Fuzzy conversation feelings

Hello! Been a meandering afternoon, a bit more digital than I’d planned, but that’s okay. I tried to do SOMETHING on the command line and of course got bogged down in a brew / package dependency spiral, leaving my project entirely unworked on and my dev environment only maybe still standing. What I’d like to be doing is pruning the bush in the front yard (I gave it a major haircut the other week, then worried I’d gone too far, but it’s happily redoubled its growth in a more bushy, less vertical way), but it’s way too hot for that. So, inside time it is.

Been listening to On Being more often, that fuzzy feeling of listening in to a good conversation. Two from this week that I particularly enjoyed:

• adrienne maree brown: a few key concepts (emergence, imagination, agency, justice), and oh the places you can go
• Grace Lee Boggs: a ranging ramble (the unedited version is great as always, but the produced version includes vignettes of some of the people in and around Boggs); at one point, Boggs critiques the impact of the auto industry and cars on neighbourhoods (“the auto industry has depopulated the city, has made us dependent upon cars”), and offers some thinking on “how we have to restore the neighbor to the hood”, a line that’s stuck with me

Some others from the roundup:

• OC Transpo’s LRT service reductions have (rightly!) received a lot of attention and critique—but I have a sinking feeling OC Transpo’s “New Ways to Bus” contains loads of hidden, hard-to-notice cuts or “efficiencies” that themselves reflect a broader reduction in service—at minimum, reduction in LRT service times for most of the week means making these bus connections will be that much harder (something that’s already a struggle most days)
• Two Globe articles, excuse the paywall: the impressive power of wastewater testing, soon to remain largely in the drain in Ontario; sketchy tenant yield software surfaces ever more clearly the grossness of financialized housing.
• Canadian university threatens lawsuit over privacy impact assessment received via freedom of information request (stop trying to hide your PIAs! it’s not a good look!)
• The CrowdStrike outage hit many sectors—Patrick McKenzie explains how and why it hit banks
• “40 thoughts at 40”—a genre of blog post I’m weirdly into (I think it works best on a blog, where folks are writing a bit more freely / as themselves?), and Brad Frost’s lives up

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas