for those interested

A Young Girl By a Pool (n.d.) - Herbert James Draper (1863–1920)

On the Seashore

At some point I realized there were different versions of it, credited to different people. I tracked down the best quality version of each.

left: A Beauty Holding a Bird by Louis-Emile Pinel de Grandchamp (1831–1894)

right: L'oiseau Chéri ('The Beloved Bird') by Alexandre Cabanel (1823–1889)

The colours are different. In one version, her hand comes up higher above the window. Various details are different, including the pattern on the wall behind her. It’s impressive how well the hand, fabric, jewellery, and other details are emulated. But which is the original?

Cabanel is a more well-known artist generally. If you don’t recognize his name, you might still recognize many of his paintings, like The Birth of Venus or Nymph abducted by a faun. Grandchamp doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — what a nobody! — but you can find his work in many places, and, though it doesn’t link to anything, his name is mentioned on Wikipedia’s list of Orientialist artists, meaning Western artists who did works with Arabic or Asian influence, as this work does appear to be.

The Millennium Falcon was one of the stupidest pop culture phenomena. It's just a forgettable grey blob, it has no distinct features aside from its simple shape. Why did people in gen X think it looked so cool?

Say in country A, they get paid A$, and in country B, they get paid B$, and I tell you that A$100 is worth B$250. Which economy is better off? And who has more purchasing power if they took their currency to another country? The answer is you have no idea, there's not enough information in the question.

The critical detail is how much people get paid. If the average salary in A is A$100 and in B it's B$100, then indeed people from A have a higher purchasing power (it takes B 2.5x the work to afford the same stuff), but it's also possible the average salary in A is A$100 while in B it's B$900, in which case A$1 has more purchasing power than B$1 but a person from B is still wealthier.

So when you see that 1 USD is worth 1.40 CAD or 0.88 EUR, that doesn’t really tell you anything. The American economy isn’t better because their dollar has more purchasing power than a Canadian dollar, and it's not worse because their dollar has less purchasing power than a euro.

I made a video all about that

yknow if you're interested

I have some disagreements with both O’Toole and Singh, just as I had disagreements with Trudeau’s Liberals. Nobody’s perfect. But Trudeau, Singh, and O’Toole were all honest, well-meaning people. They cared about decency, rule of law, and above all they cared about Canada. I truly believe this. I slept well feeling this country was in good hands, no matter the election outcomes.

That was in 2021. I can’t repeat the above about our current CPC and NDP leaders. O’Toole was replaced with Pierre Poilievre, and Singh was replaced with somebody named Avi Lewis — both worse people whom I have next to no trust in, especially Poilievre. The Liberal Party, meanwhile, replaced Trudeau with Mark Carney, who was more moderate, and who maintained the tone of decency and professionalism that I was used to.

Notice how the qualified position — a judge asking if trans women with a specific type of criminal history should be moved — wasn't enough; he decided to go even harder, effectively saying “no, all trans women should be moved regardless.”

Is this new for Poilievre? Not exactly — he said in February 2024 that “obviously female sports, female changerooms, female bathrooms, should be for females, not for biological males.” Didn’t mention prisons specifically, but he made it known how he feels.

However, he also said “A lot of the spaces you described are provincially and municipally controlled, so it is unclear what reach federal legislation would have to change them,” indicating that it’s not really in his purview. And over the 4 years that he’s been in leadership, he really does barely ever touch LGBT topics.

there’s a pokémon in the path, so you can’t go past.

why don’t you just wake it up? you can’t, it’s sleeping and it can’t be woken. you need a special flute to wake it.

if I literally can’t wake it up even if I try, then why can’t I just like, go around it, or literally climb over it or something?

also, why can’t you just attack it? it’s sleeping. are we just being polite?

then you get the pokéflute and it wakes up, and it literally uses Rest in the battle to sleep again. and then you continue attacking it, even though it’s asleep. and then it wakes up in the battle, despite you not using a pokéflute to wake it again.

then after the battle, it faints. faints. if it faints, shouldn’t it just fall over and be in the path again? like, how is that so different from it being asleep, for my purposes?

It looks right when you turn it vertically, too.

But conceptually, I like the simplicity of the original rainbow. It’s a spectrum, all visible light, so it represents the natural diversity of life, and ergo there’s no reason to add anything to it because it already implicitly includes everything.

I always felt like it could look better, though, if we took more artistic liberty with colours. I don’t know how it was originally made, but at some point everybody settled on a version that looks like they just clicked the default colours and hit send without tweaking it at all.

I’m not an art student fluent in colour theory nonsense, but here, I tried to make a rainbow flag that looks better to me:

This is an example of a collective action problem. If the entire world was on board, then I say shut down all oil and gas, no new pipelines, nothing. I’m on board, because then we could actually accomplish this and literally save the planet. But currently, the world is fucking crazy and half the largest economies are governed by 70-year-old climate change deniers. Even if Canada reverted to medieval farming and had zero emissions, this place is fucked until that changes.

The realistic path to a green economy, and a future with less horrible foreign policy driven by oil dependence, is investing in that future, of course, but it’s most likely also expanding our domestic oil and gas sector in the meantime. The economic and political benefit is simply too much to ignore.

And the political reality, too: I wrote the above as though I’m an all-powerful government that can approach the issue rationally, but if you don’t manage the economy well enough, voters will reject you and vote in the same right-wing climate change deniers I mentioned, and they’re strip away environmental protections even harder, probably without even investing in the future. So then you lose either way.

This is the reasoning for why, even though I’ve said climate change is probably the single most important issue humanity faces, I’m in favour of the Canadian government expanding our oil and gas sector, reducing carbon taxes, or scaling back our goals for reducing emissions, to whatever degree they deem is appropriate as part of a broad economic agenda. The only thing we shouldn’t touch is whatever is required of us by any international agreement that other large industrial economies are also following.

Revisiting some of it as an adult, it’s much easier to articulate. The Simpsons is horrible and depressing. It’s a mirror world, a parody of ours, where everything and everybody sucks. It’s one of the most misanthropic articles of American culture.

It’s about Homer, who’s just some random idiot, who in the beginning is at least sort of a well-meaning person, but as the show goes on even that becomes questionable. His family is stupid and dysfunctional, which is probably largely his fault considering he’s a physically abusive alcoholic father. Despite their house being weirdly large, it’s intended to be low quality and the family constantly on the brink financially, despite Homer giving up on all his dreams to work a job he hates trying to maintain stability.

Speaking of which, his job sucks. He doesn’t like it, he’s not remotely competent at it. His boss mistreats everybody and is a criminal if not downright evil. The police are all stupid incompetents, the town is run by a horribly corrupt and cynical mayor who gets reëlected anyway because everyone in the town is stupid.

There’s a priest character who’s dry, petty, and burned out, basically just showing up and doing his job as a 9 to 5 without caring. The only person in the show with a positive disposition at all is their neighbour, Ned, whom Homer despises and whose positivity is just something to make fun of. as the writers destroy his life and take everything from him for laughs.

Homer spends his free time at a bar run by a depressed, suicidal incel who’s jealous of his wife, alongside his stupid alcoholic friends, one of whom has completely destroyed his life drinking and whom the show gives no relief or redemption (the punchline is “haha, this guy used to be happy and functional, but now he’s a miserable fat alcoholic!” and that’s it).

The children’s television is all mindless crap, orchestrated by Krusty, who’s a cynical, drug-addicted criminal who shamelessly does whatever gets him paid.

I also really dislike their portrayal of the elderly. Every older person in the show is portrayed horribly. It’s like they’re all dementia patients who sit around doing nothing and having no value to society whatsoever. It feels downright hateful, like everybody in the writing room had a bad relationship with their grandparents.

In each riding throughout the country, we vote in somebody to elect us in the House of Commons, serving as members of Parliament (MPs). The party with the most seats in the House becomes the governing party, meaning they control the Canadian Ministry, our executive branch. The leader of the governing party becomes Prime Minister (PM), meaning, among other things, that it’s up to them to appoint MPs to serve as ministers, hence the name Ministry. The collection of ministers is also called the Cabinet.