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Happy Pride month!

Queer people are lovely

Bi people are amazing

Aromantic people are fantastic

Trans people are so worthwhile

Polyamorous folks are great

Pan people are precious

Asexual people are fabulous

Nonbinary and otherwise genderqueer people rock

Lesbians are so fucking valid

Allies are pretty neat

Intersex people are fantastic, whether they consider themselves lgbt+ or not

Gay people are so strong

Your microlabel is valid and beautiful too

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In the frigid water, Belmore struggles with the full bucket that she carries. The burden implies an ongoing, futile battle. It is a reminder that the oceans carried Europeans to the Americas and were witness to the shock waves of their arrival. The bucket bears the weight of historical circumstance. The turbulence subsides. Belmore hauls the bucket onto the beach and strides with great resolve toward the camera. She heaves its contents toward the viewer. The water becomes blood. It flows down the screen, turning it into a monochrome painting. Through the bloodied surface, Belmore confronts the camera with a sombre, resilient look. It is the expression of someone ready to move forward, with nothing to fear and, sadly, nothing more to lose.

Lee-Ann Martin, 

The Waters of Venice: Rebecca Belmore at the 51st Biennale

Summer 2005, Canadian Art 

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In a Library by Emily Dickinson, from The Collected Poems

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... failing society that was endurable, he lived in an isolation, with a savagery which fashionable people called pose and ill-breeding, public authorities a recalcitrant spirit, his neighbours madness, his family selfishness and pride.

from Volume Four of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past 

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Quiet, by Marjorie Pickthall

It’s Canada’s annual Poem in your Pocket Day, and this is the poem I’ve chosen. It was written in 1922. 

Come not the earliest petal here, but only

Wind, cloud, and star,

Lovely and far,

Make it less lonely.

Few are the feet that seek her here, but sleeping

Thoughts sweet as flowers

Linger for hours,

Things winged, yet weeping.

Here in the immortal empire of the grasses,

Time, like one wrong

Note in a song,

With their bloom, passes.

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list poetry (courtesy of HYP) + static html

I find creative expression incredibly helpful during stressful situations, and April happens to be Canada’s National Poetry Month. I happened to participate in HYP’s live instagram poetry workshop (every Sunday afternoon). One particular session caught my attention because the concepts are quite similar to certain elements in html. This session, led by the amazing Eddie Lartey, had a theme: list poems. He gave us the following exercises (displayed here using an unordered list) to help with writing your own list poem.

Come up with a list of 7 people you'd like to talk to.

What are 6 things you'd say to the people on your list?

Name 5 types of list.

As an example of a really powerful list poem, Eddie read us “Scars” by Rudy Francisco. When this poem is read out loud it flows so well

       that the listener doesn't have to think about how its form is puctuated.

       The reader of a poem that's in the format of an ordered list

       can't ignore its visible presentation.  

       Think about that when writing your own list poem.

       Here are some tips from a list poem expert!    

4 tips for writing list poems (displayed using an ordered list):

Your poem doesn't have to be in a traditional sequence. In other words, your list items can be out of order.

  Your poem doesn't have to be an ordered list of items. Your list of items may not have an order at all!

  Make sure you don't put too many items in your list, or you'll lose the reader's attention. Of course, there are exceptions but if you don't follow this tip you'll need to give extra thought to the form your poem will take.

 Be creative!!

If you’re quite happy with your list poem, you might want to consider publishing it. 

Maybe you’ve even got a Tumblr account... 

You can reblog this post and use Tumblr formatting to display your own unordered, or ordered, list poem. 

Maybe you want to learn some html...

While Tumblr allows you to change some detail regarding size, color and font,

there’s still a lot of styling that you won’t be able to change (like the symbols delineating the items in your list). Sometimes the line-spacing in Tumblr is a bit strange. If you think you might want a little more control over how your list poem is displayed, maybe you’d like to learn a bit about

hyper

text 

markup

language.

Not only does html form

the backbone of the internet,

it can also be used to create an interactive list poem like this:

https://deciduous-cloud-nape.glitch.me

OK, so it takes more than html to create a dynamic web page like that.

Think of the interactive list poem as a goal to work towards.

We’ve got a couple stops along the way.

The first one is all about using 

static html

to display your list poem and style it as you see fit.

Here’s another list poem that I wrote using the above poetry workshop:

https://glitch.com/~fwd-tut-1-static-html

I’m using this poem to demonstrate the 

ordered and unordered

list elements used in html.

The first thing an html file needs is a place to live. 

It could just sit on your own computer, but if you’re interested in displaying it to others you’ll need a public place to put it. That’s where Glitch comes in handy. They've created a really friendly, supportive, community where you can learn more about web development. 

You’ll find further steps for learning html in the README.md file of the above Glitch project. 

You can REMIX this Glitch project and use it to publish your own list poetry!

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Currently Reading

“The Decameron”, by Boccaccio 

“Chance Acquaintances”, by Colette

“The Imperialist”, by Sara Jeannette Duncan

“Legends from the Forest”, as told by Chief Thomas Fiddler

[04-19-20]

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#crime and punishment  #wuthering heights  #les miserables

You Can Only Keep Three

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“France is relocating women beaten by their partners into hotels, and has created a secret code word for them to discreetly seek help in pharmacies, in response to a huge increase in domestic abuse during the coronavirus lockdown.

In France and many other affected countries, restrictions on movement during the pandemic have trapped women inside their homes with abusive partners, resulting in a sharp rise in reports of domestic violence. French officials say that reports of abuse have leaped by about one third around the country since the restrictions came into effect on March 17.

Last week, French officials set up an “alert system” in pharmacies nationwide, where victims of domestic abuse could discreetly ask the pharmacist to call police by asking for a “mask 19.” The initiative mimics a scheme set up in Spain’s Canary Islands that uses the same code word.

Read the full piece here

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wtf?

Members of Hamilton’s legal, medical and street outreach community are demanding that police stop ticketing homeless people for not observing “physical distancing” rules amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This is not going to solve the problem,” said Lisa Nussey of Keeping Six, a group that supports drug users and people experiencing homelessness.

Nussey said she and her colleagues have learned of tickets issued to homeless people for not following provincial orders that ban groups of more than five people.

In one case, a man of no fixed address was ticketed $750 for “fail to comply with an order made during a declared emergency” at the corner of King and Bay streets. The date on the ticket is April 1.

The power to penalize people congregating in groups flows from the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @abpoli @politicsofcanada @torontopoli @onpoli

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- You don’t sleep at night? Since when? - I don’t know—I can’t remember.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

(via

the-book-diaries

)

This one goes out to anyone who’s experiencing insomnia right now.

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Still makes me smile!

Once again, a neural net tries to name cats

Last year I trained a neural net to generate new names for kittens, by giving it a list of over 8,000 existing cat names to imitate. Starting from scratch, with zero knowledge of English or any context for the words and letter combinations it was trying out, it tried to predict what letters might be found in cat names, and in which order. Its names ranged from the strange to the completely nonsensical to the highly unfortunate (Retchion, Hurler, and Trickles were some of its suggestions). Without knowledge of English beyond its list of cat names, it didn’t know what letter combinations to avoid.

So I decided to revisit the cat-naming problem, this time using a neural net that had a lot more context. GPT-2, trained by OpenAI on a huge chunk of the internet, knows which words and letter combinations tend to be used together on the English-language internet. It also has (mostly) figured out which words and letter combinations to avoid, at least in some contexts (though it does tend to suddenly switch contexts, and then, yikes).

When I trained GPT-2 on the list of cat names using Max Woolf’s colab notebook, it still retained a lot of what it had learned from the rest of the internet. Gone were the strange names like “Tilly-Mapper” and “Balllucidoux” - it had a bunch of real words it could use instead. Here are some of the names it came up with - and the Morris Animal Refuge (who you may remember from that time they used neural net names for their guinea pigs) has given some of these names to some highly adoptable kittens.

First, neural net can do fancy:

Taffeta Pompompur Monocle Tom Glitter Notion Tinnitus Cheesemonger M. Tinklesby Linklater Soap

It can also do the opposite of fancy:

Scat Cat Butthole Gangrene Moisture Grotesque Petard Oilbag Buttwig The Cream Meatbag Dr Fart Fudge Putty Scumbag Constipation BUTT

And it can also do names ranging from tough to downright sinister:

Miss Vulgar Lillith The Vamp Elle Fury Deadbolt Romeo of Darkness Starmaker Fist Warning Signs Bibles Smoked The Firestarter Higher Rune Scarlet Be Thy Coat Kill All Humans Bones Of The Master Mr. Sinister Evil Whispers Spawn Serendipitous Kill Stranglehold

(Starmaker and Sparky Buttons are from a litter that had upper respiratory infections that damaged their eyes, but even though their world is kinda cloudy, they love to play and cuddle.)

I’m a particular fan of the Very Weird cat names:

Honeystring Dr Leg Tom Noodle Pinball Scene Peanutbutterjiggles You’re Telling A Lie Beep Boop Thoughts Bobble Bun Atmosphere You Name It Whiskeridoo Sparky Buttons

Seemingly This Guy Various Authors Chicken Whiskey Fish Especially Thelonious Monsieur Ringo Shuffles Sweet Cakes EXTAs (Eye Stalks) Checker Spin Donut Quin Two Patz Grandpa He Glad Funky Moe Fluttering Feelers Accepted A Tribute Chewie Bean PLEASE Gregory Chimney Notable PRODUCT LEGEND Weird Science Platinum Not Suitable For Character the Enforcer

Did I mention these cats are adoptable? If you live near Philadelphia, you live near these kitties!

Bonus content: yet more cat names!

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Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colours, faintly, the association, perhaps for ever.

Swamp Angel, by Ethel Wilson (via stineographer)