Picked these beauties yesterday, yum

I think it is important to highlight where these products fundamentally cannot do the thing it is breathlessly claimed they can do out of the box by the marketing, when used in the ways non-experts (i.e. students and regrettably many academics) will be using them and encouraging them to be used

This is the appropriate response to this nonsense.

I finished this over the weekend! I wanted to see if I could do a sort of watercolour effect in embroidery.

"[...]the frame offers academics a refuge in a politicized environment: by emphasizing symmetry and structural drift, rather than responsibility or direction, polarization provides the language of detachment—enabling the analysis of democratic dysfunction without risking accusations of partisanship"

"It's one thing for a ghost to terrorize my children, but quite another for him to play my theremin!"

A lot of ink has been spilled about the books that are or aren't the spiritual successors to The Secret History, but for better or worse, I do think the Millennial heir to Tartt's Whole Vibe is Tara Isabella Burton

you have to attend the meetings and many people don't want to do that but want to direct strategy.

📚 Hey library nerds! The specific ask is that OCLC make the 041 field publicly visible, and (deets in thread) there’s a petition your library can join if you’re OCLC. Makes sense to me; translators matter!

Helen Oyeyemi is COMING FOR US, Bluesky.

The whole front of my apartment smells INCREDIBLE

I just think it's very annoying that the old Apple cable is called a lightning cable AND that a lightning bolt is the generic symbol for fast-charging cables!! Signed, someone just trying to charge Android she forgot to plug in last night.

@minxmarple.bsky.social swannery 🤍

The important thing to know about the way our laws are set up is that council and the mayor can’t direct the police to do anything unless it’s to harm poor people.

Yeah man, sometimes people don't have a lot of books in their upbringing and we live in subscription model hell and sometimes people engage with books recreationally for the first time as adults. It's all fine (I get that this is just a silly anecdote but the comments are pretty off-putting)

so are there any VPN providers who DON'T fund far-right nationalism?

At-home cold brewers, what kind of coffee beans are you buying these days? The price of Kicking Horse is absolutely ridiculous, and I need to switch it up, either something cheaper or something that's better value.

"What I learned, from ACT-UP and the squatters movement, was that in thinking about electoral politics, ideology doesn't matter much. Only 2 questions matter. What can a person holding that position actually do? Will they do it?" - Seth Tobocman Basically.

Lunch: strawberry milkshake and a Catriona Ward novel in the sun

I finished The Sentence by Louise Erdrich when I got home from the market tonight and it has kind of wrecked me, in the best way.

I'm SCREAMING

I have really come to love working with the line as the fundamental unit of embroidery, and it occurred to me this week that this is not unlike my feeling about poems

In terms of the cost of snow cleaning, she once said everything "comes with a price." Any politician who puts a price tag on the cost of helping a historically excluded group realize their human rights deserves nothing but a place in the dustbin of history.

The Public Works chair who didn’t support bringing some of Transit Plus back in-house because of the cost, and said Winnipeg is “spoiled” by a level of snow clearing that prevents disabled folks from leaving their homes during the winter is not running for re-election? Good fucking riddance.

In my perfect transit plan for Winnipeg, all buses come so frequently you never have to check a schedule or fret about missed connections, and the buses run late into the night.

I've been imagining what #Winnipeg could be, with a municipal election this fall. Ruha Benjamin's book, Imagination: A Manifesto stresses that we live in the products of people's imagination. So we need to strengthen & bring into reality our own.

Excuse me, I was told there was no glut of unoccupied housing stock because it is simply irrational for owners to hold empty units rather than lower prices, and that we must give developers tax breaks do whatever they want or we'd [checks notes] never have enough housing www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

Outlets have crime beats and reporters. It's always in the news because resources are dedicated to reporting it. Crime rates up or down isn't all that important because crime is always present, always an issue in the news. It can't not be because of the way news gathering/reporting is structured.

Excuse me, I was told there was no glut of unoccupied housing stock because it is simply irrational for owners to hold empty units rather than lower prices, and that we must give developers tax breaks do whatever they want or we'd [checks notes] never have enough housing www.cbc.ca/listen/live-...

I am being VERY brave and brute forcing my way through updating all the training documentation for my department, my absolute least favourite work task, before I have to train someone new this week. So many dead links. So many process rewrites.

To the “AI is useful” crowd, it might certainly be in theory, but we can’t ignore that it is being shaped by right wing extractive logics mired in cultural hierarchal commitments, that have very little interest in a utility that serves a broader social good.

The strangest (recurring) demand I’ve seen from self-appointed serious people is that while the “context” in which “AI” is being promoted and adopted, including the ends to which it is overwhelmingly put are, bad, we should set that aside when talking about it because in another world it’s different

citations are what tie you down to a shared reality and a shared discourse--to the inconvenient facts which discipline thought--instead of just spinning off into that gauzy mental space where everything is just the way you need it to be

anyways. i used to find academic citation practices extremely tedious. i still find them tedious! but there's a point to them: a discipline of the mind. sometimes what you think just is... isn't. sometimes what you want your interlocutors to say... just ain't what they said.

New It Could Happen Here @iwriteok.bsky.social argues that the current groundswell of public anger against data center projects represents an opportunity to hit Silicon Valley oligarchs where it hurts. linktr.ee/ICHHpod

Here is me, pleading with museum shops. We do not want yet another bookmark and eraser with your logo for 11 euros. We. Want. Replicas. Of. Your. Nerdy. Stuff.

Living under white supremacist settler colonial capitalism means we have to accept the inevitability of cyclical rebuilding. Plan it into our futures and avoid despair. This moment we are living in is unique, in its own ways, but it is also nothing new.

Canadian libraries too…

Snippet of dusk in progress

Today in You're* ** Wrong Abouts! *me, I was wrong **You'res Wrong About?

i like that Paul Simon gets big cocky with his theory that there's 50 ways to leave your lover, and then when pressed for answers he's only got like six and one of them is just "get on the bus"

It's time

💚💚💚🚌🚌🚌

I got real frustrated about the state of the scaffold conversation, so once again i wrote a newsletter about labour, danger, and being perceived. www.anxietyshark.ca/these-hands-...

Today I watched a CBC segment on YouTube that was promptly followed by an ad claiming the cure for Alzheimer's is diet advice from the Bible, but apparently that's not something the Canadian government thinks should be regulated, only access for kids.

The social internet got turned into a giant dopamine farm by a handful of companies who literally hired the same psychologists who design casino floor layouts, and the policy-makers just threw up their hands and said "guess we better ban kids from using the internet then"

June in Manitoba! Walked home from a party at 10:30 under an indigo sky smudged green with just-set sun in the northwest

It's nice to curl up on a couch on a rainy evening, listening to your friend read to her kid from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and wonder, as Eustace wanders into the fog, if they have giardia in Narnia

n.b. every goddamn Winnipeg Council member in standing committee delegations and to the press