A minor but annoying thing is if you search 'Islander Day' (the P.E.I. provincial holiday on the third Monday of February) on Google, it helpfully gives you a little 'knowledge' graph above the results telling you that Family Day's date is Monday, February 17, 2025. Mine helpfully has the word Manitoba underneath to tell me this is a holiday in Manitoba where I live. For those of you outside Canada, today isn't a national holiday, but many of the provinces in Canada decided to make a holiday that lines up with President's Day in the US and most of the provinces that did that decided to call that day 'Family Day'. Wikipedia reasonably enough groups these holidays together under a page called 'Family Day (Canada)' but there's no real reason for Google to do so when I search for Islander Day. Islander Day isn't more correctly called Family Day and neither is celebrated in Manitoba like Google told me, it's Louis Riel Day here.

N.B., if you search for Louis Riel Day, it may give you the same knowledge graph, or it might instead give you a snippet from a Saskatchewan culture site telling you Louis Riel day is observed by the Métis on November 16th. the Manitoba Métis Federation now refers to that as Louis Riel Commemoration Day and my location is set to Manitoba, but the Saskatchewan and Ontario Métis nation websites both just call the 16th Louis Riel Day and the Métis have the right here to say which day they observe Riel's legacy.

N.B., it is Family Day in NB

It's honestly so important to remember the word is as goofy as 'talky'

Best Director winner has to make a direct sequel to whatever wins Best Picture

I composed this piece based on the sound I got when I threw a basketball at an electone — Tucker is probably my favourite music I discovered through twitter

I think it is the Online Etymology Dictionary. I use it all the time and I feel like it does not get the credit it's due[by who, me?]

I was originally going to be more glib about this timeline apps article in the Verge a friend linked me too. I have a visceral, almost primal negative reaction to these apps, and David Pierce's suggestion of my current state of being does the article no favours:

You’re following creators on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, keeping up with your favorite memes on Tumblr and all the news on Bluesky, refreshing your favorite subreddits over and over all day, and checking your favorite news sites a few times, too.

The premise of these apps is that everything on the internet is a feed, and their promise is that you can have access to all these feeds in one place. This is, of course, the promise RSS made. It is also the memory many have of the heyday of RSS. Pierce even pitches these apps along with a plea to truly consider what you add to the apps—to take the retreat from unending algorithmic feeds toward a more curatorial approach. I think this impulse is good! But I think the premise these apps are built on is one we should chafe against and I think the promise of these apps is a trap.

RSS never was everything for me. I didn't have my messenger chats in Google Reader, or my email, or any of the forums I visited on there. I don't think it ever would have dawned on me to even want that. Some of that communication was synchronous and some of that would have been updates I largely didn't care about or wouldn't want to see until I actively went looking. I don't think everything is a feed (or at least it isn't in anything but the most superficial sense), and to treat it that way is to cheapen anything that doesn't fit nicely into that model. Even within my RSS reader I treat different things differently. I skim and mostly ignore my local paper's news stories but I save up Morning Music posts until I have a free afternoon to enjoy a curated experience. It's nice to know when there's something new to look for, but I do wish more places on the internet offered a place to just click around and find cool things like on my friend Casey's site. I consider One Gross Online a pale imitation, but it's page design and feed experience is aimed at making it a place to check out instead of just a feed to consume (whether it's there or not it is a goal to continue to aspire to).

My bigger problem with these types of apps (other than the fact that any of these social media and commercial sites will do their best to crush them if they gain any real purchase), is that a social media site is a place to be (or to avoid :) ). These apps simultaneously let these places run rampant and keep you out of them. The noisiest feeds will drown out the rest and have you reading everything as if it's from there. But also, you will be outside those places. Divorced of their context. It's sort of the other side of the coin from any of the tools that let you spam social media by cross-posting to both Twitter and Mastodon at once or Mastodon and Blue Sky (I've seen like 2 people who seemed to work out how to do this in a way that felt natural and you can flatter yourself to believe I mean you specifically if you were one of the people to do this). Even for slower sites like letterboxd that I unabashedly like, I am excited to see all the movies my friend Liz just added to her watch list. I would be sad if I didn't see that when I went to the site. I would hate it if that showed up in my RSS feed.

What's my thesis here? Tools that do everything rarely do anything well and even the best do it at the expense of some of those things? That places are and should be unique and to fit them into the same place is to strip them of any meaning or character? Sure. Let's pretend I made a full case for that. What does that mean for this posting into the void microblog I wrote this on? I don't know. I think my problems with it are sort of the problems I'm talking about and the answer isn't yet forthcoming to me. Watch this space (or add it to your timeline app so you don't have to)

Beocijies by Mail is live. My good pal kit has mailed me a webpage and it is now available to you over the internet

No flyers please

we cannot be held accountable for damage caused by carts i left in our parking lot

Walking through my neighbourhood i see Ukrainian flags and ‘stop the war’ messages, orange signs declaring’every child matters’ and also more ‘#bringthemhome’ signs cheering on a genocide than i can tear down on a single walk

I was making breakfast this morning and I had put my two eggs on the stove top so I could put the carton away. When I went to grab one of them I somehow accidentally knocked the other one toward me, off the edge of the oven. But, miraculously, it did not crack. It had just the right amount of momentum to land on the handle of the oven door and sit there

You ever notice how doubters of THE LINE seem to shut up whenever you point out what the shortest distance between two points is?

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Community Notes

Most objection to Saudi Arabia's 'linear city' is centered around the fact that the city will actually be an arc because the earth is an oblate spheroid.

The other day I watched middling, fate-based, romantic comedy, Sliding Doors (1998). In it, the romantic lead (played by John Hannah) regularly quotes Monty Python in a way that makes the movie feel even more dated. I think the first time he does it works quite well. A dejected Gwyneth Paltrow (of Goop fame!) has had an almost absurdly bad day when Hannah suggests she remember what the Monty Python boys always say. Paltrow reasonably guesses he means "Always look on the bright side of life", but he instead responds "Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition". The joke works because it is genuinely unexpected as a response and as a bit of helpful advice. As the movie goes on, we discover this quote is sort of a mantra of his and quoting The Monty Python boys is a regular habit of his. Charitably, Hannah's character has had a rough time of things himself, and it is a way of establishing a character finding humour in the disasters one can not plan form. I don't think the film does enough to sell that and it really just comes off as an affectation.

There's a sort memory 90s online (and sometimes offline) nerd culture consisting of just quoting Monty Python and it is maybe uncharitable but it isn't exactly wrong. As much as we might bristle at it in the particular, all culture can probably be summed up as nodding at or directly quoting a shared context. The sin is just in doing it so blatantly, broadly, and consistently to render any meaning or humour in the original lost.

All of this is to say that if I compare people endlessly quoting Monty Python to people endlessly referencing internet memes, I'm kind of left thinking at least some of the Python lines might have been well-written or funny when they were first said.

Seven, it's a number that many of us can count to, but is it a number that any of us can count on?

thank god

new PB

If you consider how long it took me to add thumbnails to my website, it honestly was pretty quick how fast I fixed the issue where landscape thumbnails were sideways.

I also made it so the tag pages were somewhat useful and got rid of the comment section because I forgot how to use it.

One day (maybe even one day this year?) my process for posting photos won't require me to copy/paste all the image IDs into a command line script

Winter is an underrated time for photography. Obviously, I love to take photos of flowers and insects and other things that are only around in summer, but when it's all white out it's a chance to really lean into texture and shadow as the focus of a photo

once in the game, and once in real life

What if there was a number, A such that X + A = X for any value X

I don't know if anyone ever thought of this before

Is the Twitter Logo (not a bird the brand guide is very clear that it was the twitter logo and not a bird) now called the X Logo?

The thing about "whatever wrapped" that is separate from whatever company is doing it is that the data you can track about a thing is not especially relevant to my experience of it. Yeah, my favourite album probably isn't one I didn't listen to^*, but iTunes doesn't know whether one of the times it played an album it was the perfect time and I still think fondly about it. Did I already complain about this recently? I'm not keeping track

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* Ok, but now that I think about it, I definitely said Hellraiser was one of my movies of the year the year after I first watched it. I was still thinking about it and it's probably better as a concept than a film.

the purpose of a system are the friends made along the way

a movie is basically the same thing as it's plot summary, but to really know a film you also have to read about it's continuity errors on IMDB

Obviously it is bad that companies compile and sell all this information about you but I feel like people don't worry enough about how keeping track of that information about yourself can lead to unhealthy habits. It's good to forget things sometimes or just not know something and be happy in that

It's my favourite holiday and I've been busy. I just published my Year in Review/Year-end Best Ofs/Plans for 2025 as well as my 2025 Qualtagh

I also posted my first photos of the year to my to my photo blog (yesterday I posted my last photos of the year if you missed that)

IMDB, there is simply nobody on Earth who has gone to Tarkovsky's page with the primary goal of finding out what three Additional Crew credits he has. What are we doing here

my aunt sends us a box of petit fours every year where some have letters on the top spelling out MERRY CHRISTMAS so then we spend time rearranging them to spell out different words and phrases

All the music in my library having a little arrow beside it that says 'downloaded'. You didn't download shit. You don't even sell a bunch of this

Is that their viewers might actually want measurements provided in both US customary units and in a metric unit. They are holding up the sky when they do a unit conversion once in their scripted content or copy both numbers off the spec sheet they were looking at in the first place

Once again remembering I need to rewatch it

The person across from me in this airport terminal is wearing a US Space Force toque, hoodie, and sweatpants

Don’t come a knocking

Normally when I travel I plan on checking a bag (as camera stuff takes up too much of a carry-on to fit everything else) so I put any liquids I need to bring there.

Today, I just had a carry-on bag but I had put the liquids in a different pocket than I remembered so I assumed I just forgot them when packing. Those liquids went through the scanner and the person didn't even notice. It's all a sham.

It is so annoying to deal with and yet do they have a single instance of it stopping anything? I bet that rule has a death toll and I bet it hasn't done shit.

Shoe thing also fake (Canadian security don't even make you do it. That's a TSA special) but it still feels more real

It should have to state it’s automated. This is not about LLM bullshit. Form emails should not get to pretend to be personal even if a human wrote it.

The expectation of this fake personal touch is the gross automation already

is corn

Why would i want a computer to tell me my ‘stats’ for the year? I can think and feel for myself

“It’s just a little fun”. It’s an ad. It’s all just trying to make you forget that the app doesn’t make the things you like. People do

My grandparents lived in the US, so every summer we'd drive down to visit them and some other extended family. One of the things I remember about there old house was the junk drawer in their kitchen. I remember it had playing cards, dice, rubber bands, and stationary. I truly don't think it had anything especially exciting or interesting for a young kid and yet I remember taking the time to root through it each time I was there. It was mundane but a slightly different mundane than I was used to.

Basically, this is my goal for one gross online

I feel like this site doesn't really count (though maybe I'll do some thinking about how I'm using it in the new year).

I started to do some planning for my year in review, and I realized I don't have somewhere I want to put it. The last few years I've thrown it on cohost and that seemed like the right place for it. I could reshare it a time or two and then it would fade away. It's not really something I need or want to be permanent.

Which is all to say, I added a sort of not-quite-blog to one gross online. Just a place to throw a few paragraphs of text. I've got some idle thoughts about Spelunky 2 there now. Whenever I have something new to say, I'll just write over it. It's like they always say, a cool URL is one that never changes. The logical conclusion is to keep it the same even as the content does. On the first I'll put up my ear in review. Maybe before then I'll have something else to say. Watch this space (or watch that one? [Watch neither and let your feed reader handle it for you?]). If anything there is worth keeping around I'll find a place for it.

I guess I did just write more text here to explain that I wanted a place to throw a few paragraphs of text. Best not to worry about it.

Was miserable.

removed word + added 'random' letter is too much for a clue. And then the amount of fill throughout the rest which is names of places/people and archaic words? fuck off

Actively hilarious that I thought I was going to recommend a movie every single week. I figured maybe I'd rewatch the movie and that would be it. For my new recommendation, I showed it to friends but also watched 3 additional movies. Anyway, project isn't dead (I'm still thinking about it a lot), but it is probably more like a monthly thing

for repeatedly calling John the Baptist Johnny Baps

I also think quantum computer stuff is never going to happen but I have way less background knowledge to back that one oup

I don't even dislike him, I just cannot imagine a single person choosing him over everyone else or even him winning a split vote with other directors

I think every profession should have its own egg dish

starting a new movie project

and yet it is easy to imagine a liberal Heathcliff wearing a Hamilton helmet