Similarly hideous massive SFH mansions go up in Oak Bay all the time, replacing tiny lil cottages, and no one says "boo" unless the new build is for two or more families... in which case, it's the devil. (ie: It's not the size, it's the classism.) #OakBay #YYJ

AI tech bros promising to allow you to talk to a digital simulacrum of your dead relatives as a false comfort during your natural process of grief are, I’m afraid, in contravention of the 1736 Witchcraft Act, the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act, and should be hanged. I don’t make the rules.

Works for Canada, too

Douglas Adams truly was the prophet of our times eh? This is now 99% of online interactions

So loads of people are sharing an obvious ai "glow up" of an actual photo. I never share ai stuff even to dunk, but in this case I'm sharing a comparison to show the problem. We have to stand against this slop at every level or it becomes normalised. They want us to stop caring. See alt text.

Thinking about this quote from Persepolis creator Marjane Satrapi again.

I heard stories of people who've fed crows, and been given gifts in return. It sounded charming, so I began doing that. Then, one night, there was a rapping on my bedroom window. I stumbled up and opened. A crow flew in and spoke: "They're coming for you. You must flee." I only just made it out.

The campaign is underway for Tumbler Ridge to be a finalist for the Hockeyville contest this year. Winner gets arena upgrades and an NHL preseason game. Among those endorsing is Hayley Wickenheiser hockeyville.kraftheinz.com/community/tu...

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

A fascinating thread about research into how our brains work

With a shoutout to @todmaffin.com

Just a reminder that Canadian fans massively subsidize American NHL teams. Just thinking about that today... The NHL is a massive re-distribution scheme that extracts money from Canadians and sends those funds to unsuccessful southern American businesses. utoronto.scholaris.ca/items/f8821f...

What sucks about our current era is upon witnessing this truly magnificent footage I first had to spend several minutes just trying to figure out if it’s a buncha slop AI bullshit.

2026 basically

Side research find: an 1859 editorial about rowdyism in Chatham, Canada West. Chatham Tri-Weekly Planet, December 6, 1859. #cdnhistory

They released this like this Why would anyone ever drive a car by people who do not Look At MEASUREMENTS

Tonight’s dumb napkin cartoon…

So people are talking about fertility again. I keep some notes/links here 👇 FTR "I think women having control over their fertility is a good thing. I am not in the business of convincing women to have more children for reasons that aren’t in their own best interest" sites.google.com/view/tammysc...

i think this is what drives me nuts. people talk about how, say, the UN was founded by "starry eyed idealists" who didn't understand "reality." the truth is that the UN was founded by those who had just fought and *won* the bloodiest war in human history.

Does this curse also count for the tech bros who illegally used books written by me and countless others to help AI annihilate the world? I fucking hope so.

Green Day have to be the only band to play the Cameron Bandshell in Beacon Hill Park and the Super Bowl

"Frictionless" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this headline

Read the thread, then for more of this thought-provoking and poignant hilarity, subscribe to @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social's website, and buy his book _Notebook_ (and the rest of the Tom Cox canon while you are at it) blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro...

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

❤️

Trends that surprise no one, in the form of a thread of charts that clearly show the enormous magnitude of various social changes in the past 50 years (Canadian edition)

It’s funny how Wikipedia used to seem relatively unreliable, because it was written by regular people instead of encyclopedia experts, and now it seems relatively reliable, because it’s written by regular people instead of glib CliffsNotes robots

I thought it might be nice to give away my last 2 signed hardbacks of my novel 1983, with two lovely linocut hares by my mum. All you have to do to enter is repost this (& leave a reply). The book's been called "Stranger Things rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut and Sue Townsend”. Extract in the replies.

For every prediction that might give a chuckle, there is one that is spot-on.

Take a screenshot of this GIF, and whichever new word you land on is YOUR word for 2026. Let's. Go.

A top-notch reflection on all the things, good and bad, about life with the internet. PS: You have three years to print your photos. Get on with it.

Excited to launch the new improved Reproducible Code guide from @britishecologicalsociety.org @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social FREE online here! www.britishecologicalsociety.org//wp-content/... Amazing work by some very talented ECRs. We hope it’s useful!

Required reading

Had to clamber over a barbed wire fence, rip my coat and trespass to get a photo of this folkloric monster pretending half-successfully to be a tree. I have no regrets.

57 years ago tomorrow (December 21, 1968) the Apollo 8 crew embarked on its historic lunar orbit mission. As I do every year as a Christmas treat, I’ll share some of my favourite discoveries and observations about the Greatest Space Adventure Ever. 1/n

every single “masculinity” influencer should be required to get in the ring against a professional boxer once they hit 500 subscribers

Jane Austen used 'however' at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.

On FB, Yukon Geological Survey posted some spectacular photos of landslides & snow avalanches triggered by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake on Dec 6 in the St Elias Mountains. Here are some of my favs. @geocron.bsky.social @theronfinley.bsky.social @davepetley.bsky.social @ksvenenvig.bsky.social 🧪⚒️

this photo from the Seattle flooding by Nick Wagner of The Seattle Times

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

This dataset, which claims to provide a single IQ value for each country, is in the news again. Here's a thread on my dive into the data a couple of years ago. I didn't have to look far to find major problems. My #rstats code is linked at the end. 🧪

One of my neighbors has been putting up these fish facts posters. All kinds of different fish, marine, freshwater, deep, shallow, all kinds. This is a good one. “Stg this real fish” took me out. Good work, neighbor.

i dont want to live in a world that values gambling apps and ai i want to live in a world that celebrates mustard and puppets

This kind of dense, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities

The new data show Alberta, not Ontario as previously understood, has the highest case count of any province, despite having a much smaller population. Ontario publicly reports probable cases. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alber...

Geneviève Bergeron, 21 Hélène Colgan, 23 Nathalie Croteau, 23 Barbara Daigneault, 22 Anne-Marie Edward, 21 Maud Haviernick, 29 Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31 Maryse Laganière, 25 Maryse Leclair, 23 Anne-Marie Lemay, 22 Sonia Pelletier, 28 Michèle Richard, 21 Annie St-Arneault, 23 Annie Turcotte, 20

My friend works on a Great Lakes freighter and was born just hours after the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. He wrote something about it on his site (where he often writes about life on the big freshwater lakers).

"In the evening the bats weave soft black circles and their wings splash delicate ink upon the pale blue air..." Joseph Auslander (1897-1965) 🎨 Eric Fitch Daglish (1894–1966) #BookologyThursday

Look, I know these inflatable decorations are lazy. And a few years ago I was lazy. But then we learned about the neighbour girl with autism whose parents take her to see these every night and, well, we’re the dinosaur house now. I had to wait in line to take a picture of my own dinosaurs tonight!