Page 4 of 524

Mastodon is Probably not the new Twitter


Twitter is beginning to circle the drain. I saw someone’s estimate that it will be toast by year’s end. This is bad for many reasons but the biggest one is that progressives have been able to effectively use Twitter to mobilize against really bad shit since 2015. Once Twitter is gone, we’ve lost an important, easily accessible social platform to find each other and share important shit.

Mastodon is just one social media site offering itself up as a lifeboat but it’s a decentralized union of servers and it’s ease of use is on the higher end of not really intuitive at all. It’s laggy. It’s picky in terms of what desktop browsers it will interface with. And the app is really not great. But I am there for the moment.

Sadly, I think the era of social media is drawing to a close. At least this iteration of it anyway. I think this is a bad thing but it isolates us from the larger world. It isolates us even within the worlds we inhabit because it’s not like media is being terrible helpful in terms of providing us with information we need rather than information some billionaire would prefer we have.

Is it possible to have a dark age in a highly civilized world? I think we are about to find out.

Emergency Act Inquiry


While Americans gear up to, hopefully, vote out the insurrectionist faction of their federal government, Canadians are in day upteenth of the mandatory inquiry of the use of the Emergency Act that cleared our capital city of coup loving squatters last winter.

Though not as dramatic as the January 6 assault on the U.S. Congress, the convoy of those who love freedom for themselves but not for others was a serious threat to our country for weeks. It rolled out into the provinces in the form of weekly truck parades for racists and anti-vaxxers. It blockaded at least two border crossings and included at least one fairly organized plot to assassinate RCMP officers in Alberta.

The inquiry into whether or not the federal government was correct in using the Emergency Act, which replaced the War Measures Act during the Mulroney era, is mandated by the act itself. Any government that deems it necessary must then allow an independent inquiry to ensure that it was.

The vast majority of Canadians (and nearly the whole of Ottawa, which bore the burnt of the occupation) will say “fuck yes it was necessary”. But there are still pockets of white nationalists and their anti-vaxx comrades who are still smarting from the general rebuke they received. Their plan to force the sitting government to resign and allow them to become dictators in their place wasn’t greeted with accolades and gratitude from those of us they want to rule over with a white nationalist fist.

The inquiry has been all manner of what the fucks. Police corruption and complicity. Provincial government abdication of authority and complicity. Bafflement that people as dumb and disorganized as the konvoy klan managed to last a day let alone weeks. Revelation after horrifying revelation, really.

Image and narrative damage for occupiers, however, is really killing their cause. So much so that Preston Manning emerged from the mothballs to announce they would be holding their own inquiry into the matter. A people’s inquiry. Of people. Real people. Not experts or journalists or people who think they are nutters. I’m sure this won’t be a circus.

It’ll be a circus. Probably a travelling one ferried from province to province by a parade of trucks.

Gonna Write that Novel on The Snowy Day


As I mentioned yesterday, it’s NaNoWriMo time and I was musing about getting back to writing that actual first novel for once. So today, I started it. I have decided to fictionalize the life I didn’t have. The one where my natural mom kept me instead of giving me away to be adopted. I am going to say that so far, I am not envisioning an existence that is much of an improvement over the one I ended up with but it’s only chapter two.

I started using a planner again to map out my days and weeks, which is proving valuable in terms of cleaning, decluttering, and writing. Hopefully it will help me finish this novel. End goal? A short novel by the end of the month. And then we will see where to go after that.

In other news, it’s snowing like a bastard. I don’t know that I have ever despised winter as much as I do now. Snow has its sports but most of them are funding intensive. Winter is mainly a chore and a hazard for people who are forced by necessity to leave their homes and navigate the world. Municipalities have become worse and worse at making winter semi-endurable. Roads are shite. Sidewalks are worse. The inability to safely get about does nothing to make this season more appealing. I don’t care how pretty it looks.

When I was a kid, I loved snow. I spent hours outside. Sledding. Building forts. Skating. I was the last child in nearly every night. Pant legs frozen stiff and face chapped with wind burn. There was something peaceful about the dark with just starlight and a frozen moon looking down on you. But when you’ve adulted in winter as long as I have, the lustre wanes.

I was hoping the endlessness of day after day snowfall would hold off another month but that doesn’t appear to be our fate this year. And I still don’t have the snow tires on the truck. Wish me luck.