#pc: calgary

[battle-of-alberta]

Who speaks the most languages? Also who has the best French?

well this just might be my most ambitious ask in a while :) shout out to the 1.5 francophones who may or may not follow this blog. And also for those 1.5 francos...

Clause de non-responsabilité

J'ai étudié 6 langues mais je suis toujours monolingue. :'(

Je ne suis pas franco-albertaine et je ne peux pas commenter sur le dialecte.

Mon éditrice @randomoranges n'est pas franco-albertaine, elle est québécoise*. Ah, et elle dit, avec plus d'élegance:

"nous pouvons répondre en français, mais svp demandez-nous pas d'le faire trop souvent, sinon notre pauvre artiste ira en burn out, malgré le fait que ses efforts feront rire sa consultante"

*cependant, selon le Lego, mon éditrice n'est même pas considérée québécoise haha >>;

more info below!

I already expect this piece to get less engagement because it's (mostly) not in English, and I'm afraid I'm still going to be more annoying and not provide a translation. As previously I will lean into making a statement Windex-style by purposefully not translating what I've written above into English just because the point of celebrating Franco-Albertan heritage month is, well, acknowledging the unique status of French in this country and how there is an expectation to conform to English in this province that needs a little challenging. I hope if nothing else, it strikes your curiosity enough to painstakingly type it into google translate so you can get half of the banter.

Another question that languished at the bottom of the box for over a year! This was because I felt I should make a real effort to write in French, of course, but also because I struggled with the wording of the question and ultimately didn't answer it. The "most" or the "best" are very loaded terms, so I avoided answering them entirely particularly because we have several languages that risk losing native speakers and because there's a lot of bs wrapped up in what "good" french is that I'm not skilled enough to unpack (though you can read what Windex wrote on this matter earlier on this blog... And here as well).

I have to strike a balance between representing the gang here as individuals (and immortals to boot) who have a lot of time on their hands and some interest and investment in learning languages on one hand... but also as representations of "average" people on the other. Francophone travellers aren't going to find many French speakers outside of airports, national parks, or government services in this province, but it still might surprise you considering all the "everyone outside of Quebec hates French" rhetoric that politicians like to fling around. It's more complicated than that, obviously, but I can mostly talk about my own personal experience with French here. I tried to represent both the reality that Franco-Alberta exists (represented by Ed) and the stereotypical resistance to French here (represented by Calvin, though clearly he understands enough to respond here. I also just think he tries to play dumb on purpose so that others underestimate him, it's all part of the image!)

Finally, I don't speak any of the languages (Michif, Tagalog, Punjabi, Cree) represented here so I hope they pass muster for the purpose of this little comic! ;~;b I have also represented Calvin speaking Mandarin previously on this blog!

oh yeah, and that "english and business" quote is from kevin o'leary who is from montreal so make of that what you will.

#Anonymous #projectcanada cities #boab ask #pc: edmonton #pc: jasper #pc: grande prairie #pc: calgary #pc: strathcona #edward murphy #calvin mccall #jasper swift #josephine cardinal #edith garneau #hapo art #digital art #clip studio paint #i had to handwrite all the diacritics so i apologize if they've moved accidentally #this font doesnt come with accents so i decided to just manually add them

[acetechne]

"Family" - Opus Daily Practice 19

Happy Family Day from our @battle-of-alberta family to yours :)

Family Day is an Alberta invention, proclaimed by then Lieutenant Governor Helen Hunley on suggestion from then Premier Don Getty to promote family values and spending time with each other. It has since spread to many other provinces, but is not a federal holiday. And yes, it's the same day as President's Day on purpose!

#opusdailypractice #projectcanada cities #projectcanada #iammatthewian #iamp: alberta #pc: alberta #pc: edmonton #pc: calgary #pc: red deer #ralph campbell #elaine hartley #calvin mccall #edward murphy #and yeah bert cheers for the oilers because i said so mwah #hapo doodles #boab illustration #ink

[randomoranges]

some prince au nonsense. is this one of cal's fantasies where he comes back from some battle all heroic like and gets to sweep up his favourite prince off his feet? is this reality? is this étienne's fantasy? are they both into it? who knows!

#pc: montreal #étienne maisonneuve #pc: gary #pc: calgary #calvin BRISEBOIS LAMAO #tw: blood #windex attempts to draw

[surfingthesealand]

A little something for @acetechne's birthday, starring the Texas boys and the @battle-of-alberta cities! Howdy from down south! 🤠⭐️ 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🎂

#my art #surfingthesealand draws #the lonestar boys #lonestar boys #lonestar #the lonestar boys big five #the lonestar boys: the big five #texas #texas boys #project canada #pc cities #the texas boys #pc: calgary #pc: edmonton #pc: lethbridge #pc: medicine hat #pc: red deer #alberta #battle of alberta #boab #boab cities #crossover #oc crossover #flags #calgary #edmonton #lethbridge #medicine hat #red deer

[allbeendonebefore]

(this is right to left not left to right sorry)

going through photos of comics i drew at work in 2019 that i never posted and nothing is funnier to me than this really angsty comic of ed yelling at calvin for ghosting him for 9+ months (and then the smoke alarm going off because he started burning what he was cooking) being immediately followed by this

#hapo rambles #pc: calgary #pc: edmonton #pc: fort mcmurray #hapo doodles #edward murphy #calvin mccall #reginald buffalo

[sundownintheparisoftheprairies]

phone cases @allbeendonebefore OC pc: Calgary would have. as a Calgarian.

starting off strong with a flames phone case. the horse one of course.

let's keep with the horse theme. he is the horse girl.

This gives very much. downtown Calgary stuck in the 80s forever vibes.

A must. Is he an over enthusiastic city goer?. A teen who must work there to make money? random politician that you've only seen flipping pancakes? part of the marching band?. the world may never know.

Banff is the second home to every Calgarian.

Rancher wannabe? murals on the side of buildings?. Yes.

last and certainly least. the blue ring. if you know, you know.

#im procastinating #can you tell? #pc: calgary

[attichoney4u]

A fanart featuring @allbeendonebefore 's character, Calvin, aka the personification of the city of Calgary in @battle-of-alberta (Ed will also receive his own fanart sooner or later), and Lucky Luke, a childhood hero of mine.

For those who don't know, Calvin is one of the main characters in @battle-of-alberta , a series featuring personifications of citied from Alberta, Canada, while Lucky Luke is the titular hero from the comics of the same name, an Affectionate Parody of the Western Genre, and he's known as "the man who shoots faster than his shadow". He's accompanied by his incredibly skilled horse, Jolly Jumper, "the world's fastest horse" and sometimes, by Rantanplan, "the world's stupidest dog". He mostly faces bandits and outlaws. His most frequent opponets are the Daltons, four dumb brothers who want to take revenge on him, for sending their cousins to death.

The reason why I did it is because Calvin gave me huge cowboy vibes and Lucky Luke is a cowboy (albeit, we've never seen him attend herds), so it only made sense to put them together and have them wear each other's outfits (though, knowing Lucky Luke, he would never wear something as fancy as Calvin's 😂).

And now that I'm thinking it, I should have drawn them both in a similar style, but ok, enjoy the result, I guess.

#fanart #pc: calgary #calvin mccall #lucky luke

[roniebuttercups]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Hetalia: Axis Powers Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Edmonton/Calgary/Montréal Characters: Calgary Alberta (Anthropomorphic), Montreal Quebec (Anthropomorphic), Edmonton Alberta (Anthropomorphic) Additional Tags: Fluff, Domestic Fluff, self-care, Sleepovers, Hair Brushing, One Shot, can be seen as romantic or platonic or queer-platonic, up to you, Soft Boys, Historical References Series: Part 2 of IAMP/PC Fics Summary:

Cal's been having a hard time recently... time to destress!~

@randomoranges @allbeendonebefore

#welp posting this a year late ig #is it obvious that I love cal??? #pc: calgary #pc: edmonton #pc: montréal #my writing #fanfic #fanfiction #project-canada #boab #battle of alberta #iammatthewian

[the-quotable-alberta-hansard]

March 27, 2024

Mr. Nicolaides: The only ones who are intent on driving ideology into the curriculum were the NDP when they were in office. They were determined to ensure that social studies creates, quote, agents of change. End quote. That was their objective. They had a very clear ideological objective with the curriculum.

#only this lot would put Agents of Change in scare quotes #thanks for admitting what you're afraid of #also that phrase was in place under the PCs #alberta #alberta politics #ableg #Demetrios Nicolaides #Calgary-Bow #UCP #cdnpoli

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #linkdump #linkdumps #junk fees #fcc #ai #ai hype #labor #unions #hamilton nolan #history #cfpb #privacy #online harms #ai snake oil #anne dagg #anne innis dagg #obits #rip #mobile #net neutrality #5g

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Why did the Alberta NDP lose the 2023 provincial election? The major flaw at the core of their strategy was deciding to make an explicit pitch to historically conservative voters in Calgary and the suburbs surrounding Edmonton. The idea was that voters would be so repulsed by premier-elect Danielle Smith’s embrace of COVID conspiracies and Alberta separatist fantasies that enough would reluctantly support the NDP just for this election. From that assumption flowed four major mistakes to learn from next time. Mistake 1: Making it about leader personality: The NDP’s strategy produced a campaign centring largely around Smith’s personality and suitability for the premiership, rather than more substantive policy debates. To the extent the NDP offered alternatives to Smith’s policies, they were tailor-made to woo former PC supporters who were asked to “lend” their votes to the NDP. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada, @abpoli

#cdnpoli #NDP #Alberta #provincial elections #Rachel Notley

[battle-of-alberta]

Who had the happiest childhood ?

well over a year later i finally tackle this question! it was at the bottom of the box because one of my weaknesses is drawing children, and another one is the necessary historical research to draw their childhoods :' ) but i really wanted to start imagining them because it's very important to the overall story i'm trying to tell here.

here's the main gang, who were children at one end of the 19th century or another. I don't really know how to answer the question (they all lived through some very rough times, even if they didn't know as much) but I can give a little bit of an explanation for the times they grew up in...

[but most importantly, who do you think was the cutest?]

Ed and Jas were kids in the early decades of the 19th century (the regency era). They didn't really have a sense of the outside world much at all (Ed in particular had a very inflated sense of self importance he has since lost) and moved around a lot to follow the fur bearing animals (typically beavers). I feel like they were often getting into scrapes like this!

Cal and Lil grew up in the 1870s when the Northwest Mounted Police were establishing the Canada-US border. Calvin doesn't realize that his childhood enemy Fort Whoop Up and Lilith are the same person, so he tends to think of Lilith as younger than him. Lilith knows better, of course, but I guess she wanted a fresh start. In some ways, they were both only a bit spoiled as kids, though Lilith was less sheltered.

Jo and Mac didn't really interact much as they were isolated for most of their childhoods and didn't really hit their first growth spurts until the 20th century. It's hard to imagine their childhoods (or that Mac was ever a child haha) but they must have been quite lonely, so I figure they had to have pretty big imaginations to cope during the times Ed wasn't around.

Nor, Red and Maddie grew up in the railroad era of the 1880s-90s, although Nor and Maddie were the railroad resort and energy princesses respectively. Red depended far more on carriages and later vehicles passing through on their way between Ed and Cal's places. [also, do not attempt to cuddle bear cubs or feed them chocolate biscuits!!]

#Anonymous #projectcanada cities #historical hetalia #hetalia oc #pc: edmonton #pc: calgary #pc: jasper #pc: lethbridge #pc: grande prairie #pc: fort mcmurray #pc: banff #pc: red deer #pc: medicine hat #hapo art #clip studio paint #digital art #boab ask #edward murphy #jasper swift #calvin mccall #lilith sheran #josephine cardinal #reginald buffalo #eleanor crandell #elaine hartley #madeline hargrave

[acetechne]

Truth be told I drew this days before the Boopening but it seems relevant :)

#projectcanada cities #pc: edmonton #pc: calgary #or is it projectcatnada #hapo doodles #ink #traditional art

[randomoranges]

BOGO!

Ed loves a good deal! How could he resist????

#pc: montreal #étienne maisonneuve #pc: edmonton #edward murphy #pc: calgary #calvin BRISEBOIS LOL #art #windex attempts to draw

[preservationofnormalcy]

OOC: I guess I can talk about this now that I know I'll be off that day.

Barring anything bad happening, will be at the Bunka Hashi convention in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada on September 30th!

This is two hours south of Calgary. A friend of mine is giving me some table space at her table, and I will have posters and stickers there. If you do meet me, all I ask is please do not post pictures of me. If all goes well, I might even have some stuff available for purchase there that won't go up on the shop until after!

I've gotten a lot of new followers that might not know all of the posters and stickers (with some out of stock at the moment) are available here!

In addition, PC wallpapers have been a big request, and I finally got some of them done! I've put up pack 1 here, 9 designs, for $5 CAD pay what you want. Thanks for being patient, and please give me any feedback you like on them. The second pack will hopefully be up in the near future.

#ooc post

[allbeendonebefore]

Monmongary Week(end) returns!

Windex was abroad experiencing life the universe and everything last month so we delayed it until August this year, but once again we are celebrating the bizarre relationships we construct between our OCs.

What is Monmongary Week

It’s like a ship week where we draw art and write stuff about our three city personifications Montreal, Edmonton, and Calgary. You’re welcome to join in too if you like! It can be platonic or romantic so long as it includes at least two or all three of the characters. It’s also called M3 Week because their last names all start with M (until I finally go rogue and change one)

WHY on earth is this a ship

Because we are friends and have ocs so it’s our legal obligation to put them in Scenarios for their own development, hope that helps.

Where are the character refs

My refs:

Ed: Masterpost | 2020 Ref Sheet

Cal: Masterpost | 2020 Ref Sheet

@randomoranges‘ refs:

Étienne: Bio | Tattoos

How do I do the Thing

tag art and writing as #monmongaryweek or us at @allbeendonebefore and @randomoranges so we can find it. You can check out previous examples here. If you need any help with French, @randomoranges has your back.

There’s no prompt list or deadline this year, you’re free to use previous years prompts or give us a shout if you need some inspo.

Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5

We’re aiming to do stuff this coming weekend but if stuff gets posted a little later, that’s a-okay.

#monmongaryweek #monmongary week #pc: edmonton #pc: calgary #pc: montreal #hapo rambles #randomoranges #edward murphy #calvin mccall #étienne maisonneuve #m3week #m3 week