| culture, science | 2,993 words
TAGS: personal essay, video games, mathematics, Cultural Criticism
A love letter to the mathematics hiding inside video games, and a protest against the expression 'I'm just not a math person'. From parallel universes in Super Mario 64 to the technical exegetes mapping Animal Crossing, The Sims 2, Pokémon, and...
| french | 1,423 words
TAGS: personal essay, Language Learning, Social Commentary, philosophy, queer
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur le jeu de mots derrière «Brenjour», l'insécurité linguistique, et l'idée qu'apprendre une nouvelle langue nous donne une nouvelle âme. Sur la recherche en...
| indieweb | 2,158 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, Interview, Cultural Criticism, Social Commentary, personal essay
An interview with Benjamin Behnke, the creator of Bubbles.town, a community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs. After controversy on Mastodon and 32-bit Café over his use of Anthropic's Claude to categorize blogs and bypass...
| politics | 2,489 words
TAGS: Social Commentary, Cultural Criticism, politics, Social Justice, history
A refusal of the sanitized story that rights were won by asking nicely. The suffragettes bombed Westminster Abbey. The Deacons for Defense guarded MLK. Mandela was on the U.S. terror list until 2008. On the radical flank effect, the state's...
| indieweb, culture | 2,278 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, Cultural Criticism, Social Commentary, personal essay, philosophy
A personal plea from me to you to write your own comments. On the genAI plague of LinkedIn, Meta ads, and Medium, and the human warmth of the IndieWeb. From deviantART's old comment culture to Seneca's letters and the Vindolanda tablets, through...
| writing-craft | 2,940 words
TAGS: Social Commentary, Cultural Criticism, Media Criticism, journalism, personal essay
From Drudge to Salam Pax to Darnella Frazier and Zhang Zhan. The world needs citizen journalists. There has been a hollowing of Postmedia's local press, the radicalization pipelines mainstream coverage fails to trace, Andrew Callaghan's...
| indigenous | 2,552 words
TAGS: Social Commentary, Cultural Criticism, Indigenous, philosophy, Interview
After publishing my piece on Frances Widdowson this morning, she reached out to comment. What followed was an hour of argument, bad faith, and one remarkable final message.
| indigenous | 2,298 words
TAGS: Social Commentary, Cultural Criticism, Métis, philosophy, mental health
Ex-Mount Royal University professor and author of 'Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)' believes she is persecuted by grieving Indigenous communities and woke leftist academic institutions. She has...
| politics, culture | 2,138 words
TAGS: Cultural Criticism, Politics, Art, Media Criticism, Social Commentary
Why does reactionary, conservative art in modernity fail? A look at God's Not Dead, the Daily Wire's $100 million entertainment collapse, and how resentment produces derivative, hollow work that cannot generate any cultural magnetism.
| religion | 5,599 words
TAGS: personal essay, theology, Christianity, Buddhism, spirituality, philosophy, Métis
My testimony, from Dawkins on an iPod Shuffle down a back alley, through Buddhist libraries and a children's hospice, to Matthew's Gospel in a break room chair, My case for tragic theism: a God who creates, risks, makes mistakes, grieves them...
| writing-craft, history | 2,207 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, blogging, culture, history
My daily writing is a practice of releasing messages in bottles and folding paper cranes--from Montaigne in his tower and Johnson writing in poverty, to Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 cranes in a hospital ward. What the essayists, drift bottles, and...
| science | 2,382 words
TAGS: public health, covid, Long COVID, disability, policy, Social Commentary
A follow-up looking at the real, systemic intervention for the Long COVID mass-disabiling event: Clean air. MERV 13 filters, the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, and the Zadroga Act we still have to write to climb the bureaucratic wall of disability denial...
| culture | 3,139 words
TAGS: personal essay, Digital Culture, memes, writing, video games
A history of the word 'meme'--from Richard Dawkins coining it in *The Selfish Gene* in 1976 to Advice Dog and the death of shared internet monoculture--and what happens when you take memetics seriously as a theory of culture. Metal Gear Rising's...
| community, indieweb | 2,725 words
TAGS: personal essay, commons, IndieWeb, open source, Indigenous
A defence of digital stewardship, IndieWeb principles, Blackfoot models of collective flourishing, and what it means to plant seeds in a garden you'll never see. From Garrett Hardin's infamous 1968 essay to Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning...
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 2,302 words
TAGS: personal essay, road trip, masculinity, prairie, family relationships, Métis
A fifteen-hour road trip across Saskatchewan with my brother, watching the prairie unfold through grain elevators and abandoned towns. The quiet weight of prairie masculinity, the failure of academic knowledge to translate into brotherly wisdom...
| personal-favourites, writing-craft | 2,161 words
TAGS: personal essay, poetry, writing, mental health, neuroscience
I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley, shoplifting Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters, and I'm alive and writing today because of that. Recent neuroscience confirms poetry activates the brain's dopaminergic reward system, treats...
| lyric-essays | 2,007 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, theology, gratitude, Mental Health
My annual birthday essay on turning thirty: examining the cross-cultural agreement--from Confucius to the Hebrew Bible to Zoroaster--that thirty is when formation ends and function begins. My dark year of depression which turned out to be...
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 3,266 words
TAGS: personal essay, grief, Literary Criticism, spirituality, Mental Health
A eulogy for two kinds of loss: those who die and those who become simply elsewhere. Filtered through Didion, Barthes, C.S. Lewis, and Pema Chödrön. On ambiguous grief, the names written down so they don't disappear, and the sixteen-year-old who...
| writing-craft, religion | 1,915 words
TAGS: personal essay, poetry, philosophy, theology, gratitude
On the poets who found different terrors inside the phrase 'earn my keep'--Jeong Ho-Seung, Brecht, Heather McHugh, Kim Hyesoon--and the theological dispute over whether grace can be deserved, turning thirty in borrowed time, and the nuthatches...
| culture | 1,567 words
TAGS: Book Review, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Canadian Literature
A review of Jake Beka's sophomore poetry chapbook SINKHOLE--eleven poems across four continents and three generations, tracing patrilineal damage as a force that reshapes geography, contaminates water tables, and follows you across borders. A...