take everything from them.

Is it effective? Yes, yes it is. Is it always justified? That’s a different question. Sometimes it can be for very serious offenses, but for something small it is hard to justify. As long as you’re a good person, and treat everyone the same, and don’t do anything stupid, I don’t see why anyone should be afraid of cancel culture in the slightest.

Vancouver’s Culture Of Staying In Our Own World

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I don’t know about you, but when I get on the sky train or the bus I always put my ear buds or headphones on. Not only is it a way to pass the time on public transit, but also a way to tune out the outside world and prevent people from talking to me.

And I know I’m not the only one. Whenever I get on any form of public transportation, I can look around and see that almost 90% of the people on the same bus or sky train as I am will have the ear buds in. It seems that the city has developed a culture on public transit of not wanting to talk to others.

It is not only public transit either. It’s in almost every public space that you go into. It could be walking along the sidewalk, or sitting in a coffee shop as well. It’s almost as if having the ear buds or headphones has become part of your essential equipment for the day.

It is almost as if as a city we have decided to forego spontaneous human connection, and decided to go with the security of our playlists, podcasts, or YouTube videos. As a city, we’ve decided to embrace out identity of being cold but kind, and not changing it to make other people’s lives better.

People getting on and off of public transit (Credit: TobiasRehbein via Pixabay)

It can also change the perspective of the day as well. Like when it’s a rainy day outside, and everything is miserable, putting on a playlist of upbeat music can change it from a dreary rainy day to feeling like you are the soul star of an action movie. It’s as if we are not listening to music anymore, but instead experiencing it to augment our everyday lives.

Vancouver has being called a city that is “cold but polite”. Where we would rather be in our own world as opposed to interacting with others outside of it. It has become so ingrained in our culture and DNA as a city that when we don’t have our earbuds, it feels like an entirely different world.

maybe as a city it is time for us to step outside of our own world, and embrace the people that also live inside of it. To embrace not only our friends and family, but strangers along the way as well. You never know who you’re going to meet, you may even meet your best friend, but you’ll never know if we stick to the culture that we currently have of staying in our own world and not venturing outside of it.

 

Lost Media: Part Of The Internet Culture

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Have you ever remembered a TV show, a book, a commercial, or a song that you listen to when you were a child or when you were younger and gone to look it up only to find that it seems like you’re the only one that remembers that media?

That is what is known as lost media. It’s a piece of media that has been lost to time, whether that’s because of natural disaster, not enough people watching it to record it and preserve it, human error when deleting it, and many more possibilities.

To prevent those pieces of media from being lost, there is an entire community surrounding the preservation of media from all times. This can include video games, YouTube videos, TV shows, TV commercials, or even the media that is played before amusement rides.

The entire point is to preserve the past of the digital age. Because of everything being on servers, and being out online, there’s a lot of history that is being made every day that has the potential to be lost forever just because nobody recorded it.

It isn’t a unique interest either. There are entire subreddits and discord servers dedicated to identifying even the smallest piece of recovered media. This can be a three second sound clip, going all the way up to a TV show that the world almost completely forgot about if not for these groups.

Think of it like a modern digital museum curator. It’s a team of people making sure they’re able to preserve these pieces of work so that future generations know what happened on the Internet before them. Like a time capsule back to the early 2000s and the early Internet.

Not only is this kind of like a nostalgia trip for those people that are preserving this media, it’s as if they’re preserving the lives of people that may not even remember it. Events or experiences that if not for these preservation efforts, would have been lost to time and never heard from or seen again.

Some of the websites that people use, especially the most prominent one, would be the wayback machine. It’s a website where other websites can be archived or saved for specific snapshots to see how a website looked at any given time, day, or year.

So the next time you clean out your garage, and find a dusty box filled with old VHS tapes, instead of just throwing it away or donating it right away, take a look inside and see what you may have because you never know, you might have something that someone else somewhere else in the world is looking for.

Are Food Trucks Going To Replace Restaurants?

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Picture this, it’s a warm summer night, and you don’t feel like cooking at home. Do you order takeout, or do you go to a restaurant? Recently, a big trend in the culture of the restaurants in Vancouver has been the introduction of food trucks, and the explosion that we’ve had in the city.

When you think of going out, you think of a restaurant. A place where you’re seated, you are tended to by a server, your food is brought out to you, and you were waited on for your meal. For food trucks, it’s a completely different experience

instead of having to make a choice for a group of people to go to 1 restaurant that everyone can agree to, at a place that’s easy for everyone to go to, you can instead go to multiple food trucks where everyone can get what they want to eat, and pick where you want to eat as well. It doesn’t have to be near the food truck, but instead anywhere that you’d want to eat.

Etsy Vancouver Food Truck - Bandidas

A Mexican food truck in Vancouver (Credit: Scott Cutler via Flickr)

Do you want to eat at the beach? You can do that. Do you want to eat at a park? You can do that as well the only limitation of where you can eat the food that you purchase is your imagination. It gives you the freedom of choice and flexibility instead of having to spend an hour or more sitting at a table at a restaurant.

if you’re worried about the quality of food, you don’t have to. thanks to the food scene, and the culture of people looking for good restaurants to eat at, finding a new place to eat that will become your new favorite spot is not hard to do.

this experience also matches up with the nomadic lifestyle and culture of Vancouver. People that like to work from home, from coffee shops, to park benches as well, this new Ave. has allowed people to find foods that they are looking for that matches both their budget and lifestyle as well.

will this new trend in the food culture of Vancouver with food trucks being everywhere replace restaurants? Absolutely not. Is it an option that is needed or welcomes by the population here? Absolutely yes.

if you’re looking for places to find for food trucks to go try, streetfoodapp website. It’s a dedicated website and map that shows what is open, where they are and what they serve. You can find a link to it here.

Who Would Want To Explore An Abandoned Building?

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Have you ever looked at an abandoned building, or a do not enter sign in front of a dark hallway that seems to lead to somewhere, or a no trespassing sign and wondered what is in there, or what is there to be found? That is the entire idea around urban exploring, and the culture around it.

around the city, there are many abandoned buildings, or places that have not been touched in years due to closures of businesses or people moving away that just breed curiosity. It is that idea that has led to the development of urban exploring.

the thing with urban exploring is that there is an unwritten rule. Take only pictures, leave only footprints. This means to not vandalize or disturb the place that you’re exploring. Don’t break any locks to get anywhere. It is purely about the exploration and reclaiming the city that you live in and the buildings that have been abandoned by the past.

An example of what Urban Explorers are looking for (Credit: Tama666 via Pixabay)

the entire purpose of it is to preserve what is happened to the city through pictures or video, and posting it online instead instead of vandalizing it and ruining it for people that come next, or cause the building to be torn down. It’s a way to see what the city was like in a time capsule as opposed to what we’ve seen now every day when we walk around.

the entire community around urban exploration is also very secretive about the places that they find, and that they post about. It is not because they don’t want people to explore those same areas, instead they want to make sure that it can stay open to people to explore if they feel like it. There are many cases where someone will post a video online of a place and because of the popularity, it gets boarded up within a week and nobody can explore it ever again.

It isn’t limited to just buildings either. It can be underground tunnels, old steam pipes, or the World War 2 bunkers that were built around Stanley Park and Point Atkinson. It’s a way to reclaim the city from urbanization, and the glass towers that come with it.

when it’s done right, it’s a cool idea. There are some bad actors that will ruin it for everyone from time to time, but for the most part the community is united in sharing what they found and sharing the history of the city with those who watch.