Author: Sean Carney
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Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality
This isn’t a dead city. There doesn’t seem to be much creativity at the top. It seems to me that Toronto has a split personality, a civic schizophrenia. On the one level there’s the spirit of individuals and small groups who do things, what you might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal…
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Robin Sloan in Syntheizers as Utopian Technologies
This recalls the early days of synthesizers; what was Switched-On Bach if not “I see what you did there”? I hope that analogy is right, because the synth provides a healthy, sustainable template for these tools (AI). Ubiquitous and unremarkable, controllable and hackable, with flavors ranging from fully corporate to gloriously DIY … I’m realizing, as I…
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April 2025
Housing In March we replaced the lighting in the basement with some nice LED fixtures and removed all the old T12 fixtures. My next project is to drop off the large collection of burnt out T12 bulbs at the dump, and then organize the workbench in the basement so I can start using it as…
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John MacIntosh on Finance Aesthetics
Finance is everywhere in the cultural imaginary; it represents itself largely on its own terms, a set of appearances that do not correspond to its practise. John MacIntosh, Finance Aesthetics
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Cory Doctorow on AI Generated Art
Today I read Cory Doctorows latest post, Why I Don’t Like AI Art, and really appreciated his approach to defining art and how the use of AI tools diluted the meaning within works of art. …the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative…
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March 2025
Housing Over the course of February, we finished unpacking everything in the living areas of the house and have gotten settled in to the new place. We were able to host friends for the first time mid-month in February which was a great feeling. Late February in Calgary saw a very rapid thaw after a…
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Edward Tufte on Interface Design
No matter how beautiful your interface is, it would be better if there were less of it. Edward Tufte
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Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce on Canadian Winters
To survive the Canadian winter, one needs a body of brass, eyes of glass, and blood made of brandy. Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan
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N.T. Wright on Our Participation in Renewal
When God rescues your heart from its natural rebellion, and makes it new through your trust in him, your baptism and your following of Jesus, the way this newness works must be through your own decisions, your own thinking things through, your own will power (aided and strengthened at every point, Christians would say, by…