for those interested

[irisembury]

The Millennium Falcon was one of the stupidest pop culture phenomena. It's just a forgettable grey blob, it has no distinct features aside from its simple shape. Why did people in gen X think it looked so cool?

Also at a glance it looks backwards, you'd think the pointy part is the back. I don't know it's stupid. The ship in Star Trek also looked stupid but at least it was more visually unique not just an oval with a pointy end.

[irisembury]

A currency exchange rate doesn't inherently tell you anything about the economy or the purchasing people of people who live there.

Say in country A, they get paid A$, and in country B, they get paid B$, and I tell you that A$100 is worth B$250. Which economy is better off? And who has more purchasing power if they took their currency to another country? The answer is you have no idea, there's not enough information in the question.

The critical detail is how much people get paid. If the average salary in A is A$100 and in B it's B$100, then indeed people from A have a higher purchasing power (it takes B 2.5x the work to afford the same stuff), but it's also possible the average salary in A is A$100 while in B it's B$900, in which case A$1 has more purchasing power than B$1 but a person from B is still wealthier.

So when you see that 1 USD is worth 1.40 CAD or 0.88 EUR, that doesn’t really tell you anything. The American economy isn’t better because their dollar has more purchasing power than a Canadian dollar, and it's not worse because their dollar has less purchasing power than a euro.

Another good comparison point for this to click with people is the Japanese yen. 1 USD is worth over 160 JPY, but obviously the average American isn’t over 100 times wealthier than the average Japanese person. Japanese people just get paid way more yen than Americans get paid dollars. Get it?

[irisembury]

remember the Trucker protests in Canada a few years ago?

I made a video all about that

yknow if you're interested

[irisembury]

Part of why I’m distressed as a Canadian right now is because 5 years ago the Liberal Party was in government, and to their right we had the Conservative Party (CPC), led by Erin O’Toole, and to their left we had the smaller New Democrats (NDP), led by Jagmeet Singh.

I have some disagreements with both O’Toole and Singh, just as I had disagreements with Trudeau’s Liberals. Nobody’s perfect. But Trudeau, Singh, and O’Toole were all honest, well-meaning people. They cared about decency, rule of law, and above all they cared about Canada. I truly believe this. I slept well feeling this country was in good hands, no matter the election outcomes.

That was in 2021. I can’t repeat the above about our current CPC and NDP leaders. O’Toole was replaced with Pierre Poilievre, and Singh was replaced with somebody named Avi Lewis — both worse people whom I have next to no trust in, especially Poilievre. The Liberal Party, meanwhile, replaced Trudeau with Mark Carney, who was more moderate, and who maintained the tone of decency and professionalism that I was used to.

This is why I currently find myself clinging to the Liberal Party. They got better while our opposition parties got worse. I no longer feel the country is in good hands no matter election results. I now actively fear the Liberal Party losing, not because I’m dedicated to Carney in particular but because the thought of a person like Poilievre becoming Prime Minister is frightening.

[irisembury]

Pierre Poilievre, Canada’s right-wing opposition leader, normally tries to downplay LGBT topics — but today, he decided to remind everybody that he thinks trans women should be thrown in men's prisons.

Notice how the qualified position — a judge asking if trans women with a specific type of criminal history should be moved — wasn't enough; he decided to go even harder, effectively saying “no, all trans women should be moved regardless.”

Is this new for Poilievre? Not exactly — he said in February 2024 that “obviously female sports, female changerooms, female bathrooms, should be for females, not for biological males.” Didn’t mention prisons specifically, but he made it known how he feels.

However, he also said “A lot of the spaces you described are provincially and municipally controlled, so it is unclear what reach federal legislation would have to change them,” indicating that it’s not really in his purview. And over the 4 years that he’s been in leadership, he really does barely ever touch LGBT topics.

Which is why it’s interesting that he decided to make a statement about this again today. I wonder why?

[irisembury]

there’s a pokémon in the path, so you can’t go past.

why don’t you just wake it up? you can’t, it’s sleeping and it can’t be woken. you need a special flute to wake it.

if I literally can’t wake it up even if I try, then why can’t I just like, go around it, or literally climb over it or something?

also, why can’t you just attack it? it’s sleeping. are we just being polite?

then you get the pokéflute and it wakes up, and it literally uses Rest in the battle to sleep again. and then you continue attacking it, even though it’s asleep. and then it wakes up in the battle, despite you not using a pokéflute to wake it again.

then after the battle, it faints. faints. if it faints, shouldn’t it just fall over and be in the path again? like, how is that so different from it being asleep, for my purposes?

wahhhhhh

[irisembury]

Hey there. If you’re somebody who often just tries to avoid Donald Trump because it all feels so miserable, I get you, but make an exception for this bizarre interview he just gave. This might be the most embarrassing, child-like meltdown I’ve ever heard him give, which for Trump is a high bar. (timestamp 37:22 til the end when he walks out)

It feels almost too tired to even bother saying, but... “imagine if Kamala ever gave a performance like this.”

[irisembury]

A few years ago at Pride in Toronto the only political party with any presence was the Liberal Party and they were giving out these buttons and I thought they looked really nice

[irisembury]

Without getting into the meaning or anything, just from a visual perspective, I think what’s appealing about the ‘progress’ flag is that it looks more like an actual flag, and it helps because the colours on the original flag people still use just don’t look that great together.

It looks right when you turn it vertically, too.

But conceptually, I like the simplicity of the original rainbow. It’s a spectrum, all visible light, so it represents the natural diversity of life, and ergo there’s no reason to add anything to it because it already implicitly includes everything.

I always felt like it could look better, though, if we took more artistic liberty with colours. I don’t know how it was originally made, but at some point everybody settled on a version that looks like they just clicked the default colours and hit send without tweaking it at all.

I’m not an art student fluent in colour theory nonsense, but here, I tried to make a rainbow flag that looks better to me:

[irisembury]

something that pisses me off is pills that taste bad. why? you can literally coat them in stuff. put them in a dissolving capsule like the gel pills. I don’t get it

[irisembury]

In smaller-population, countries, like Canada or Sweden or something, there can’t be hardcore environmentalism until there’s global cooperation on the issue. Even if we totally dismantled our economy and had zero emissions, it wouldn't make a significant difference. It would just disadvantage us and allow other countries to define our future.

This is an example of a collective action problem. If the entire world was on board, then I say shut down all oil and gas, no new pipelines, nothing. I’m on board, because then we could actually accomplish this and literally save the planet. But currently, the world is fucking crazy and half the largest economies are governed by 70-year-old climate change deniers. Even if Canada reverted to medieval farming and had zero emissions, this place is fucked until that changes.

The realistic path to a green economy, and a future with less horrible foreign policy driven by oil dependence, is investing in that future, of course, but it’s most likely also expanding our domestic oil and gas sector in the meantime. The economic and political benefit is simply too much to ignore.

And the political reality, too: I wrote the above as though I’m an all-powerful government that can approach the issue rationally, but if you don’t manage the economy well enough, voters will reject you and vote in the same right-wing climate change deniers I mentioned, and they’re strip away environmental protections even harder, probably without even investing in the future. So then you lose either way.

This is the reasoning for why, even though I’ve said climate change is probably the single most important issue humanity faces, I’m in favour of the Canadian government expanding our oil and gas sector, reducing carbon taxes, or scaling back our goals for reducing emissions, to whatever degree they deem is appropriate as part of a broad economic agenda. The only thing we shouldn’t touch is whatever is required of us by any international agreement that other large industrial economies are also following.

I’m not happy about it but that’s how it is.

[irisembury]

When I was younger, I couldn’t have explained why I didn’t like the Simpsons. I just didn’t. It had funny jokes sometimes, which was easy to acknowledge if you showed me scenes from it out of context, but whenever I just sat and watched the show, I actively disliked it and after some point started avoiding it.

Revisiting some of it as an adult, it’s much easier to articulate. The Simpsons is horrible and depressing. It’s a mirror world, a parody of ours, where everything and everybody sucks. It’s one of the most misanthropic articles of American culture.

It’s about Homer, who’s just some random idiot, who in the beginning is at least sort of a well-meaning person, but as the show goes on even that becomes questionable. His family is stupid and dysfunctional, which is probably largely his fault considering he’s a physically abusive alcoholic father. Despite their house being weirdly large, it’s intended to be low quality and the family constantly on the brink financially, despite Homer giving up on all his dreams to work a job he hates trying to maintain stability.

Speaking of which, his job sucks. He doesn’t like it, he’s not remotely competent at it. His boss mistreats everybody and is a criminal if not downright evil. The police are all stupid incompetents, the town is run by a horribly corrupt and cynical mayor who gets reëlected anyway because everyone in the town is stupid.

There’s a priest character who’s dry, petty, and burned out, basically just showing up and doing his job as a 9 to 5 without caring. The only person in the show with a positive disposition at all is their neighbour, Ned, whom Homer despises and whose positivity is just something to make fun of. as the writers destroy his life and take everything from him for laughs.

Homer spends his free time at a bar run by a depressed, suicidal incel who’s jealous of his wife, alongside his stupid alcoholic friends, one of whom has completely destroyed his life drinking and whom the show gives no relief or redemption (the punchline is “haha, this guy used to be happy and functional, but now he’s a miserable fat alcoholic!” and that’s it).

The children’s television is all mindless crap, orchestrated by Krusty, who’s a cynical, drug-addicted criminal who shamelessly does whatever gets him paid.

I also really dislike their portrayal of the elderly. Every older person in the show is portrayed horribly. It’s like they’re all dementia patients who sit around doing nothing and having no value to society whatsoever. It feels downright hateful, like everybody in the writing room had a bad relationship with their grandparents.

Maybe if you have nostalgia-goggles because you saw this show on TV when you were a kid like I did, you got so used to how horrible its world was that after some point you don’t even feel it anymore. Stop me before I start thinking about how much the Simpsons alone may have contributed to a generation of 30-to-50 year-olds growing up to be jaded, cynical, ungrateful, pessimistic burn-outs.

[irisembury]

For Canadians who don’t know how their government work:

In each riding throughout the country, we vote in somebody to elect us in the House of Commons, serving as members of Parliament (MPs). The party with the most seats in the House becomes the governing party, meaning they control the Canadian Ministry, our executive branch. The leader of the governing party becomes Prime Minister (PM), meaning, among other things, that it’s up to them to appoint MPs to serve as ministers, hence the name Ministry. The collection of ministers is also called the Cabinet.

The ministers are leaders or directors of various government departments and agencies, which comprise the Public Service (formerly, and still colloquially, the Civil Service). For example, Mélanie Joly, MP for Ahuntsic-Cartierville, QC, is currently our Minister of Industry. However, there isn’t simply a corresponding department of industry (we have many more departments than ministers). As minister of industry, Joly works with the Office of Consumer Affairs, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the Canadian Space Agency, and numerous others. The exact titles held by ministers is regularly in flux to describe their areas of focus, and they’re not always short. The current Cabinet can be seen on the official website for the Prime Minister’s Office: https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/cabinet

The Canadian Senate and the Supreme Court of Canada both also exist and they sometimes do things, but they’re not in the news as much, and not as powerful as their American counterparts. I don’t think the average Canadian knows the name of a single member of either body. The Senate, like the King, theoretically has a lot of power, but very rarely contradicts the House of Commons. They mostly review legislation and make minor corrections or revisions. Like the House of Lords in the UK, its members are appointed, not elected. By whom? The Crown, but on advice of the Prime Minister and via their Governor General — which means, in effect, they’re simply appointed by the Prime Minister. Of the 105 current members, 81 were appointed on advice of Justin Trudeau, due to his long tenure as Prime Minister.

The Governor General is basically just an intermediate functionary. After an election that changes the tides in the House of Commons, it’s the Governor General who appoints the Prime Minister. When the Prime Minister wants to appoint people to his or her Cabinet, or appoint new members to the Senate, or appoint members to the Supreme Court of Canada, it’s formally not the PM doing these things directly, but the Governor General who does it on advice of the PM. This separation is a customary artefact of Canadian history, where the Governor General represents the Crown, theoretically holding great power but never exercising it.

I’ve talked to a lot of Canadians who didn’t know what the “Canadian Ministry” referred to, who didn’t know the Cabinet had to be MPs (in the U.S., the Cabinet can just be any random person the President appoints), or other miscellaneous things like this. I have tried to start bringing it up more.

[irisembury]

I remember when I was 12, my parents bought younger sister a particularly huge amount of toys she wanted one Christmas, and then sat around opening them all with her on Christmas morning. It was very exciting and middle-class wholesome. Then we had coffee on the patio and went out to get something from the other house and when we came back, instead of playing with any of the toys she just opened, she was sitting around playing with a little box of pennies she already had before Christmas. This is my favourite childhood memory.

[irisembury]

I made a video talking about our relationship with left-wing extremists, and looking over some of the history they often talk about to demonstrate how little they care about your values.

[irisembury]

Story: Indigenous Actress (Q’orianka Kilcher) Sues James Cameron for Using Her Face in Avatar (2009) Without Permission

This is a very weird lawsuit because it’s not even an AI story. It’s literally just that back when they were making this movie 20 years ago, they looked at various women as inspiration for designing this animated character, and one of them was this girl, who somehow found out years later. Now she’s suing, calling this exploitation and theft, not only of her face but her biological identity and cultural heritage.

Is this really where we are? To be inspired by something while drawing your character is exploitation and theft?

They also appear to claim that if someone is inspired by your appearance, then draws a cartoon, then later has that cartoon do anything sexual, that’s actually the same as deepfake pornography.

Wow, did you guys know that when the Na’vi did that hair-connection thing in the first movie, you were watching child porn? Neither did I.

I don’t have a finger to the pulse of the American legal world, so I can’t tell if this is just going to be laughed out of court or not. I’m having trouble imagining the potential consequences of a suit like this actually winning.

[irisembury]

If you exported all of Trump’s rhetoric and positions and such it would be unpopular in Canada, so when I say there is a rising MAGA-esque sentiment on the right in Canada, it’s more about people embracing the same style of choose-your-own-reality conspiracy theorism like this: