frandroid: YPG logo, Syrian Kurdish defense forces (kurds)
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. ("[personal profile] 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.

---

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.)


---

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 [profile] 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.
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
Alright now I'm procrastinating at work, so let's see...

The Agenda with Steve Paikin - Still Plenty of Strange New Worlds for Star Trek to Explore

Fuck Steve Paikin, but Robert Picardo was in Toronto to shoot Starfleet Academy and Paikin got to interview him. Picardo is awesome, you can't really have a bad interview with him. His interview on InvestiGates was good too.


Free City Radio - Interview with Shir Hever on the call for an arms embargo on the Israeli state

Shiv Ever is an Israeli who now lives in Germany and spends a lot of his time working on the BDS campaign. In most of his interviews, he describes the negative impacts that war in Gaza has had on the Israeli economy. Let's say that it's kind of collapsing. He's full of hope for the future of Palestinians. Stuff we need to hear.


Disrupting Japan - The forgotten mistake that killed Japan’s software industry

Okay this might be the most niche I've ever gotten. Not that I was wondering why there wasn't a great software industry coming out of Japan before noticing this episode. Seriously though, it was such a behemoth of technology in the post-war era until 2000 (i.e. until networks and software started to matter more than hardware) that being told that its software industry is shit made me ponder. (I knew that the PS/2 or /3 was insane to develop for, and contributed to the XBox taking part of its market share because Microsoft had a developer-friendly platform that PC Developers already knew well... But I digress)


Movement Memos - Breaking Down Sudan’s Struggle: What the World Is Missing

A good overview of the conflict in Sudan, from an always great podcast. I wanted to share American Prestige's episode but it's members-only. This one is as good, and features Toronto BLM alum Yusra Kogali.


Ideas - Why the 1976 novel Bear is still controversial — and relevant

Marian Engel's 1976 ursosexual novel Bear was not a joke but a real literary work, and you may ignore it at your own peril.


__
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
From the height of our 20th floor apartment, in spite of the new condo tower they're building right in front of me, I can see the CN Tower when I lean to my left. If you didn't know, the CN tower has changed its lighting: instead of projectors on the ground beaming white light on it, it is now covered with a ton of LEDs.

What would have been a sensible thing to do would have been to use the LEDs just to replace the ground lighting with white LEDs and save a lot of electricity. Instead, they installed a programmable, multicoloured matrix that allows for complex lighting. Now, this would be interesting if:
1) LED lights were available in an interesting palette of colours, and
2) these guys knew what they were doing.

Of course, LED technology is still limited, and you get these weird, cold colours. If you have paid any attention to the new LED christmas lighting, esp. side by side with the traditional incandescent technology, you will have noticed that LED lighting, while potentially brighter, is also much colder. Some people like this, but I find it atrocious. White LEDs are actually kinda grey, and the blue LEDs remind me of cold metal, which is not something I associate with the holiday season (except for "yes, sticking your tongue on the freezing shovel is a good idea!"). I mean, I love the 90% energy consumption decrease, and have replaced my own "festive" lightbulbs with LEDs. But they are somewhat lacking anyway.

So, they stuck probably a million LEDs or something on the CN Tower, and what do they do with them? Most of the time, the tower is a pink shade of red. It makes the tower look like a space outpost on Star Trek: TNG on an episode where the SFX team was having its Christmas party and they let the interns take care of the work. I mean, the CN Tower already looks like spacecraft, but this lighting makes matters worse. It looks like a giant popsicle. Now, do you want your city's nightscape to be dominated by a giant popsicle? The SkydomeRogers Centre has already started being illuminated by an awful set of colours, but that building is hidden from me by another apartment tower, so it doesn't irritate me as often as the CN Tower does.

So, that was the situation so far. But as I bid F good night on the stroke of midnight, I actually looked outside, and the tower was throbbing with red and green light. It was spectacularly ugly. It looked like a sea anemone, but anemones actually look good: this was nasty. The light show came back on around 1am, so I guess it happens every hour. I wish it was some sort of ride at the CNE or something, and that it would go next week. But we're stuck with this thing now. Check it out, tell me that you aren't stunned...

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frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
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