A Funkaoshi Production

Camilo José Vergara has spent more than forty years photographing and rephotographing the same forgotten corners of American cities. From crumbling housing blocks in the Bronx and an abandoned Detroit mansion, to dwindling row houses in Camden and the many lives of a Los Angeles baptist church. In all cases Vergara eschews the monumental to focus on a city’s discreet pockets. Returning year after year to the same positions, he regenerates images even as the structures in front of his lens decompose and are reborn in a cycle of photographic renewal. Architecture given shape by time and neglect takes on an organic quality—a reminder that edifices are as temporary as the lives they shelter. Vergara’s urban generation loss depicts fluid cities as a mirror of the present aging into obsolescence. Ultimately his images force a reckoning with death, confronting our inability to grasp the undercurrents relegating urban space and time.

For Scarborough residents, this isn’t just a mall —it’s where one most likely had either their first date, first fight, or perhaps both at the same time (we call this an Ellesmere special).

In an extract from his memoir, A Long Watch: War, Captivity and Return in Sri Lanka, Commodore Ajith Boyagoda recalls senseless destruction by soldiers.

I need to check out this book.

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In time I came to understand the nature of my job as the father of this sartorial wild child: I didn’t need to fathom Abe or his stylistic impulses; I needed only to let him go where they took him and, for as long as he needed me, to follow along behind.

Bollywood star Sonam Kapoor on unrealistic expectations of beauty.

The TTC’s rollout of Presto is at best very confusing, at worst kind of terrible.

The guy behind Oculus is secretly just another garbage dude in tech. Shocking!

An overview of Snapchat as they prepare to release their first camera product. It presents the company in a much more interesting light.

One of my favourite websites on the internet redesigns. I think he’s done two major redesigns since I started reading his blog, but there may have been more. One day maybe he’ll return to that iconic weird green. The new site is nice clean and readable. I should really update the design of this site. It’s remained unchanged since I switched from the old not so immaculate conception layout.

Nick Denton posts the last post on Gawker.com. The end of an era. I’ve never been a fan of the site, really, but it’s sad to see it go out like this.

Gawker.com is out of business because one wealthy person maliciously set out to destroy it, spending millions of dollars in secret, and succeeded. That is the only reason.

Peter Thiel is a super villain.

The Toronto Star newsroom sounds kind of terrible.

Their speech was fire. I love how they have derailed Trump’s stupid campaign.

“For years, I’ve been telling people he’s the most patriotic person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met quite a few,” Mr. Leroux said of Mr. Khan. “There are people who will put on cutoffs of the American flag and say they’re patriotic. Or they’ll put on bumper stickers — America, Love It or Leave It — and say they’re patriotic. He has a much more profound idea of being patriotic. It’s a complete understanding of what liberty and democracy mean.”

Read this.

This thing is so god damn amazing.

At the other end of the D&D actual play spectrum we have HarmonQuest, which features actors and is pretty slick in it’s production. Still, as these sorts of things go it’s also amazing. (The DM rolling all the dice is weird, though.)

I Hit it with My Axe is back. It’s one of those shows where they film people playing D&D. The main difference with this one is that most everyone playing is a porn star. That (probably) makes this gaming group outliers in the wider world of D&D groups, but I think this is a much truer presentation of what D&D games are like compared to a lot of these sorts of web shows, where the DM and players all happen to be actors (or voice actors) and everything feels so polished and scripted. This first new episode is more of an introduction about the group and one of the players, Kimberly Kane.

One day they’ll pass a bylaw that you can only put art on billboards. One glorious day.

This is the kind of thing I expect from Australia, no Canada. I hope the liberals make more an effort to dismantle some of the stupidness that I assume comes from a decade of Conservative rule in this country.

By having a widely armed citizenry, we create a situation in which gun violence becomes a common occurrence, not the rarity it ought to be and is everywhere else in the civilized world. That this happened amid a general decline in violence throughout the Western world only serves to make the crisis more acute; America’s gun-violence problem remains the great and terrible outlier.

America is fucked.