I spent much of my Sunday working in a Chinese restaurant along the highway.
I was with a couple of other people filing for national TV news, radio and web.
All the gear we needed fit under our table.
Over the past year I’ve done this in hotel rooms, coffee shops, a college and an airport lounge.
It’s not super new, anymore, but it’s still pretty cool to be able to do this sort of thing out of a Chinese restaurant.
Over the weekend, Shawn Miccalef tweeted, “Hello I wrote a column about the psychogeography of the new subway line + Downsview park in the @TorontoStar but never once used the word psychogeography. Thank you.”
As a fan of the word pyschogeography since 2014 I was ready to read, and am I glad I did.
“Subways have political power and persuasion,” Miccalef wrote. “People who live in cities that have them often use the system map as a basis for their own mental map and understanding of their city. Subway lines define its shape and limits, and stations become local and regional landmarks. If a place is off the map, it’s, well, off the map.”
“When I was teaching at OCAD, I had students go on mapping walks around the Grange neighbourhood and beyond. One was surprised at how close Chinatown was to campus: she thought it was far away, rather than just a few blocks, but since she arrived at OCAD via the University subway line, and went to Chinatown via the Spadina streetcar from Bloor, the neighbourhoods were disconnected from each other. It was only when she ‘corrected’ her perception by walking between the two places did geographic reality snap into view.”
As a visitor, I’ve explored not just Toronto but Vancouver, Montreal, London, Istanbul and Hong Kong primarily by where transit lines will take me. Though biking helps fill in some gaps, I very much relate to Miccalef’s students and I very much enjoyed this piece.
I’m traveling for work today but I wanted to share some notes from a community dialogue I was honoured to take part in yesterday on reconciliation. There was a combination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous speakers and much audience participation inside Nusdeh-Yoh, the province’s first Aboriginal Choice school.
Though the discussion went down quite a few roads, looking over my notes I realize the subject of language came up a number of times. Leona Neilson spoke about growing up in Saskatchewan speaking Cree and English and later refusing to learn French, then moving to Prince George later in life where she’s been teaching Cree. She teamed up with another of the speakers, Caitlin Nicholson (whose children are members of the Tahltan Nation through their father), to write books in the Cree language for early learners.
Clayton Gauthier presented a children’s book he’d written in both English and Dakelh, and shared a song gifted by his uncle to Nusdeh Yoh about the importance of passing on knowledge to new generations.
Hira Rashid, who identified herself as an immigrant from Pakistan, spoke about learning the history of the Southeast Asian community in Canada in relation to Indigenous people. She said the word used by Southeast Asian settlers to describe Indigenous people when they worked together at sawmills was “Taiké”, which means roughly “of my father’s family”, a phrase that described the close relationship between the two communities (more on the phrase here).
Rob Budde, who identified himself as a settler, as well as a poet and professor at UNBC, spoke about how his interest in the local Indigenous culture and history was sparked by an experience he had with with what we call in the English language, Devil’s Club.
He said based on his knowledge of the plant “Devil’s Club was not the right name” so he took language classes to find out what it was in the local language. At that point Noelle Pepin of the Nisga’a Nation volunteered the word for it in Nisga’a is “wa’ums”, which means “medicine” as that is what the plant has actually been used for by Indigenous people for generations, something you would never guess from “Devil’s Club.”
“Language opens doors,” Rob said, and that sparked my memory of learning the meaning behind “Lheidli T’enneh”– people of the confluence. Based on the name of my blog, that obviously had an impact on me because it was the first time I had experienced my home having a name that reflects the local geography. I grew up in “Prince George,” named after a dead monarch who never saw the place– colonization literally erasing local history, identity, and culture. Through words alone, a new connection to the place I call home had been opened up, which is the power of language (and provides insight as to why our country tried so hard to erase it from the people it was colonizing.)
There were other stories of language, too. Noelle Pepin mentioned an academic project she is doing combining the language of computer code with the language of beading, both of which you learn by building something. There was talk of an speaker at another weaving words event who said his language did not have a word for “reconciliation” and so the language keepers came up with a phrase that translates to “making amends for damage done.” They found the right name.
All in all it was a great way to spend two hours, and thank you– musi– to Toni Carlton for inviting me.
Photo by Toni
some notes I took during the discussion
I wrote a story this week about the Prince George District Teacher’s Association wanting a policy around snow days in the city. The gist of it is, they want schools to remain open for any students who show up, but want to make it clear classes– and the drive to get kids to them– is optional, as is the need to come in for any teacher/staff member who feels like they can’t make it in.
Living in a part of the world that does get heavy snow, there’s a certain pride people get that goes with not shutting down the way, say, Vancouver does when a bit of snow falls. But there is a wisdom to what Vancouver does. It is a city that doesn’t get enough snow for it to be practical for people to buy winter tires. Driving without winter tires in snow can be dangerous. Ergo, close down classrooms and campuses to increase safety.
Here, it is practical to have winter tires and at the very least all-seasons. But no amount of winter tire is going to make it practical for a standard-sized car to drive multiple kilometres after half-a-meter of snow has fallen and crews are still busy trying to clean up downtown. A few years ago I had a shift that started at 4:30 in the morning, before buses start running. I looked at the snow up to my knees and my supermini car and decided to strap on my cross-country skis to get in. On my way home I took the bus, and passed a whole lot of cars in ditches. During this year’s heavy snowfall, one tow truck company said they were averaging over 80 calls an hour– 20 times the normal volume.
There are always going to be people who choose to drive, even when conditions aren’t optimal. And there are always going to be people who have to work, one way or another. But doing things like canceling classes could be a way of sending the message that today is not a normal day. RCMP and Environment Canada already put out warnings suggesting people don’t drive unless they need, cancelled classes would be another way of getting that message out there. Schools would still be open for kids whose parents can’t look after them, but for those who can it would be another reason to stay off the road.
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Earlier this year I was asked Jeremy Sroka of High Five For to take part in his blog’s “Highly recommended” feature in which participants recommend music, tvs, books, websites and anything. So I did and it was pretty fun to think about what things I’d like to get people to watch/read/listen to.
In the “anything” section I wrote:
“Carve out a creative space that is just for you. It’s not in the hopes of turning it into a job, it’s not a portfolio, it’s not geared towards getting hearts or shares online. It’s something that you personally find enjoyable, and you do it once a week or once a month or once a year.”
I did this just as I was thinking about starting more regular blogging again and now that I’ve gone down that path I’m glad to see I’m taking my own advice.
You can read the feature here, and thanks to Jeremy for giving me a chance to do it!
I’m writing late today because I’ve just restored my WordPress install after I’m pretty sure an extension I used to help me upgrade my site to https screwed up my htaccess file.
If that sentence doesn’t make sense to you, then it’s a pretty good demonstration of the problem of the internet becoming too complicated.
Frank Chimero picked up on this recently in a piece he published called “Everything Easy Is Hard Again“:
“So much of my start on the web came from being able to see and easily make sense of any site I’d visit. I had view source, but each year that goes by, it becomes less and less helpful as a way to investigate other people’s work. Markup balloons in size and becomes illegible because computers are generating it without an eye for context. Styles become overly verbose and redundant to the point of confusion. Functionality gets obfuscated behind compressed Javascript.”
Now, I’m no Frank Chimero but I learned everything I know about making a website in much the same way: I’d see a site and I’d use Firefox to look at the HTML code being used to make it look the way it did. Increasingly this isn’t possible because even something as simple as an image (which used to be <img> “the image source” </img> is hidden behind a bunch of complicated code.
This problem is also playing out in the debate over https. Too start with, let me just tell you, I barely understand what https is. What I do know is that when I first started using the internet, websites started with “http://” before getting to the “www”. Now more and more of them start with “https://”. And, apparently, “https://” is a more secure way of computers communicating with each other over the internet than the previous “http://” method. I don’t know why it is. But it is.
And because of that browsers like Google Chrome are starting to warn people when they are visiting a site whose address begins with “http://” instead of “https://” alerting them to the potential insecurities. On my own website I saw a note telling me that hackers could still my information, which makes no sense to my mind. But that warning was there. And so I decided to try and figure out how to get a padlock instead.
I succeeded and I’ll share the instructions at the end of this post. But this isn’t a how-to so much as it is a reflection on whether I did the right thing. Because as you can see in the screenshot above scripting.com, one of the oldest blogs on the internet, is still deemed as insecure and its owner, Dave Winer, has a very good reason why. You should just read the whole thing, but if I were to summarize it, it would be:
HTTPS is more secure than HTTP, but most HTTP websites aren’t actually insecure, and by making it look like they are Google and other https pushers are threatening to essentially cut off many early websites and, functionally, break a large part of the internet.
Ron Chester, another early website builder and, like me, someone who did it as a hobby rather than a career, wrote his own thoughts on it:
“I still don’t understand how my website has become so dangerous. I have recently searched for simple language that will explain the danger it is creating, but without success. There doesn’t seem to be anyone who actually cares whether I understand about this or not. The world and the Internet have moved on. Now big businesses use it to generate billions of dollars of income each year.
The technical people who make this possible enjoy big paychecks and communicate among themselves with their own special language and technical jargon that puts them among the elite, an unelected ruling class in our culture today. I’m not a part of that elite class of people. But you know what, I still have the best website with a Bob Dylan bibliography, even though it is now two decades out of date.
Many of the books there are still important books on the subject, even though there are also tons of other important books on the subject that have come out since May 1999, the end of my active work on that website. One day I will publish a much more comprehensive bibliography. And maybe I should encrypt it, so no one can read it.”
When I saw Ron’s post I had just finished my first attempt at moving my website to https. It seemed pretty easy, actually, and I told him so. I understood where he was coming from, but it is also worth noting that the half-hour I took me was significantly simpler than when I first learned how to install WordPress on a hosted server.
Then, yesterday, I went to write about https and I found out I couldn’t log in to my website. Working with customer support at my hosting service, it turned out that an extension I used to help me in the conversion had screwed up a file that required us to create a new administrator account in order to get in and fix things. Then I had to create myself as a user again and transfer ownership of the site back to me from the new account we made and fix a few other things here and there.
It wasn’t a major deal, but I’ve been doing this for a little while now. And it certainly was more complicated than just posting on Facebook or Medium or Twitter. And that’s sort of the problem Frank Chimero and Dave Winer and Ron Chester are getting at. The internet used to be simple enough that you could just screw around with it and start building websites, either as a career or as a hobby. But the complexity is taking off. I still have a grasp on them because I have the advantage of having learned in simpler times, but I honestly don’t know that I would be inclined to do this today given the availability of social networks. That’s why you see “the best blogs of our generation… being wasted in tweetstorms, Facebook rants, and reddit comments,” as Jason Koebler put it. That’s why you see entire business models being built and destroyed around Facebook’s algorithm changes. That’s why I’m trying to make an effort to contribute to an internet outside of these networked walls more, even if I have upgraded to https not fully sure of the consequences.
Converting your Bluehost-hosted website from http:// to https://
That’s the end of the post, but I also want to give the steps I used to move my site from http to https, because I think one of the best ways to help other people live on the internet outside of the major networks is to share advice and lessons openly. I don’t know if this is the best way, but it’s what I did and it worked (without crashing my website).
Over on Twitter, BBC Radio 6 Music asked, “What’s the strongest run of three songs in a row on an album?” It’s sparked a lot of answers, and I think it’s because it’s such an interesting question.
Usually, these sorts of questions are a lot simpler: “What’s the best debut song by any band?” “What’s the best album of the 1960s”? “What’s the best opening track?” In any one of these, you’re either considering the strength of a song in and of itself, independent of any other songs, or the strength of a full body of work, ie. an album. The three-song run is between that: you need more than just one killer song, but unlike an album there’s not room for any lulls that can be made up for elsewhere.
I looked at a few of my favourite albums and it really drove home just how hard this. For example, Weezer’s Blue Album is one of my favourite back-to-front and I love every song. However, looking for a run of three songs that stand on their own is harder.
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When I was in London, I bought this t-shirt at the Tate Modern
And last year on a trip to Toronto I picked this up (yes, at the CN Tower)
What I like about both of them is the way they capture the essence of being in the cities through their built environment. No “I Heart London” or “T dot O” needed: if you are familiar with the places, you know what they are.
It got me thinking about what a similar shirt for Prince George might look like. We do have a few distinctive buildings kicking around and lately I’ve noticed people are capturing them through design.
For example, here’s the backdrop to the Heat Wave music festival over the summer
You’ve got the Grand Trunk Pacific Bridge, the court house, those iconic skylights at UNBC, the downtown clock tower, Mr. PG of course, the Wood Innovation and Design Centre, and the Two Rivers Art Gallery.
Update: Jillian Merrick points out this has been in use as a CelebratePG iconography for a couple years now, and Tourism PG says it was designed by Leanne Schinkel.
When the food ordering app Skip the Dishes expanded here last year, they incorporated a few of those elements– you have Mr. PG and the clock tower, and the art gallery acts as the backdrop.
When I started writing for CBC online I was asked to come up with a stock photo for a portal to all my Prince George stories. I didn’t want to go with Mr. PG as it felt too obvious so I tried a few things: the cutbacks, the art gallery, the bridge. But then a Radio-Canada videographer came through town and came up with what I think is the most “Prince George” spot in the city.
So now when I want to show the changing seasons I just head over there to get another similar photo.
All of this is to say, while we may not have the same sort of skyline as some of the most iconic cities in the world there is enough unique architecture kicking around to fill a t-shirt.
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Last night I went to watch some bands and I realized I’ve been going to shows by some of the musicians there for about 15 years.
Right now I usually see them at the local legion, but I’ve watched them in pizza places, pubs, coffee shops, restaurants, theatres, a record shop, and above a bookstore, most of which are now closed (!).
When I started going to shows I found out about them via a local online forum, but now it’s Facebook.
I used to stream their music on MySpace, and we’ve gone through several other iterations including Soundcloud and Bandcamp.
The places and platforms change but they keep finding ways to put their music out there and I keep finding ways to listen to it.
Twitter has been one of my favourite internet things for close to a decade now because of its ability to expose me to voices from outside my own network. Unlike Facebook, which was built around ‘friends’ and following and be followed by strangers feels weird, Twitter is much more oriented towards interacting with people you’ve never met.
For myself, that’s been incredibly valuable. I’ve learned from Black and Indigenous voices, from women sharing stories of experiencing sexual violence and everyday sexism, from scientists writing about their research. It has, I think, made me more empathetic and certainly less likely to assume my personal experiences are in any way universal.
The irony of this is that for many of the people I’ve learned from, the experience has been the opposite. As they share their personal experiences they get notice from people who want to argue with them, to tell them they’re wrong, and to engage in harassment campaigns aimed at shutting them down.
In the past year this has resulted in a number of people leaving the service, either permanently or temporarily. Ta-Nehishi Coates quit in December after being accused of “fetishizing white supremacy”. Lindy West, whose work on the way we talk about fat is among the most worldview-altering writing I’ve experienced, wrote an op-ed this month about how liberating it was to have deactivated her account. And this past week I became aware that two Canadian thinkers who I became aware of via Twitter– Robert Jago and Vicky Mochama– had left the service (both have said it was their own choice to step back).
All of this has made me realize I’ve become too dependent on the service to regularly expose me to smart writing. If I come across someone who makes good points, I hit “follow” but I’m less likely to visit their website, buy their book or subscribe to their column. I’m trying to change that. I’ve reactivated an RSS service (remember RSS? No? You should read this then) and am being more diligent about subscribing to people who have blogs or columns. I’m also trying to do more of my own thinking and writing outside of social media silos and posting them on here (this marks two weeks straight of a new post every day).
I hope others do the same. I’m not advocating for the downfall of Twitter, but if smart and diverse voices are leaving it because they find the harms outweigh the goods, than the value of the service disappears for me, too. Though they don’t owe me anything, presumably people signed up for Twitter to an extent because they wanted to share their ideas and follow other people’s ideas. If the existing social networks aren’t going to be a good place for that, then we need to adopt the infrastructure for networks outside of them.
PS. I am currently trying out the service microblog, largely because I think the thinking behind it recognizes the value centralized networks like Facebook and Twitter offer in terms of community while at the same time looking to learn from their mistakes by setting it up so everyone within the network is an independent owner of their own site. I have no idea if it will succeed.
PPS. I very much related to this post on Vice about blogs which includes the line “the best blogs of our generation are being wasted in tweetstorms, Facebook rants, and reddit comments.”
An interesting thing about climate change is that even though there is lots of long-term, system level data to show it’s happening and is causing extreme weather events, climate scientists are hesitant to attribute specific extreme weather events to climate change.
For example, where I live in British Columbia’s interior, we’ve been getting more extreme forest fires in recent years, putting people out of their homes for weeks at a time and putting a layer of smoke over cities hundreds of kilometres away.
But although it is widely agreed a changing climate will likely result in these sorts of fires, more extreme and more often, there is a hesitancy among scientists to attribute any specific fire to climate change, specifically.
The reason is because although aggregate data suggests changing climate patterns will result in changing forest fire patterns, forest fires are complex and have occurred for thousands of years. To try and say any single fire would not have happened without climate change is a difficult statement to prove.
At the same time, it’s when people’s lives and properties are being threatened by forest fires that they are most likely to pay attention to the problems more frequent and intense forest fires pose and ways to stop them from happening.
Which brings me to the Canadian justice system.
There are any number of experts, including lawyers, social scientists and former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who have looked at aggregate data and identified a systemic problem with how Canada’s justice system interacts with Indigenous people.
Like those climate scientists hesitant to point to any individual fire and say, “This, THIS, is a specific example of the problem,” they are more likely to say things like, “Incidents such as this do stem from systemic problems, but we can’t say for sure any one case is a specific example.”
System-level problems pose a unique challenge. On a broad level, it can be seen they are resulting in bad outcomes, but it is extremely difficult to point to any single outcome as a specific example of the system-level problem.
So the question is: when a forest fire destroy someone’s life, and other people start talking about how forest fire’s have been ruining their lives, too, do you sit back and explain to them that, well, we don’t know the specific cause of any one forest fire?
Or do you figure out how to solve the problem?
See also: One of the good ones, Canada
One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received is when a co-worker told me about an Instagram post and said something to the effect of, “I’m sure you can do a story on this.”
It was a ton of fun to do, and it was great that my co-worker trusted me to convert a simple Instagram photo into a fully-formed radio piece journeying through a road trip and how our brains work.
Going the other direction, I recently came across information about a rally to raise awareness about the fentanyl crisis which was being organized by a mother who lost her daughter to an overdose. It sounded like a great radio piece, but I didn’t have the capacity to take it on. So I handed it off to another co-worker, and she hit the exact tone I had envisioned. No instruction, no overseeing, I just trusted her with the story and she pulled it off.
Working with a team in journalism, there’s a lot of trust that goes on. We pass off tips and ideas for other people to pursue, set up guests to be interviewed on-air by hosts, send audio files to be turned into web write-ups. There’s no better feeling than having someone execute your vision of what a story might be except, especially when they do it better than you might have.
And, of course, members of the public trust us with their stories, too. We often come into their lives at their most vulnerable moments, after suffering a loss or a tragedy or while on the steps of a court house. When I think about it, it’s amazing complete strangers will let us into their lives, share intimate details, and trust us to turn it into a story for all the world to hear and see. It’s a tremendous honour.
Ad nauseam
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February 22 2018 | ∞
Note: There are so many spoilers ahead, for both Black Panther and The Last Jedi. Also the original Star Wars trilogy, just in case you are visiting from 1977. I’m even going to put a big image just under this paragraph so you have the chance to throw this into your Instapaper or Pocket account to read after you’ve seen both. You’ve been warned. Read more →
Filed under: misc, ramblings | Comments Off on I wrote some words about Black Panther, the Last Jedi, and moral deliberation