• 12 Posts
  • 248 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Given his unpopularity, even among his own party, and his recent fumbling of the Freeland and Carney situation causing his cabinet to implode, this isn’t exactly a surprise.

    Unfortunately it’s probably going to turn out similar to the Biden/Harris situation where the next Liberal leader won’t have the time to sell themselves to Canadians nor will they be likely to separate themselves from Trudeau’s policies in any real way. Which, since Singh has by and large failed to sell himself to Canadians, seems to be pointing us to Pollievre as PM. Ugh.




  • I tried to read The Nightingale and had to drop it because Hannah seemed to simultaneously want to insist on how french everything was (ooo, they’re drinking café noir, not black coffee) but also didn’t seem to understand how a language works.

    Like, the main character was reflecting on her mom calling them her little nightingales because their last name is Rossignol, the french word for nightingale, and I’m like… She called you nightingales because your name is literally nightingale, why does this warrant multiple paragraphs of internal monologuing?

    The plot and characters were fine if uninspired, but she put so little effort into the setting that the whole thing felt poorly slapped together. Which I guess tracks well enough with this article, too.





  • IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.

    Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.




  • To some extent this feels like episode 2; the last few episodes didn’t feel like they really moved along the main conflict with Marcus, but this one really sets up a proper encounter between Veltol (with more of his power available) and Marcus’ minion(s). There’s a point that ties back to everything else, not just a semi-SOL episode dealing with something random.

    Not that I didn’t enjoy the last few episodes, but clear progress towards the main conflict is always appreciated in this medium.










  • It’s one of my all-time favorite books and I’m still not sure I could actually explain the plot to someone. In fact, I’m not confident there is a coherent plot rather than a bunch of related vignettes that just kind of happen, some of which tell a story and some not so much.

    My brain just kind of spent so much time trying to understand what the point of any of it was that I eventually ended up with an interpretation that I loved to view the book through, and therefore I ended up loving the book.