Last month I shared the new-to-me Lost Prophets podcast. I’ve made it halfway through the back catalogue to the episode titled “A Pause to Reflect” which if you aren’t convinced yet could be a great starting point. It encapsulates the concept of the show and also drops some excellent lessons they have learned along the way.
Basically, the show examines thinkers from the mid-20th century who grappled with the second order problems of modernity: technocracy, hyper-individualism, and more.
Ever since visiting the British Museum in February I have been on an Anglo-Saxon history kick: reading books, watching videos, listening to podcasts… That was certainly not on my “Reading Goals for 2026” list, but it kind of took over my media diet for the first half of the year. Early British history is not something I have ever studied before; I am an Asian Studies scholar since Grade 10, and prior to that we only learned about Britain in the formation of the Canada.
I slept quite a bit in Frankfurt. After two weeks of travel from Toronto to London to a wedding in southwest Germany and then walking Heidelberg, I was pretty tired out by the time I reached the last city in my multi-leg trip. The hotel I picked was the same one from last time I was in Frankfurt. Then I stayed just for one night after my transatlantic flight before quickly transiting to Mannheim, but this time I took an extra couple of days in to explore the city a bit more and meet a friend.
The overstuffed bed of the Seman Hotel in Kashgar was a luxury after a 30+ hour bus ride along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The lighting in the room was low, with shadows adding more complexity to the fancy moulding and cornices. I read Peter Hopkirk while leaning on a mountain of pillows.
Prior to becoming a hotel in 1950, the building served as the embassy of the Russian empire in the 19th century.
The churches of western Canada I have experienced are angular, one floor buildings constructed out of cedar or some such wood in the 1960s or 70s, usually with an era-appropriate abstract stained glass window often depicting a dove or flowers. Pretty basic, frontier stuff. Travelling to Germany I saw a lot of old impressive churches, but the insides were sparse, utilitarian affairs. Still, a level up for me. Although the fantastic Hagia Sophia in Istanbul started as church, its status as a working mosque puts it out of the running.
There is a cubby of my bookshelf with some ragged handwritten journals, dating back to my first real trip abroad to Thailand and Hong Kong in 1994. Most of my major trips have an associated journal, filled with disconnected chickenscratch, laid down at night in hostels and hotels after long days of seeing important temples or trudging through deserts, mountain passes, and crowded hot city streets. There is also a 5 Year Journal that my wife got me with entries from my years in Nagoya.
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
This episode of Peoples & Things completely nerd sniped me. On recommendation from Biella Coleman, hosts Lee Vinsel and Paula Bialski interview Ben Collier about his new book Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy (available Open Access from MIT Press.
I love ethnographic works on computing history and especially admire Biella’s book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking.
Recovering from the four+ days of the second annual ATmosphereConf, this year held here in Vancouver at the UBC campus. It was more than twice as big as last year’s inaugural event in Seattle, and even more international with many folks coming from Europe, Japan, and Brazil.
The community is very thoughtful about how to make hashtag#opensocial better for communities, as demonstrated by some excellent presentations from folks like Erin Kissane, Blaine Cook, Rudolph Fraser and many many more.
NDC are back.
exilic design [is] the act of knowingly building within the Para-Real… protecting our own memory through deliberate fragility.
(Emphasis mine)
the exilic are venueless. Their participants know the server won’t be there tomorrow. They treat the right to disappear, distort, and misremember as sacred, or at least, as inevitable. They document on their own terms, with their own tools, and preserve through adaptation. They recalibrate after loss, borrowing from sneakernet traditions for out-of-band transfer and redeployment.
Chad opens an event at Newspeak House At the top of Brick Lane on Bethnel Green Road in east London the streets are lined with four-storey buildings tightly packed shoulder-to-shoulder, alternating brick and plaster. At street level there are pizza parlours, cafés, vinyl record stores, and a shop that sells terrariums. One building, measuring four gabled windows across with two wide storefront windows at the ground level, has nothing in the display for sale.
An unexpected thing happened to me on my first trip to London earlier this month.
I stayed in Brick Lane close to the venue (which I will write about separately!) for the event I put on. The first four days I stayed in the area prepping for the event and meeting people, so pretty much just work work work… but after the event was over (and I finally got a full night’s sleep) I had 3 days to explore the city, which I did mostly on foot.
Last week the Canadian Competition Bureau released the report Your Data, Your Control: How data portability can unlock competition and empower consumers. The surprisingly readable report centers around an experiment exploring data portability in the insurance sector, calculating that “introducing data portability could save Canadians “between $1.10 billion and $3.83 billion in both time and money on their annual costs.” I decided to read the report to understand how the Canadian federal government thinks about data portability in general, with an eye towards other digital spaces like social media, cloud, AI, and the types of stuff I am interested in.
For a couple of years we kept a very small apartment in Kyoto for monthly visits while we were taking care of my parents-in-law. The rent was cheaper than getting a hotel each time, and my parents stored stuff there which justified the expense. The apartment was on the very edge of southwest Kyoto in a neighbourhood called Rakusai Newtown, a housing project started in the 1970s for the families of men working in the factories of West Kyoto.
From Evgeny Morozov’s essay Socialism After AI:
The driving imperative would not be “growth” measured as ever more commodities, but the enlargement of what people are actually able to do and be, individually and collectively.
On that view, AI would be judged by whether it opens new spaces of competence, understanding, and cooperation, and for whom. A tool that lets teachers and students work in their own dialects, interrogate history from their vantage points, and share and refine local knowledge would score highly.
Lewis Gordon on Frantz Fanon
This is a beautiful interview with Lewis Gordon, scholar of the work of Franz Fanon. Gordon contends that many people mis-interpret Fanon, especially around his views of political violence. Gordon’s reframing of Fanon is succinct and captures a side I didn’t get before.
Here are couple of choice quotes, but the episode is short and I encourage you to listen tot he whole thing. Dr Gordon is a great speaker.
Early Xmas!🎄🎁 New kit! 📷 I mulled getting a Fujifilm X100VI when they came out but wanted something smaller. Been watching the iteration of GRs and when they announced the IV I signed up right away. Gonna carry this thing everywhere!
#photography