For CBC Arts, I wrote about why I think Canada needs to revel in the beauty of its weirdest impulses www.cbc.ca/arts/canadia...

I... think I may have to take back some things I've said.

Bleakly funny that Canada's lead* higher education consultant* is currently like, we should probably stop talking about Higher Ed and ponder Involuntary Conscription instead.

Wow! Go back up and ready this whole thread.

Truly impressive how quickly the nationalist squabbling and insults came out on here in the last few days. Real quick turnaround on that one from a bunch of people who were talking about community and solidarity for the last few years. It's everywhere I look now. GG.

New from Sam Popowich - Young's Five Faces of Oppression & Citational Justice, in an issue of Kula focused on Citational Justice that has some other interesting articles for librarians and pedagogues too! kula.uvic.ca/index.php/ku...

Do yourself a favour and go read this. Elegant, precise, and gives this moment its true name.

"touchless lead poisoning" ☠️

"The ultimate goal of termination, the court said, is to correct “unequal bargaining power” by giving artists and authors a chance to retake rights they’d sold away before they realized they were valuable."

Quite frankly, it’s outrageous that Mark Carney is cutting Statistics Canada. If he was Stephen Harper or Pierre Poilievre, I feel like this would be getting a lot more backlash. Carney of all people should know the importance of high-quality data and information about the country.

Because this affects a beloved friend (as well as countless students and faculty) I don't have it in my heart to add any cynical commentary. cca.edu/about/vander...

I really feel like 2026 is the year I fully become "the weirdo in the office behind the stairs (that seems physically improbable) whom you occasionally consult for arcane knowledge". People will vaguely suspect I'm a myth, or an exaggeration, and I'm going to start wearing flowing robes even more.

Everything is terrible, but having found out from our disabled neighbor that the city estimates another full week before our back lane is drivable, we went to dig her a path out at least, and another neighbour we've never met came and joined.

"The search firm was presumably paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. For that investment, UVA appears to have received a process that failed to conduct due diligence that could have been completed in an afternoon using free tools and widely accessible academic databases."

Giving my kid a classical education (Viking Kittens [Immigrant Song])

I actually remain unconvinced that LLM training on CC-BY+ licensed stuff is specifically permitted by the license, as the *main* building block is attribution, which is not part of LLM outputs.

We are watching Thor: Ragnarok, and I caught a movie reference my partner didn't: THE CASTLE! You're dreaming! (Don't spoil this for me)

hey i wrote a history of electronic music in canada from 1945-1985. it's called A Nation of Tinkerers and it's now available to pre-order through @invisibooks.bsky.social! invisiblepublishing.com/product/a-na...

At the blood drawing clinic 5 min after opening - behind about 30 people, and currently getting rick rolled.

A year's round up that is worth a read. www.startribune.com/umn-professo...

Day two of Winter Break: the three cheese pasta the kid is making smells suspiciously of candy cane eggnog.

"An academic discovers a paper attributed to him that does not exist has been cited 42 times" is a sentence with an actual referent in 2025.

434 Canadians have been detained by ICE. Only 6 of them had any criminal records. #DontGo www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

Winnipeg Leisure Guide Registration Day: clicked on the link the very first second, had under a minute wait, website redirect hung, class was full by 8:01. There has GOT to be a better way to do this.

We have had this problem here - like everybody - and we seem to have mitigated it ok with Anubis and other strategies. To me this problem very much underscores the *necessity* of having a responsive and competent IT structure, which...libraries have been divesting themselves of in rapid pace.

The Librarian and Archivist Lament - a site is neither truly discoverable nor preserved unless you've really really put the work in (or work with those who have).

Don't forget the CJAL CFP is due soon! CJAL special issue on Libraries, Humans, Machines details here: cjal.ca/index.php/ca... Questions? Just lemme know. #lis #libraries #cfp #library

Our poor kid has had defrag explained to them so many times, with real walked to school uphill both ways vibes.

📣 Our friends at the #ScholCommLab have published a preprint, "The Drain of #ScientificPublishing", and are calling for #research communities, funders, governments, and #universities to "re-communalise publishing to serve #science not the market" doi.org/10.48550/arX... #ScholComm #AcademicSky

#Winnipeg made guitar pedals that look like Hilroy Scribblers. :) winnipegelectricalco.myshopify.com/collections/...

I refer to my needs during this time as "winter cheese", and am still sad that the two best winter cheese restaurant options near work have closed.

sorry I'm late! I have at last broken my silence on Pantone's Color of the Year johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/cloud-danc...

Turns out preventative MRIs can save lives.

My favourite part of book ordering is just going through the Fernwood catalogue...

The problem with having an extremely stressful work day is I come on here for a 30 second steam release, and some dude is condescendingly calling a systemic review a literature review, and now I have to practice deep breathing for an hour.

One thing I've learned from my attempt to reread Agatha Christie books chronologically is that, while I have zero in common with her politically or in regard to her racial bigotry and hatred of jobbing gardeners, always look at what the actual outcome is if you want to solve a mystery.

A college student complaining about a grade on a paper is not national news. Not even close. The details have minimal import outside the class itself. Well-funded political activists targeting profs and TAs—in this case because they're trans—with the help of elected state officials? National issue.

If anyone is curious about the current list of search terms being used by right wing activist organizations to harass university professors, here's a public records request I received today from Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation. Not intimidating or meant to curtail by my speech at all, right?

I just really need to see brain scans of people who intuitively understand Super Smash Bros vs those (of us) who don't.

I will believe in the end of identity politics when steel and lumber (28,000 jobs and 105,000 jobs respectively) stop getting bailouts, while higher education (310,000 jobs) collapses in front of our eyes because it's full of ivory tower elites

The funniest thing to me about this article is the complaint about how difficult it is to get a 36 person Board to agree on anything, after they literally voted to get rid of the President, which is kind of a big deal! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Truly love when the consultant class takes over. Pure performance art.

We just got an email saying that our Uni Pres is... No longer our Uni Pres. 😳😳😳😳

Mutual aid should be a threat to the state, not a substitute for its “failures.” It is saying “the state does not do this & will not do this because it is built to oppress & exploit.” Mutual aid is a radical act of caring for each other outside of those systems of oppression.

i saw someone lamenting that turning off ai in gmail makes your inbox unusable-- the good news is you can still set up your own filters to do a lot of the same work, and maybe even better support.google.com/mail/answer/...

It is time for my annual "when the hell is American Thanksgiving actually" confusion, because I could have sworn based off a million emails over the last weeks that today *finally* had to be Black Friday.