Homeless in Vancouver: Friday's reality outages in Fairview

Friday afternoon in a Fairview back alley up by Heather Street, I came across quite a technical glitch, in the form of a terribly pixelated fence.

Fully a year after we were promised by Version Control that the entire Fairview neighbourhood had been upgraded to high definition, here was an unmistakable patch of 1990s-era VGA resolution.

"...I think you'll find reality is on the blink again."

It’s weird when the display on a person’s smartphone is in higher resolution than the neighbourhood they live in.

One of three things had clearly happened: F.V.C. had missed a few spots, or they were experiencing some sort of temporary system difficulty. or I was just seeing an unfortunate spot of one-off bit rot.

However, just few kilometres away from the low-resolution wooden fence I came across a faulty dog.

This was on Cambie Street, right on the eastern edge of Fairview—a sort of mastiff had obviously crashed in mid-redraw so that while most of the mutt was properly ray traced, one of its back legs was barely wire-framed.

These two instances, kilometres away from each other, pointed to systemic rather than local problems, which probably means that some aspect of Fairview was being upgraded.