Just finished The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie 📚
This is the 10th book in The First Law world, and the finale of The Age of Madness. (Also the 6th book of Joe’s I read this year!)
Phew! Epic! Done! So good!
A few more shots from our pre-Xmas celebrations in Vancouver on a pretty nice day! (which means overcast but no rain)
At the Hyatt was the annual Gingerbread House display, with a couple dozen gingerbread houses in all sorts of designs. Here are some wild examples:
Cool live jazz at the skating rink in Robson Square ❄️⛸️🎺🥁
Midnight Xmas tree 🎄 at the library
Haha the chaotic energy in this! 😂 But @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social surfed on it 🏄 Hilarious and insightful.
The Japanese Canadian Legacies Society launched a new website with educational resources for K-12 teachers. It has lesson plans, exercises, and tons of images to help students learn about the internment of 22,000 Japanese-Canadians from 1942 to 1947.
Happy to be alive … and to know all of you wonderful, inspiring people!
(Also, I’m pretty sure all the sedatives from yesterday have worn off 😊)
Today been a busy. Launched Protocols for Publishers ✨ London early in the morning, then took a taxi to get surgery. Now just woke up. Feeling groggy with a pool of blood on my pillow. Answered a few messages, mostly inbox is full of reservation notifications for the event. Lovely! Back to sleep 😴
Just finished The Trouble With Peace and couldn’t help myself and immediately picked up The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie 📚
Of the Top 20 Apps of 2025 on the Canadian iOS App Store there are only 4 I use, and all of them begrudgingly. I am like the Scrooge of popular technology, aren’t I? (Considering I still use an iPhone, I suppose not.)
Coast Contra is back at The Table!! (ﾉ＾◡＾)ﾉ︵ ┻━┻
So many online meetings today, back-to-back, that by the end I was losing my voice 🗣️
But lots of exciting progress for the next protocolsforpublishers.com 🇪🇺✨
Doing some Xmas shopping for my kids 🎁
Went to the neighborhood Holiday Party and met some more of my neighbours. Then we finished decorating the tree. 🎄
Today is an uposatha day so maintaining my fast while all these cookies are being handed out did not make me a particularly holly jolly elf. 🙃
This month has been… well, not easy.
But today I have had some time to relax. So I am sitting in my reading chair catching up on @mekongreview.com which always delivers on cool insights and new books to add to the pile. 📚
Neverpo.st interviewed Drew Lyton about building his own “cloud” server in his living room and thinking… there must be a better way. At DWebYVR we have a saying: “self-hosting is selfish.”. By the end Drew argues “the future is community-hosted”: we need a public-service cloud, a people-owned cloud.
Set up my profile and starred a bunch of sessions for #AAS2026 @asianstudies.org
Looking forward to meeting some Asia scholars that I have interacted with online but never met in person, and also many other scholars whose books I have on my shelf.
Been having strange dreams all week… but lying in a dark trench, cold and wet, delivering an extremely thorough explanation of all the various features of a luxury hand-stitched leather shoulder bag to Alan Rickman probably takes the cake.
Started reading: The Trouble with Peace by Joe Abercrombie 📚
Nearing the end of the whole cycle!! 🙀 Such a great series.