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It's hard to have a lot of hope for the future, what with the ongoing, unrelenting genocide, the fire sale of public services, the rise of the extreme right, the incessant slurping of AI slop. This last one truly irks me, that we've just decided that the environmental, cognitive, and societal costs are worth polluting media with a deluge of false imagery and spam. I've heard speculation that this bubble will pop but what will that look like? It definitely feels like things are going to get a lot worse before any relief will come. I've been playing a lot of video games lately.. well, sampling games is more like it, just a taste here, a nibble there. I just find that I don't have the mental endurance to do much else after my evening chores. Even writing this is like pushing a cart through mud, the thick tar of my mind. Namely, I've been really enjoying Sworn ( Steam ), an unabashed copy of Hades but somehow a lot more fun. The game manages to hit the sweet spot of...

Our first family trip this year was to British Columbia to visit family and friends. Pre-trip drama: - Monkey had a bout of vomiting that lasted a couple days and the presence of blood (a tiny bit but still) prompted me to make a last minute visit to the veterinarian. Turns out he has a tumor or cyst in his abdomen, pushing on his liver and stomach. We got him on an  anti-emetic  and a soft food diet but it seemed like his time left was limited. - About a week before the trip our A/C stopped working -- air was coming through but it was not cold. It's an old unit, probably over 20 years, and was leaking coolant through a crack. We had someone re-fill and seal, a temporary measure that is currently allowing us to live sanely. Before the repair we were using fans and sleeping in the basement. The usual tactics. (If you ever need a big fan that blows HARD, get one of these bad boys .) Day 1: June 29th We were supposed to arrive in the afternoon but our Porter flight got pushed bac...

Actually I just wanted to drop a note regarding using Libby/OverDrive and my Kobo  device and the little journey it sent me on over the past hour or so. Basically, I had checked out a book  from the library but it simply would not sync onto my device, which had been working fine for as long as I could remember. Long story short, after much resetting, rebooting, and Googling, it turns out that the Kobo won't show you books that are not in Kobo library, regardless of whether the public library has them or not. I would've minded less if Kobo had at least informed me of this restriction so that I could avoid reading old Reddit posts for the answers. With that off my chest, I can give some quick reviews of my latest reads, in reverse chronological order. - The Unseen World (Liz Moore). While I had problems with the ending and the glossing over some of the technical details, I really enjoyed this story, a mystery of sorts. The relationship between father and daughter, of the father ...

So the Liberals have won themselves a minority government. Or rather, the NDP, by offering lame, too-little-too-late alternatives, transferred their seats to them by people who desperately wanted to avoid having the country headed by the un-pretty hate machine that is Pierre Poilievre. I am not happy that the Liberals won but I am relieved that the Conservatives did not. However, knowing that 40% of the country wanted that unctuous cretin as leader is frankly rather alarming. Yes, the country needs real change but no-one was offering a positive one. Can Carney be pushed to alleviate the woes of his fellow countrymen? Seems doubtful -- a former banker who talks about " catalyz[ing] private investment ", which sounds a lot like subsidizing private development and is not exactly the medicine we're all looking for. Those of us who'd like Canada to avoid becoming another burning hellscape have our work cut out. I while back I wanted to mention that I had to get a new winds...

"Interesting times are here again," is what I was thinking of saying. But then I thought, "Maybe not everyone thinks so." My writing skills certainly could use some panache. The Ontario election has really bummed me out; I was in a funk a for a couple days, musing over the futility of our provincial electoral system, the apathy of the masses, the limp challenges to the Conservatives' frankly absent campaigning. Why should my soul squirm so much? Just another sad little loss in a series of terrible outcomes. I suppose everyone's news diet is sated by the clamour and spectacle going on south of us, a government fire sale that can only end in tears and tear gas, the sputtering final stages of a failed state. It seems every day brings a fresh hell. It was nice to have a winter with real snow, a spotless blanket over everything. I know some people are sick of it but I'll miss its soft stillness when it's gone, an increasingly rare luxury by my numbers. I ...

A few years back I bought a YouTube subscription and it totally transformed my video consumption habits, realizing my fear of spending more time on my phone, something I'd been trying to get a handle of. Which is not to say that I can go back to sitting through commercials, that bane of modern life. Now, instead of listening to podcasts, I listen to YouTube videos, whether in the background of washing dishes or while farming monsters in Path of Exile 2; I'm exposed to more media than ever, for better or worse. My daily journey along the YT algorithm can go to some interesting places, and the other day I encountered one such place:  Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries , a video discussing the problems with the OLPC or "One Laptop Per Child" campaign/device, an initiative I myself funded  some seventeen years ago. The "interesting" part to me is having the failure spelled out, precisely and incontrovertibly, a lesson I hope that is heeded by all s...