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Podcast Friday - The foreseeable escalation trap in Iran

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:15:13 GMT

American prestige - Strategic Bombing, Air Power, and the War with Iran w/ Robert Pape (Preview)

Prof. Robert Pape, who's teaching military strategy, has been modeling the invasion of Iran by US forces for 20 years, and basically predicted how most of these blunders would happen. This is a paid episode of American Prestige but the 7 minutes they excerpted here are the most important of the episode.

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Podcast Friday - War in the Gulf and the Global Economy w/ Esfandyar Batmanghelidj

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:03:25 GMT

American Prestige - War in the Gulf and the Global Economy w/ Esfandyar Batmanghelidj

A quite insightful podcast episode on how much the Trump administration and the EU fucked up the JCPOA/commercial relationship with Iran, and how difficult it's going to put it back on the rails, if ever.

#PodcastFriday, on Thursday. 😅

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#PodcastFriday is a tag where people recommend a particularly good episode from a podcast. The point of this tag is NOT to recommend entire podcasts--there are too many podcasts out there, and our queues are already too long, so don't do that. Let's just recommend the cream of the crop, the episodes that made you *brainsplode* or laugh like crazy. Copy this footer so people don't start recommending whole podcasts. :P\

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Podcast Friday - Race, genre, pouvoir : où va la société ? - Rokhaya Diallo

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:49:19 GMT

Sismique - Où va le monde ? - 149. Race, genre, pouvoir : où va la société ? - ROKHAYA DIALLO
Partie 1 - Partie 2

Entrevue très nuancée en deux parties sur l'intersectionnalité, avec un hôte qui devrait en savoir plus et une invitée très intéressante, une des animatrices du vieux podcast Kiffe ta race.

149. Féminisme, racisme structurel, intersectionnalité : Rokhaya Diallo expose et défend une autre lecture de la société.

Les débats autour du féminisme, de la race, de l’identité ou de la laïcité occupent une place de plus en plus centrale dans nos sociétés. Mais ils sont souvent abordés à chaud, à coups de slogans, dans des logiques de camp qui empêchent toute véritable compréhension.

Et si, au lieu de les esquiver ou de les caricaturer, on prenait le temps d’en explorer les fondements, les tensions, les promesses — et les dérives possibles ?

Dans cette conversation passionnante, Rokhaya Diallo, journaliste, essayiste et figure majeure de l’antiracisme et du féminisme français, nous propose une autre grille de lecture. Une lecture située, incarnée, dérangeante parfois, qui met au jour les angles morts de la République, les héritages coloniaux que la France peine à regarder en face, et les formes d’exclusion que produisent encore nos normes les plus “neutres”.

En s’appuyant sur son Dictionnaire amoureux du féminisme, elle interroge les rapports de pouvoir liés au genre, à la couleur de peau, à la classe sociale ou à la religion. Elle explore des concepts souvent mal compris — comme l’intersectionnalité, le privilège blanc ou le racisme structurel — tout en répondant aux critiques sur l’essentialisation, la polarisation ou les effets pervers de certaines stratégies militantes.

Dans un monde où les démocraties sont de plus en plus fragilisées, où les extrêmes gagnent du terrain, où la peur du “wokisme” devient un outil politique, cette conversation aide à comprendre ce qui se joue. Et à poser, en profondeur, la question du vivre-ensemble : comment construire une société juste, égalitaire, réellement inclusive — sans renoncer au débat, à la nuance, ni au commun ?

Une discussion exigeante, parfois inconfortable, mais nécessaire. Pour comprendre les fractures de notre époque — et peut-être, commencer à les réparer.

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Podcast Friday - The Axis Burns: F-35s in Tehran & Putin's 30 Trillion Ruble Crater

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:10:24 GMT

The Eastern Border started as a Latvian anti-Soviet history/current Russia podcast, but host Kristaps Andrejson found his gold vein with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It's the only unhinged podcast I listen religiously to, because Kristaps is genuinely if sometimes inadvertently funny. He loves to mock far-right-wing Russians, who are critical of the war because they imagine Russia is treating Ukraine with kid gloves, and cannot imagine that Russia has become this depleted. It's the only part of the independent media sphere Putin tolerates in Russia even though they are really critical of the war effort. (They also do lots of popular fundraising for equipment for frontline Russian soldiers, so that's probably why they're tolerated.) Kristaps is based in Latvia, has traveled a few times to Ukraine to do some (gonzo) reporting, and also took refuge in the Netherlands for a while due to nebulous threats...

The first part of this episode is about Russia's help to Iran in their current conflict with the U.S. (i.e. zilch). Kristaps makes good points there but a week after this was posted, many of these points have become obvious.

The second part is about how tanked the Russian budget and economy are. I'm not posting this for gloating, because it is ordinary Russians who will pay the cost of the war, and Kristaps does not hide that either. It's really going to be grim going through the year for Russians, and things weren't rosy to start with.

Here's the official episode description.

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The Eastern Border - 2.13 The Axis Burns: F-35s in Tehran & Putin's 30 Trillion Ruble Crater

While the physical fires are kept burning with a metric ton of heating pellets here in the freezing Latvian buffer zone, the geopolitical cesspool has officially overflowed. In this massive, fast-paced dispatch, we tear apart the outbreak of the largest Middle Eastern war since 2003—Operation Epic Fury.

As American stealth bombers dance through the Iranian skies, the myth of the "Multipolar World" burns to the ground. Russia and China have completely abandoned Tehran, triggering an absolute panic among the Z-Patriots. We break down the delusion of the exiled Russian opposition, deliver the brutal pragmatic truth from the Baltics, and explain how Iran’s asymmetric terror strategy is dragging the global economy into the abyss.

Meanwhile, the Russian economy is actively cannibalizing itself. We look at the 30 trillion ruble crater in the budget, the Orwellian trap being laid to freeze civilian bank deposits, and the hardline military faction explicitly citing the UN to justify a "holy mutiny" against Vladimir Putin. Finally, we end on a darkly comedic note: watching Solovyov's top propagandist accidentally admit to the Holodomor on live state television, only to get accused of being a Banderite.

The cardboard armor of the authoritarian world is violently catching fire.

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Podcast Friday: Viktor Orban

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:27:24 GMT

Ukraine Without Hype - 109: What is the problem with Hungary

This one's pretty straightforward! If you want to get a one-episode summary of where Viktor Orban comes from (Surprise: He took Soros money to study when he was younger!) and how he got where he is today, this is your episode, hosted by Anthony Bartaway.

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Podcast Friday - Fuck Trump in Gaza

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:29:52 GMT

If you're wondering WTF is happening with the ceasefire, and what's its potential future, you really have to listen to Ali Abunimah on the Dec. 4th Electronic Intifada livestream.

I'm going to link to the Youtube version of this podcast here because it's the easiest to link to a specific timestamp but if you want to listen to this podcast episode in your podcast app, here's the link, and if you don't feel like listening to the entire 2h43m episode, you can download the podcast episode and jump to 1:39:02 to hear the part I want to highlight.

Our comrade really takes apart all of Trump's, the US government's and the "international community's" illusions about the chances that the ceasefire's plans for an international force to take over security from Hamas in Gaza.

"Taking over security" is diplomatic obfuscation, of course, for "Hamas surrendering sovereignty in Gaza to a foreign-run entity." The IDF has been generally trying to do that since 1948 in Palestine, more so since the 1967 and 1973 wars, has been trying to contain Hamas since Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza in 2008 through a brutal blockade, and has actively tried to do that with an unlimited supply of weapons from the world's only military superpower since Oct. 7 2023, so obviously this security force defined in the ceasefire is bound to fail. It's delicious to hear Abunimah get into the nitty gritty to understand why it's bound to fail, what illusions it's built on, etc. Our comrade is particularly firing on all cylinders in this update.

(As for the "Israel can't stop killing" title of this livestream, it's referring to how Israel doesn't feel bound by the ceasefire, and continues to kill defenseless civilians, including children. Its success going after the Al-Aqsa Brigades (Hamas' armed wing) and other armed resistance groups is nowhere to be seen, even when the latter don't fire back.)

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Podcast Friday - Fuck Israel

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 10:46:29 GMT

The best thing you can do in your life to not lose sight of the genocide happening in Palestine is to listen to The Electronic Intifada's weekly live show on their podcast. It's a beast of a news show (frequently clocks in at 2 hours) but thankfully it's split in known segments, and you can decide to skip certain parts. Usually it goes like this:

1) News round-up (if you listen to nothing else, listen to that one; ends up on some good news to recover up a bit from the current horrors)
2) Interview with someone in Gaza, usually an Electronic Intifada writer or a friend of the show, or
3) Interview with a relevant guest, people like Francesca Albanese (the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine), Dyad Abu Jahjah from the Hind Rajab Foundation, etc
4) Combat report by Jon Elmer
5) Sometimes something from the UK by Asa Winstanley
5) Group discussion

I want to bring your attention to the last episode of November, which was Day 776: Gaza Betrayed.
Podcast link
YouTube link

Two particular topics were discussed on this episode:
- The report on Palestinian prisoners' treatment at the hands of Israel. We're talking about multiple beatings, brutality, sexual assaults, gang sexual assaults, leading to injury and sometimes death. Just utter barbarity from "the only democracy in the middle east".

- The proposal agreed to at the UNSC to hand over Gaza to an American-controlled council. This is an absolutely betrayal of the the sovereign rights of Palestinians, endorsed by the UN, the same organization that originally endorsed the colonization of Palestine in 1948. But this is worst because it's also bringing in the United States, the co-author of the current genocide, as an active participant in controlling the territory. Craig Mokhiber, who used to work at the UN, explains why the deal and why it's so bad.

So I recommend listening to this particular episode, to understand how things are, and how things are becoming. As for listening on the regular, you can see the weekly livestreams on YouTube here, or you can listen on your favourite podcast app.

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the dots

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 10:39:11 GMT

The Legendary Pink Dots were a 3-piece band tonight. Once you removed Ka-Spel, the remaining two musicians formed "Orbital Service", which turns out played better LPD-style material than when Ka-Spel sang with them. LPD were also good, but nowhere as good as on some of their albums.

Showing how far down they've come, they were playing at the Dance Cave rather than Lee's.

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dumpster divin'

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 09:04:34 GMT

Some of my local ant!fa friends help with a soup kitchen run out of the local Anglican church run by the most anarchist pastor you'll ever meet. Since I'm not working, I offered to help with their late night dumpster diving raids. We got in a car, drove to the northern suburbs, checked out the bins for 5 different supermarkets, and ended up with SO MANY CROISSANTS (not nice ones, but industrial crap), tons of lettuce, 20 huge pineapples (!!!). Not a balanced selection but they'll be buying other ingredients as well. This is a good way to stay out of trouble.

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Reading Wednesday - I don't want to talk about Capital

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:22:36 GMT

Oh, I haven't done this in a while. I've been reading a liiiittle bit though.

I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terry Real. This is the book of his that I really needed to read. He talks about the gendered expression of depression, how men often have covert depression which is hidden by hidden behaviour, such as addiction (substances, sex, etc), overwork, grandiosity, aggressivity, etc. He talks a bit about love addiction and I'm curious about that one. I'm still just halfway in.

Le capital, par Karl Marx. My friend Corvin, who is über smart, has decided to rope a bunch of his friends into a Capital reading group. I don't belong in this group at all. At least two of the people are university professors, including one who I have huge respect for. One of my great comrades who I think *might* have a masters but not a PhD is in the group, but she has been on the editorial collective of one of the most important radical publications in this city for over a decade, so she's way better read than me. A new arrival in the group is a Hegelian. I'm assuming he has a PhD, like I think Corvin does.

I knew that Corvin read German, but now I've learned that his father did speak it natively, so that somewhat explains that part of his knowledge. One of the profs also reads German. Corvin asked me if I would read it in French, since that would bring a different perspective. At first I didn't want to, because I do 95% of my radical/political reading in English, and I would have to translate my thoughts back and forth when discussing with the others... ugh. But I did a bit of research anyway. I learned that Marx had personally supervised the translation of the book to French, making significant editorial changes. In the end Marx called the French version the most accessible, and said that even if someone had read it in German, it would be worth their time reading the French version too (as one does) since it contains some extra innovations. Apparently people in Trier, where Marx was born, were often fluent French speakers if they had some education, so Marx would know what he was reading when supervising the work. So anyway. We've had two meetings so far but scheduling has been hell. I canceled the pilates class (!) I had registered to to make things easier. We're still on the first chapter of the first section, which is very abstract. Amusingly, people say that this section makes more sense once you've made it all the way through Volume 3. So anyway, I'm reading the French version, even though I still have to do a bit of on-the-fly translation when discussion the book. The others, when they're not peeking at the German version, are reading the brand new translation by Paul Reiter, which is being roundly lauded.

One thing that's great is that Corvin has found a number of ancillary texts and explainers, and we have a large PDF folder to consult from. But of course, other than buy a copy of one of the main support books, I'm barely keeping up. We'll see what happens!

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long nail struggle

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:34:41 GMT

I broke my pinky nail, just the nail, but not the hardened gel it's covered with. Every time I touch the nail it hurts like fuck. I need to go back to the nail worker/technician to get the gel buffed out. Then she'll trim, and maybe we'll put an extension on top? This is weird and new.

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Podcast Friday - Brookfield

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 03:58:48 GMT

Guys, I have like dozens of tabs open on different episodes to recommend for Podcast Friday. But of course writing a paragraph that's relevant and enticing is Work. Anyway. Let's clear this one out. It's not even that old. (I have episodes dating back to 2022...)

The Hatchet is the new-ish podcast hosted by Arshy Mann and Jordyn Cornish, who used to run the last iteration of the Commons Podcast at Canadaland. I like Arshy; he's is a radical but he doesn't get tripped up in too much orthodoxy, though some of the episodes sometimes feel a little light.

So The Hatchet started a new series on what is now known as Brookfield, the gigantic Canadian asset management firm, where Mark Carney just stepped down as Chairman so he could run to become PM of this country. So you know, capital and capitalist parties acting like giving yourself a handshake. Anyway, I knew that Brookfield was huge in the size of their investments (they built a GIANT stalinist apartment building at one of Toronto's most desirable intersections, which is basically MASSIVELY overpriced student housing that only rich foreign students would afford and bother to live in (try $2800 a month for a ROOM in a 4BR "appartment" that doesn't even have its own kitchen because you're expected to buy a meal plan from the cafeteria on the 2nd floor?)) but this episode goes back in the TIME dimension to show us our Brookfield was an important comprador corporation in Brazil in the early 20th century. Turns Canadian capitalists were playing the British game in LatAm too!

Here's the pod.link to your favourite player...
https://pod.link/1782338231/episode/c3Vic3RhY2s6cG9zdDoxNjExMzU1NzM

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rage

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 02:23:51 GMT

‪If we don't have to do post-protest detention solidarity support after the #DrawTheLine protest on Saturday, I'm going to the Carcass concert in Toronto and I'm going to LET LOOSE in the mosh pit until I'm either dead or spent.

I need to figure out a FUCK EVERYTHING a sign that takes sides for the protest.

Ironically on Friday afternoon I'm going to be sign-holding decoration for a World Beyond War press conference.

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okara vegan cheese update #2

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 04:09:25 GMT

Remember my last update, where the okara culture burst out of its container? It turns out that happened because the okara had been contaminated with other bacteria. So I'm on attempt #2 right now, made with fresh okara straight from getting boiled/pasteurized in the soymilk maker, and it's time it's not gassing out like crazy. We'll see in a couple days what it tastes/looks like...

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Okara cheese update

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:10:20 GMT

I was also looking to add quinoa to my rejuv' but couldn't find it. Eventually I found it last night while looking for a spice mix to add to my late night snack... Anyway this culture is doing well so far. I've since remixed the contents and transferred it to a new container.

— frandroid - Mahmoud Khalil is free!! (@frandroid.bsky.social) August 13, 2025 at 12:32 PM

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rejuvelac, okara, drinkmate

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 06:50:52 GMT

I had started a rejuvelac culture with older whole rye berries that F had bought years ago, and they just spoiled. I chucked that, bought some new whole wheat berries, and started a new culture with these and brown rice grains as well. The rice had visible sprouting earlier than the wheat. After they germinated, you soak the grains in water for three days. At the end you filter everything out, chuck out the grains in the compost. The filtered liquid that's left, which smells like feet, is your rejuvelac. Eww. Apparently you can DRINK this?? I mean I will obviously try it because I am me.

F has a soymilk maker with which she makes her soymilk. At the end of the operation, you're left with soybean fiber and still lots of protein matter to be cast off. You can't make tofu from it, since tofu is made from precipitating soymilk anyway. It's sometimes used at cattle feed, but because it's so wet, it has a very short shelf like, so much of it is just disposed of. So F had made soymilk and had left her usual 2 cups of okara or so on the counter for me, because I had been looking at using a tempeh starter to make okara tempeh. People have done it, and it's not as good as tempeh, but apparently it's edible. I think if one was to mix in extra broken soybean chunks in the okara, like there is in tempeh, it could come closer to the experience. I thought I had bought tempeh starter, but I can't find it. It's probably deep in the freezer an I can't be bothered to empty the freezer to find it, so I thought that I'll just buy a new culture later. However this newest batch of okara has been sitting on the counter for three days now, it's fermenting a bit but it'll spoil if it stays there any longer, so I should just chuck it.

Meanwhile I'm looking at my cookbook which starts a lot of these vegan cheese recipes with pulverized cashews. And I had this okara in front of me. So the obvious thing to do is to try to start a cheese culture with the okara and the rejuvelac. It required more rejuvelac to get a smooth spin in the blender, possibly because my blender is not one of the ninja style machines, it's an old, classic Osterizer. But eventually I got a smooth spin going on, and it looks like the okara further pulverized itself, turning to a creamy texture.

So we'll see what I get! I could get a spoiled culture on account of the okara being left to rest on the counter for a while, I could have a vegan cheese, or maybe I could have some sort of disgusting natto paste. If I get a spoiled culture, I'll just try again with fresh okara in a week.

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Oh yeah, I had bought a Drinkmate, the BDS-safe bubbly water machine, (don't buy SodaStream) but in typical ADHD fashion the box had just been sitting there, unopened for a few weeks. The goal being to add more bubbly beverages to my rotation to drink less beer or something. So I finally opened and unpacked it. Even just carbonated plain water is nice. What this machine has that's better than the SodaStream is that you can carbonate other beverages too... So if I find the rejuvelac edible, I'm going to see about carbonating it too. :P But more seriously, I'm looking forward to make bubbly cold chai, and bubbly amaro type things.

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Le vendredi des podcaaaaaasts, le dimanche

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 03:52:33 GMT

L’état du jeu - La peur: Se lier d’amitié avec celle qui nous empêche de foncer

Un épisode simple mais efficace qui discute de la façon dont nous devrions faire face aux défis qui nous causent beaucoup d'anxiété.

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Podcast Friday - Missed appointment with revolutions

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:50:02 GMT

Andor, Trump and Our Revolutionary Times | The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
(YouTube version)

Guys, when I heard that this episode dropped, I was SO EXCITED, I was expecting to make an immediate post ahead of the regular Friday schedule. Unfortunately, my expectations were too high. Gilroy tries to pull the trick that’s usual Jon Stewart’s–”I’m just a screenwriter!”, so you have 2 out of 3 people trying to play coy and cute. It takes over 2/3rds of the interview to get at the similarities of The Mars Revolution and Andor to the current moment. Like I feel the interview should have started with THAT, and gone on from there. It’s still an interesting episode, but I was expecting better. 😛

It's also pretty cool to see Duncan getting interviewed by Jon.

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diy vegan cheese

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 22:18:07 GMT

My mom sent me a cashew cheese recipe, and it's reminding me of something. I bought Miyoko Shinner's (the founder of "Miyoko's", that fancy vegan cheese company) recipe book a long time ago but one of her base ingredients is making your own rejuvelac culture, which takes like a week to come together, with daily maintenance. That was too much planning and thinking for me so I let the book sit aside, but now that I have some spare time I'm going to try some of these recipes.

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Podcast Friday - Podcast coding community - Cyberpunk

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 20:49:30 GMT

So I mentioned my little app project...
( development talk )

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Empire - The Fall of the Royal African Company

Empire, hosted by William Dalrymple and Anita Anad, is a bit of weird podcast. Very progressive in text and more liberal in tone. Less so here as they speak about British slavery and the result on the fortunes of the entire empire. Anyway there are some astonishing numbers in there describing the scale of the enterprise.

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Speaking of cyberpunk stuff... Sorry for the ad-like copy, I don't know what kind of kool-aid I was drinking when I wrote this. 8)

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman - "What would you do with robotic wings? (or How to get a better body)"

This one's about brain plasticity. How is it possible for a dog to become a champion surfer? Why does the world’s best archer have no arms? Why might someone come to believe that her leg doesn’t belong to her? How can we build robots that simply figure themselves out? In this episode, Eagleman unmasks mysteries about the brain's shocking flexibility -- revealing how it comes to drive whatever body it finds itself in, how it determines what the "self" is, and what this tells us about our future as humans.

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#PodcastFriday - The podcast recommendation app

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:45 GMT

I can't recall if I mentioned this before, but one of the reasons I started this #PodcastFriday thing is that I want to eventually build a podcast episode recommendation app, esp. for lefties. In Canada we have unrigged.ca but it's basically a feed aggregator for the top 40 lefty podcasts in the country (which is probably half of the total selection...), so you still have to wade through the garden hose and pick *whatever*.

I would like to build an app where you could share episodes that you liked, and you could also give the app some thematic preferences, and it would build a personalized recommendations podcast feed for you. You could then queue these episodes right in your podcast player of choice. You could decide to follow a number of people as well. You could build 1 or 2 or 3 different feeds. ("the algorithm", "people I follow", "these 2 tags I want to follow", "all of these feeds put together").

My last job actually was quite useful for thinking about the architecture of such a project, and now that I have time on my hands, I feel like this is going to be a fun summer project...

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Podcast Friday - Saved by the Bell,

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:02:10 GMT

READER. I thought I had lost all of my Firefox tabs. All 918 of them. While trying to recover them, I mistakenly shut down my browser again, preventing the "restore last session" type of dialogue from happening easily. And my Time Machine backup is not running on my work computer, which has remained my main web browsing machine. I had LOOOTS of podcast episodes banked on there. Plus different windows with extensive bibliographies for special research topics. ("frandroid, why don't you just bookmark the pages?" "Shut up Pinky!"). I was fairly despondent. I have a back up going to last September which has the bulk of my special topics, but the podcasts seemed to be lost. Finally today while I was looking at something different, I realized that there was a different "restore session" button than the about:sessionstorage dialogue in the 'fox. I clicked on that and it restored a month-old session I had tested with, so I was overjoyed. Finally I searched the trash bin, found a session backup dating to just before I lost my tabs, and restored that. Magic!! I am so relieved.

Alright, on with our regularly scheduled program. The first item is pretty nice "me" stuff but the second one was fun.

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Chasing Leviathan - Understanding Modern Kurdish History with Dr. Djene Bajalan

In this episode, Dr. Bajalan describes how Ottoman, Turkish and Kurdish modernity were intertwined and how the idea of their respective nation-states developed in relation to each other, esp. In the crucial decades of 1910-1930.

(The PKK held a symbolic "weapons surrender" ceremony today, where they put 50 automatic rifles in a big container and set the whole thing on fire. Empty symbolism, clearly, which matches the Turkish' state own emptiness in this "diplomatic process". To demonstrate the point, an hour after this symbolic demonstrating of good will by the PKK, the Turkish air force bombarded a PKK position in Northern Iraq. What a clusterfuck. I've promised a follow-up post about this... It should come up soon.)

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Better Offline - Silicon Valley Fashion With The Menswear Guy

So it’s been a bit of a trend this year, if you have a successful podcast (probably one which pays appearance fees), to have dieworkwear come on to talk about whatever? So Ed Zitron didn’t miss his chance and had him on to talk about the style a variety of tech executives, from Zuck to Jensen Huang (nVidia). At the end of the episode he discusses buying the best leather jacket for your taste. The thing that I love about him is that he’s all about “figure out your style, then rock it” kind of fashion guy, rather than the old school “this is the style now, forget everything you knew yesterday” thing.

...

I love Ed Zitron to bits, but other than in this episode and a few other interviews, his ranting about AI is getting pretty repetitive. I think I'll focus on listening to Tech Won't Save Us more than him.

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behold! a zine fair!

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 02:51:18 GMT

So even though I've been selling zines for 25 fucking years now, there are two big zine things I have never done until now:
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.

Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.

We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)

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Looks like I'm a little late discovering this, but it kicks ass

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:43:01 GMT

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#PodcastFriday special edition - The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:36:51 GMT

The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.

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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.

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