A Funkaoshi Production

I hate it when people ask me where I’m from, because my answer is often followed by, “But where are you really from?” When they ask that question, it’s as though they’re implying I don’t belong here. The black diaspora has rippled across Toronto: Somalis congregate in Rexdale, Jamaicans in Keelesdale, North Africans in Parkdale. We make up 8.5 per cent of the city’s population, but the very notion of a black Torontonian conflates hundreds of different languages, histories, traditions and stories. It could mean dark-skinned people who were born here or elsewhere, who might speak Arabic or Patois or Portuguese, whose ancestors may have come from anywhere in the world. In the National Household Survey, the term “black” is the only classification that identifies a skin colour rather than a nation or region.

Desmond Cole has been on fire, recently. Some great stuff. I still remember him from City Idol. I wish his monologue from that film was online.

I need to watch this show. Daredevil is my favourite superhero, and for a long time the only comic I was buying. (The Brian Michael Bendis run got me back into comics, really.)

Strong words from Edward Keenan. Blair was a breath of fresh air after Fantino. It’s a shame to see him back carding.

This week, Toronto Police Board (TPSB) chair Alok Mukherjee broke his silence and admitted to The Toronto Star that he was cornered into a position where he could either charge outgoing Chief Bill Blair with insubordination and delay the policy change on carding, or accept a compromise — to be debated at today’s TPSB meeting — and pray the next chief will be reformed-focused.

I’ve been carded twice (that I can remember) while living in the city. Both times were while I was back in town from University within a 1 KM of my parents house. I think both times I was drinking bubble tea with my friend Rishi, loitering in front of my brothers old school.

I’m really not interested in a smart watch at all, but i’m curious to see how they develop over the coming years. I wear a watch from Uniform Wares. The “screen” is always on and the battery lasts years. The Apple Watch is a worse at telling the time than the watches that proceed it. Of course, my watch can’t send text messages or let me know if I have an appointment, so that’s the big win for the Apple Watch. I’m not sure that’s enough.

Previously: Death and Advocacy & Charges against Michael Bryant dropped.

And this is what keeps the place I work (Security Compass”) in business.

I need to watch Orphan Black.

A cool advert from Wilkinson Sword, plays on the company’s history.

There really isn’t any reason not to watch every instalment of Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou.

This story is amazing.

This is some great music.

A long ass reivew of my backpack. I have one that has been half written for a couple years now.

The show doesn’t address sexual violence head on; it’s possible to watch without dwelling on the details. But Kimmy’s ugly history comes through, in inference and in sly, unsettling jokes about trauma, jagged bits that puncture what is a colorful fish-out-of-water comedy. The backstory that emerges combines elements from a number of familiar tabloid stories: those of Katie Beers (abducted from her abusive family, kept in an underground bunker), Elizabeth Smart (snatched from her bedroom by a self-styled messiah), Jaycee Dugard (abducted from her front yard), and the three women who were rescued two years ago in Cleveland, after having been beaten and raped for years by Ariel Castro. At times, the story feels inspired by Michelle Knight, one of Castro’s victims, who wrote a memoir called “Finding Me.” Like Kimmy, Knight had no family to go back to; her upbringing was a horror. But, to judge from newspaper profiles, she has not merely survived the abuse—she’s resilient and downright giggly, a fan of karaoke and dancing, angels and affirmations. It’s a powerfully girlish model of human toughness.

The show is written by Tina Fey, and has a pretty great theme song by the Gregory Brothers.

A profile of Shimiken, the king of Japanese porn. (Perhaps world wide by the sounds of things.)

I haven’t watched the video yet posted by Kottke yet. I’m not sure I will. I’m halfway through the first article by Paul Kalanithi about his cancer diagnosis, How Long Have I Got Left?, and it’s god damn amazing.

I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.

The second article concludes with words for his infant daughter:

When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Anyway, as always, fuck cancer.

A review of Microscope, a game where you collaboratively come up with the epic histories.

Hells yes.

This video is hilarious.