Autumn

Happy birthday to Gustav Holst and me. I'd never looked at the score for the planets until I found it via @archive.org. Even if you don't read music you might be able to tell this is the beginning of "Mars." Music has a look as well as a sound. Inspiration for John Williams' Star Wars themes imo.

Okay, I laughed.

Why does Bluesky keep showing me kinky anime which I find misogynistic and which I keep blocking? I'm starting to be repulsed by the whole genre.

That tree is growing Chicken of the Woods again. It skipped last year. Going to pick it younger this time. Maybe cook it for my birthday.

Doesn't have quite the same ring.

Do people who buy McMansions know they're McMansions?

When flying was a Big Deal.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel... Hic Spiritus Est, a sculpture of nails by David Partridge in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Toronto. Holy Cross Day.

Okay, so now using metaphor and figurative language is an AI "tell." Ditto for varied sentence lengths and symmetrical clauses. THAT'S HOW I WRITE.

Deep called unto deep.

I always love those lists of "35 under 35," but as I get older, I find that I would love to know about innovations/art from people over 65. "65 over 65" please. Elders have incredible ideas that are the result of having seen the full lifecycle of previous ideas and learned from it.

I know it's less than nothing in the grand scheme of things but I found a bit of blue beach glass.

I got blocked by someone on here! The only person who blocked me on Twitter (as far as I know) was the fox-torturing lawyer.

Slight crepuscular rays this morning.

Great that this goes to an archive where it's accessible to everyone. The opening paragraphs are the first time I've seen acknowledged what all archivists have to respect in our dealings with families: sending papers to the archive is like a second funeral, celebratory but also saying goodbye again.

Book store display of apocalyptic literature. (The passcode for the store washroom is 1984#.) @allistert.bsky.social

The title of this book is 419 words long. Authors, become ungovernable.

Toronto

"Teams" pings going off all over the train. At least mute your speakers so that sound doesn't have to haunt our every waking moment.

Hour-and-a-half highway commute this morning. Should be 30 minutes, never is. Feel done for the day, or year.

Page 29 3/4 was a corker.

This long terra cotta beach on Lake Ontario is thanks to a now-defunct sewer pipe company.

Have seen two posts on here recently of the threatening "I'm watching you/who you follow/where you post" variety. Doesn't do this place any favours.

Butterfly. Have seen relatively few this year.

I'm finding I'm increasingly sensitive to noise as I age. I don't want to hear you or your phone from kilometres away. And leaf blowers should be banned.

When did "thanks for rolling with the punches" become an oft-used management phrase? I'd rather not be punched at all actually.

On my car this morning!] Six inches stem to stern. Very docile when moved. @n8rnerd.bsky.social

Googling "how to function on no sleep."

Topped it today!

Tech boosters like to use a set of terms to thwart any kind of pushback against their proposals to insert "AI" into any and every organization. Here's a dictionary of their language and what these terms mean. sonja-drimmer.squarespace.com/blog-1/2025/...

I love that this is the first use of the harp emoji in my feed. Did you know the harp emoji was only relatively recently approved by the Unicode Consortium? It takes a whole lobbying effort including a historically grounded justification to get this done.

Art Nouveau light fitting at the Newman Centre, University of Toronto.

At University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library for a day of talks by U of T's archivists and archival scholars.

Today, August 6th, is the anniversary of my baptism as a young adult at the church on this hand-drawn 1856 map which I rescued for the archives decades later.

Here's my quickie response to archivists also being included on the obsolete-by-AI list. Along with historians like Dan here, we are among very last professions LLMs could take over - that is, if one has any clue what archivists and historians do.

I do appreciate the antiquity of our hospital's logo.

Found this at a charity used book sale in a mall here in southern Ontario. Assumed I'd already have all the songs but there are actually a few live recordings that differ quite a bit from the studio versions. Tunnicliffe is an ideal illustrator for Steeleye.

I'm not sure there is much interest in me offering a hot take in return for each like. But perhaps you might like a photo of a musical instrument from my collection, instead? One per like until I run out of steam. Or instruments.

Just leaving this here as a heads-up ...

Thus endeth one of the most stressful workweeks of my "career" and that's a high bar.

The absolute deranged CONFIDENCE a church has to have to engrave the service times in literal stone. Love the corrections.

Is it normal to be constantly thinking about how to make some money when you have a FT job?

Monograph ideas from a local antiquarian obsessed with Ingenious people. I mean...I suppose.

Trying to make sense of a never-published literary manuscript with multiple drafts of the same chapters, that was the subject of great authorial-editoral dispute and was rescued from a basement - without disturbing juxtapositions that may be meaningful. 🤯

Local government self-harming in Canada. This collection includes archival records. We're all worried this attitude will spread, to the detriment of quality of life and governance.

In my debut for @theatlantic.com, I wrote about the disappearance of cultural listings from major New York media outlets, and what it portends for artists, audiences, institutions, and journalists. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

"One or two"