Driven by Cheese

I Didn’t Think Things Would Get This Chaotic When We Elected President Donkey Kong

Same with President Donkey Kong’s press conferences. Reporter asks a gotcha question? Barrel. Someone wants to know what he’s doing about the price of eggs? Barrel. Softball from a friendly reporter? Barrel, barrel, barrel.

(via McSweeneys and kottke.org)

This is actually crazy.

Canadian details the hate she experiences living in the U.S.

A Canadian working in health care in the U.S. shared a disturbing incident she faced in the operating room amid a discussion on the tariff war. … The neuroscientist described how she was in the middle of surgery when she “outed” herself as a Canadian during a conversation about tariffs.

This is a neuroscientist working with a nurse.

(S)he says, ‘You guys have been stealing from us for years, and it’s about time that someone stepped in and stopped it.’ And I was shocked," she alleged. “Stealing? She thought the Canadians are stealing from Americans.” … “What I took from that is what she meant was all she wants to be left alone, as in, she doesn’t want foreigners around her,” she explained. “And she thinks that she’s due all this money because Canadians have stolen from her, and not the oligarchs, not the billionaires, not the system — it’s the Canadians.”

These people are in a cult. There’s no other explanation. I bet you any money they didn’t think about Canada for even 10 minutes a day before they elected their current dictator. And now all of a sudden a nurse is shaking and crying in an operating room because the Canadians have stolen from her and she thinks tariffs will fix it?

I have no idea what to do with this information.

(Article via blog.to)

When I first got on Bluesky I was really stoked. It felt like old internet Twitter. It was friendly and exciting and fun to engage with.

Then it got more popular, and started feeling a little more like twitter in the middle years. People seemed more interested in gathering followers, increasing engagement through “starter packs”, and more businesses got on board. It was still fun, it still felt like a cool place to be on the internet, but the shine was starting to wear off for me.

And then, within the last couple of weeks, it began to feel like Twitter of a couple of years ago. As in, Twitter as it was right before it got sold. I was seeing a huge increase in followers - I’ve always been a micro-presence on the internet (and let me be clear, I still was/am, but having over 500 followers felt extremely weird to me). I actually didn’t like the feeling of having more followers, it didn’t jive with where I’m at with my internet presence these days.

More than my issues with my own personal profile, it started to feel as though most posts I saw were about self-promotion. Artists I follow were promoting stores and sales, and I was hardly seeing any actual art. There were more political posts (and don’t get me wrong, in this climate if you have a platform, speaking out is definitely a Good Thing. It was just a vibe shift.). I also started seeing things like Wordle scores in my feed, which I had joked would be the signifier of an established Bluesky. I had worked really hard to create a feed of comedians and artists that brought me joy, but all of a sudden it just felt like… being on social media. And I realized, I hadn’t missed that at all.

So, sort of unceremoniously, I’ve decided I probably won’t be posting there any more. I didn’t delete my account or anything. I still like the idea of Bluesky, and it’s not their fault I wasn’t having fun on the platform any more. But, I exported all my posts, and I think I’ll just be posting here from now on.

This is definitely a me-thing. I think I like just putting my thoughts in my own little sphere, and not having people really engage with them at all. I like the sort of return to a livejournal-esque internet that I find with blogging. I post when I want, I don’t if I don’t want to. I don’t feel pressure to engage with anyone or respond to things.

Honestly, I think I’m just over social media.

I did a big hair colour switch over the weekend.

Click here for selfie

Went from dark brunette to a bright copper-red! I love it!

A few days ago I posted about how I was moving to micro.blog, but I was having trouble with the import feature. I said I was just going to let that go, and leave all my archives on one of my backup sites.

Of course this was a lie, I would never let that go. I ended up taking my Tumblr back up, importing it to a Wordpress account, exporting that backup, and using that to import to micro.blog.

It’s mostly working! There were some issues with the tool, so I contacted support and they’ve been super duper helpful! Imports are rolling in, but slowly.

If you have a great desire to read a bunch of posts I made on Tumblr in 2010 (so. many. 2010. posts.) then they actually are already viewable in a number of ways, which I’ve linked to on my way back page. I actually don’t recommend most of them, 2010 was a different time on the internet and Tumblr was a whole other culture.

But anyway, they’re there. And they will soon be here. Fun!

A couple of days ago l saw that Micro.blog had started offering plans for $1 a month, which is basically free. Without too much thought, I decided to move my blog over, away from blot.im.

I’ve had a couple of concerns with Blot in my time using them, the main one being the price of Dropbox storage. Blot itself is very competitively priced, especially for the quality of service. But it relies on outside cloud storage to work, and the number one option is Dropbox. If I ever ran out of Dropbox space, increasing it would be prohibitively expensive. I also use Dropbox for things aside from my blog, and yes I guess I could create multiple Dropbox accounts to separate them, but it just felt like a lot of faff. Blot also offers Google Drive and Github as back ends but I’m not a Github user and I try to avoid Google services where possible.

My second issue with Blot was always ease of use, although I got into a good rhythm with drafting my posts using Bear.app. I have wanted something that was also easier to use on mobile, though, and something with image hosting (since to avoid using Dropbox storage I was hosting images elsewhere).

A while back, I found a really great post with some simple blog options, and I tried all of the ones I thought might meet my criteria. Bear and Pika were standouts. Pika is relatively new, but has an awesome design sensibility and a great vibe. I really like Bear as well, it’s got a good mission statement and a simple UI that I enjoy. But both cost more than Blot, so that ruled them out for me; I just don’t blog often enough to justify their prices.

Microblog was also in this camp until they started their $1 a month plan - that made them the cheapest option out of all of them. And they have a bunch of official and third party iOS apps, so that was all my criteria met.

I had planned to move all my archives over but the import tools weren’t really working for me. So I only moved posts from 2023 onwards. There weren’t many. (Who wants to read a 15 year old Tumblr blog anyway?) The archives do actually exist as static html files on Neocities and the Blot archives will be live until my subscription runs out, so I may still figure out something other way to archive them at some point.

Saw this list on Bluesky, thought it would be fun to answer:

1. Favourite scent: Clean laundry
2. Something you collect: Tamagotchi
3. Dream Date: Staying in with my husband and ordering pizza
4. Favourite Mythical creature: Unicorn
5. Fun fact about yourself: I was the 4,897 person on Twitter. The Prime Minister’s account followed me for a bit
6. Fun fact about not yourself: Babies are born with all their teeth. A baby skull is literally full of teeth. Wait did you say fun or horrifying?
7. An unforgettable experience you’ve had: I was an extra on the movie White Chicks
8. Your mundane super power: Remebering quotes from TV
9. Dumbest way you’ve been injured: Running on a cobbelstone street, twisted my ankle, tore ligaments
10. Deep sea vs. Deep space: Neither, both are terrifying
11. Love Language: That’s a stupid book that I’ve never read
12. Tattoos/piercings: No tattoos, three piercings in each ear and a cartiledge piercing in my left ear that has since closed over; belly button pierced too.
13. A food I’m good at making: Lasagna, my lasagna is legend
14. Song/Album I love: Boxer, by the National
15. Something very stupid I’ve done: Spend time filling this out when I should be working

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.

Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these videos! Watch them below, ordered randomly.

IMG_0001 via beSpacific and Wired

A great idea for a list: The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years. Includes caesar salad, the last word cocktail, Marcella Hazen’s tomato sauce, Julia Child’s beef bourg, no-knead bread, and Kenji’s reverse-sear steak. What’s missing?

via kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products

I’ve decided that my new thing is going to be watching Murdoch Mysteries. There’s just so much of it. 18 seasons - so far! It’s filmed in Toronto, and all around Ontario. Apparently former PM Stephen Harper had a walk-on role?

In the first episode “Miss Toronto Electric and Light” is murdered by electricity. Irony!

Yannick Bisson (Murdoch) has a real John Reardon (Hudson) quality that gives me high hopes for this as a very Canadian sort of “why do they continue to go there!” murder mystery show. Like, why do people keep going to the Hudson and Rex version of St. John’s? It is so small and there is literally a murder a week now. They used to do more kidnappings but lately it’s all just murder. Murdoch is murder right off the bat!

Wish me luck in my new journey to become an afficianado of Canadian crime shows.

The most bizarre thing I think I’ve seen so far popped up. A giant cradle for your cranky wife!

I found this great write up about it on Tumblr:

The Hen-Pecked Club’s Peace Box, a “patent cure for a cross wife”. The Hen-Pecked club was an organisation which encouraged men to do more household tasks to take some of the pressure off their wives. The ‘Peace Box’, also known as ‘the wife tamer’, was invented by a club member called Harry Tap in 1862. If a wife was nagging her husband too much, the husband could put her inside the box, which could be rocked like a child’s cot in order to send the wife to sleep. While she was sleeping the husband would perform all the chores then release his wife who would hopefully have calmed down.

— Write up via Victoria Fan Guide on Tumblr, and look at Fiona Bruce inside it in this old article about the Roadshow episode.

Is it wrong that I would absolutely eat this?

Chef Alessandro Pipero says he doesn't begrudge Heinz for selling a creamy spaghetti in a can. But he wouldn't call it carbonara.

"I'm a Roman man and I love the real carbonara," Pipero told *As It Happens* guest host Tom Harrington.

In a press release, Heinz billed its new canned spaghetti carbonara as a "fail-proof" version of the traditional Italian dish "that comes with absolutely zero drama."

But it's already causing quite a bit of drama among foodies and high-end restaurateurs. A chef in London called it "a disgrace," and a BBC presenter suggested it could mark "the end of culinary civilization."

The controversial culinary creation hits shelves in the U.K. this month, but it will not be coming to Canada.

Carbonara in a can? This Italian chef thinks it’s ‘genius,’ but he’ll never eat it | CBC Radio

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

This article in Quanta magazine was really interesting to me! I’m aphantasic, and I always thought things like “counting sheep” and “visualize it” were just metaphors. I remember discovering the concept of Aphantasia in 2016 or so, and it blew my mind that there were people that could actually visualize things when they were told to imagine a concept.

Saw the apple? Shomstein was confused. She didn’t actually *see* an apple. She could think about an apple: its taste, its shape, its color, the way light might hit it. But she didn’t see it. Behind her eyes, “it was completely black,” Shomstein recalled. And yet, “I imagined an apple.” Most of her colleagues reacted differently. They reported actually seeing an apple, some vividly and some faintly, floating like a hologram in front of them.

That is me. I imagine the apple, but see nothing. But I do dream in images! I just can’t conjure an image. Apparently, this is normal for aphantasic people!

Because many people with aphantasia dream in images and can recognize objects and faces, it seems likely that their minds store visual information — they just can’t access it voluntarily or can’t use it to generate the experience of imagery.

I also have a pretty weak autobiographical memory, particularly for things like day to day memories of high school; and a terrible sense of direction. Turns out, these things are related!

They found that people with aphantasia indeed tended to have weaker autobiographical memories and less activity in the hippocampus, which helps encode and retrieve such memories.

Overall, just a really interesting article.

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

Oh look, my actual nightmare!

When two American astronauts blasted off on a test mission to the International Space Station on 5 June, they were expecting to be back home in a matter of days. But things didn’t quite go to plan. In fact, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams are still there, floating high above the Earth nearly two months later.

They went to space for eight days - and could be stuck until 2025

Famous Paintings Recreated using Emoji via waxy.org