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Horoscopes for the week of Jan. 11

Zodiac tips for surviving life at the U of M

Damien Davis, staff

ARIES

Your tarot card for the week is the Tower. Things have not gone the way you wanted them to go. You’ve found yourself falling into line time and time again. Through sideways pupils, you’ve seen the future you crave so deeply on the horizon, but can’t seem to make it up the hill. Stop resisting. This is not a time of senseless chaos, but a catalyst for personal transformation. Shave down the coat you’ve been stuck in since last year. Start fresh. CANCER

Your tarot card for the week is the Magician. Who are you when you are not performing for others? At the bottom of the ocean, you wonder what a life without the water’s reflection could be like. This card asks you to reach the surface and find out for yourself. What good is it, sitting around and wondering about the what ifs? Approach the new year with the knowledge that you could do more than survive, you could thrive. LIBRA

Your tarot card for the week is Death. When Perseph one found herself locked in the underworld, she made it her own. You too will be surprised at what can grow and flourish in the darkest of times. The scales do not tilt unless you wish them to. What would your childhood self say if they saw you now? Remember that order is not for the good of humanity, but for you. CAPRICORN

Your tarot card for the week is the Chariot. This week, you should practise making a decision and sticking to it. You are not in a place to be acting impulsively. Gather your things and consult your mentors. There is truly nothing more satisfying than knowing that you made the right choice. The Chariot asks: do you hold the reins of your destiny, or does someone else?

TAURUS

Your tarot card for the week is the Sun. Have you seen a farm with fields of cattle in your dreams? The Sun beckons you to embrace your inner child and to rear your horns toward the sky. The first week back at school will test your might and patience, but you know what it means to have absolute control. LEO

Your tarot card for the week is the Fool. Caution is your friend again. Meticulous planning with the hope of a relaxed week is your best chance at preparation this term. You’ll find yourself gravitating to the busy corridors of University Centre. There is a comfort in walking invisible among strangers, not because you’re nobody, but because you choose not to be seen. This card asks you: if the universe has your back, why don’t you take what you want? SCORPIO

Your tarot card for the week is Judgement. You are on the precipice of change. Scorpions can go months without nutrients. Their stingers reach for the sky, and they bow in the face of the universe. It is not in your nature to hate, but rather to behold the wonders of the universe and your place within it. This week will challenge you, but you can handle it. AQUARIUS

Your tarot card for the week is the Devil. In the new year, you are peeling off all that limited you from last term. These chains you put on yourself in attempts to be free do not serve you anymore, and it is time to get rid of them. You’re known for your independence, but it’s never wrong to ask for help, especially when you’re struggling. Rest easy, water bearer. All will be well in the end.

GEMINI

Your tarot card for the week is the Moon. The fear that is burrowing itself inside you and your inner self will finally be purged. Know that you know yourself best, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Twins symbolize duality. Show your peers what it means to be both kind and cruel when necessary. Consult the ever-shifting librarians of Elizabeth Dafoe on what it means to be whole. VIRGO

Your tarot card for the week is the Emperor. With the moon in your sign at a waning gibbous, now is the time to feel grateful for all that brought you here. You’re known for your logic and practicality. The Emperor asks: how do you apply the wisdom and guidance from past mentors to your current situation? Never forget your elders. Never forget the warnings of writing on the walls. SAGITTARIUS

Your tarot card for the week is the Fool. When was the last time you had real fun? Did you release all of your ten - sion and stress during the break, or were you so caught up in making sure you had fun that you were unable to truly relax? The need for things to be just so can be overwhelming. This week, you should focus on the excitement of going to new classes. Put down the bow, archer, and remember what it felt like to be free. PISCES

Your tarot card is the Hermit. If you felt that you barely got through the fall term, or were overwhelmed by any chaos near its end, the Hermit is here to tell you that it’s time to put your toys away. Sometimes we have to do things that others may see as odd in order to ensure success for ourselves. As a Pisces, you’re used to solitude, but that doesn’t mean you always have to aim for it. Even Diogenes had a friend, surely.

’Toban Tips

How to help a friend in a toxic relationship

Dear Toby,

During winter break, I brought my boyfriend to my family’s Christmas Eve dinner. However, he made some problematic comments that made my family uncomfortable.

I wonder if this is something to expect from him in the future, or if it was a fluke. If it is what I should expect, I don’t know what to do!

I’m not okay with that behaviour. How do I resolve things with him and my family?

Help, Troubled girlfriend

Dear Troubled girlfriend,

I am sorry you are dealing with this issue. It’s always uncomfortable when your partner doesn’t get along with your family, especially when they’re the ones in the wrong. Communication is key. Ask your boyfriend what he meant by his comments in private. He may have spoken out of pure ignorance, and may not have understood why what he said was problematic. If that is the case, he might be willing to apologize for his actions and educate himself so that he can do better in the future.

However, it’s also possible that your boyfriend knew what he was saying and was purposely being problematic. If that is the case, you have to make an important decision about your relationship. We should not surround ourselves with hateful or spiteful people. People can change, but only if they want to. If you do end up making the choice to leave him, explain why. Perhaps it will give him something to think about, and hopefully his future partners will not have to experience what you did.

Wishing you luck, Toby the Bison

To ask Toby a question, email comment@ themanitoban.com.

The best Canadian albums of 2022

’Toban picks for the best music to come out of our beautiful nation last year

Alex Braun, staff

Alvvays — Blue Rev

Alvvays has reclaimed its rightful spot as indie-pop royalty. Since its first record in 2014, the band has pumped out perfect pop gems at a frustratingly slow pace. Blue Rev comes after an excruciating five-year gap, but any wait would be worth it for an album like this — 14 perfect songs that somehow get more perfect the more you listen to them.

Each song has such a strong base — beautiful, wide vocal melodies matched with clever, observant lyrics. And Alvvays keeps building on top, piling on ingenious instrumental parts, perfectly timed key changes, bridges that cut through like rays of sunshine and little blips and melodies that appear for a second, then disappear. It’s breathtaking songwriting and an absolute masterclass in craft and production. Fellow Canadian super producer Shawn Everett’s mix is pitch-perfect, with constant little details that boggle the mind but never distract from the neatly built songs at the core. It’s a magic trick of an album, a rare alchemic accident, an incandescent bright blue potion that rockets you out of time like the sugar-rush alcopop that gave the album its name. Drink it up.

The Weeknd — Dawn FM

The Weeknd is probably the best living pop star. In a world of sleepy pastiche peddlers, trend-chasing TikTok phenoms and washed-up hangers-on, the Weeknd is one of the brave few really pushing forward. And nowhere is that more apparent than on his admirably ambitious album Dawn FM.

Reuniting with experimental electronic darling Oneohtrix Point Never, we are led through a dance mix presented by the official radio station of the purgatorial afterlife, Dawn FM, hosted by none other than Jim Carrey.

This is another case of a great songwriter and performer flexing his muscles. Abel Tesfaye pulls from ’80s synth pop, ’90s Eurodance, modern R&B and house seamlessly, without ever indulging in imitation. And the hit rate over the 16 tracks is remarkably high, especially in the sterling opening sequence from “Gasoline” through “Sacrifice.”

Chastity — Suffer Summer

The so-called pop-punk revival is still limping along after a couple years of relevance. Pop artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Machine Gun Kelly have embraced the sounds of ’00s stars like Avril Lavigne or blink-182 by making the music even more poppy and artificial. However, Chastity grasped the real object of pop-punk on Suffer Summer, fusing together classic power pop and actually edgy punk music with style.

Project mastermind Brandon Williams managed to make an album both harrowingly honest and effortlessly catchy, with songs so sugary that you don’t notice that you’re swallowing some truly bitter pills. Like on “Happy Face,” a song about a friend’s overdose death that somehow still goes down like an ice-cold Coke on a hot summer day.

Living Hour — Someday Is Today

Someday Is Today marked a big leap forward for Winnipeg’s premier indie rock band. After two albums of solid but uniform dream pop, the band leaped out of its previously defined patterns to deliver an album of varied and consistently excellent pop and rock songs.

These songs run the gamut from fuzzed-out rock to gentle instrumentals to woozy, steadily building guitar pop, introducing whole new worlds of texture and structure to the band’s already gorgeous sound. And somehow, even as the band expands to new genre frontiers, it always fits perfectly and never feels like trying on a costume. When Living Hour returns to its signature dreamy sound, it is deeper and more breathtaking than ever.

Destroyer — LABYRINTHITIS

Dan Bejar is a journeyman musician, a real standard-bearer of Canadian indie. On his 13th album, LABYRINTHITIS, he once again demonstrates his constant restlessness and increasing wiliness in his middle age.

The album can be seen as a synthesis of some of Bejar’s previous adventures, mixing the herky-jerky, uncanny electronics and dry, surreal humour of 2020’s Have We Met with the smooth, glammy sound of albums like Kaputt or Poison Season.

But in that synthesis, Bejar arrives at something completely new and exciting. From the hypnotic opener “It’s in Your Heart Now” to the heartbreaking closer, aptly titled “The Last Song,” Destroyer offers up some of his most elusive songwriting paired with some of the tightest and catchiest arrangements of his long and varied career.

What to play before the semester weighs you down

Space out with these gravity and physics-based video games

Jessie Krahn, staff

While January is past the longest night of the year, many students still have weeks of scarce sunlight and burning the midnight oil ahead.

These four space-themed games immerse you in zero gravity and starry nights. Hopefully, they’ll lift your spirits, give you a different perspective on the darkness and lighten the burden of schoolwork.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a 2D space shooter with up to four-player couch co-op. You and your crew of little nubbin-limbed Tic Tacshaped “spacenauts” must navigate spherical ships through asteroid belts and perilous caves to rescue captive creatures from insectoid and fishy aliens.

Each player controls one function of the ship, such as its movement, guns or shield. However, Lovers does require a level of co-ordination and teamwork that always melts down into hilarious consequences when the ship is surrounded by 40 angry, flying acid-spewing beetles.

Combat in Lovers is ridiculous. You can mix and match different gun upgrades to create anything from a bouncing buzzsaw cannon to springloaded laser-shooting flails. Because missions can take a while to complete, even with an efficient team, the price of failure is steeper than other stress-fun couch co-op games like Overcooked.

The game is cathartically silly, like a road trip through space with your best friends. Playing with two or more people is a guaranteed bonding experience, as your team will shriek and giggle trying to destroy extraterrestrial fish while the brave soul who volunteered to drive crashes into asteroids.

Slime Rancher

Slime Rancher’s setting isn’t exactly celestial, but it does take place on a far-off planet. The player character, Beatrix, is a rancher tasked with collecting plorts, a special resource to sell to a voracious off-world market.

Most of the game’s mechanics involve corralling and farming the source of plorts — slimes, giggly little animated liquid critters. Once fed, the slimes will poop out precious crystalline plorts, which can either be sold for profit to upgrade the ranch or used as material to construct gadgets to explore the slimes’ home world.

The game is technically a first-person shooter, as your vacuum gun is capable of sucking up and firing out your giggling slimes like a militarized shipping container.

Slime Rancher offers a calming, lush and rainbow-hued open world and equips you with a jetpack that allows you to float through it.

My one criticism is that Slime Rancher puts forth the capitalist and colonialist myths that colonized lands are improved through resource extraction and refinement, which are too often tacitly endorsed in the farming simulation genre.

However, if you’ve exhausted everything to do in Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher is a kooky, floatier alternative that’ll scratch the same itch.

Gravity Ghost

Gravity Ghost is a relaxing puzzle game and a feel-good gem. In it, you play as a little spectral girl named Iona as she works through residual grief in the afterlife, guiding animal spirits along the way.

Beating a level seems simple — just collect stars.

The catch is, you have to figure out how to work with the game’s gravity by flinging Iona into the orbit of heavenly bodies with enough momentum to cause the path she is on as she hurls through space to precisely align with a star.

Building up enough force to land in just the right spot is tricky, but super rewarding as you grow accustomed to the game’s physics.

For me, whipping the ghost around until she became a human satellite was soothing in a way I imagine knitting or needlework must be for patient people.

Heavenly Bodies

In Heavenly Bodies, you play as a cosmonaut who must fix space stations, flying through space collecting resources and doing simple tasks that zero gravity renders monumentally difficult.

What’s more, you have to do all of that while controlling your cosmonaut’s arms and legs separately. Pulling a lever, for instance, is broken down into several steps — kick off a wall to float to the lever, lift your arm, grab the lever and hope physics is on your side.

Experienced through the magic of couch co-op, the physics-based gameplay of Heavenly Bodies is comically absurd.

Either I or my co-op partner usually try and fail to regain control over the game’s twisted physics, while the other miraculously carries us through to the end of the level. Spinning in a circle for 10 minutes while someone else single-handedly fixes a space station — possibly while literally dragging your character through the level by the foot — is humbling in the best way possible.

As I watch my little cosmonaut kick and flail desperately, whirling out into the star-speckled cosmos, the burden of deadlines doesn’t seem so heavy. I think about thousands of little nubbins rushing to complete arbitrary tasks while soaring through the dark abyss on our little Earth, and I just can’t help but laugh.