#kevin steele

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Skinnamarinkstump Linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TODAY (Feb 15) for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS, and on MONDAY (Feb 17) for an event at KEPLER'S in MENLO PARK with CHARLIE JANE ANDERS. More tour dates here.

It's Saturday and I'm on a book tour, and the world is in chaos, and there are more links to write about than I could fit in to this week's newsletter, so time for a cubic linkdump, the 27th such:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Let's start with the best thing I saw all week: a 3D-printed, spring-loaded, clockwork chess pawn that uses a magnet to sense when it has reached the end of the board and SPROING! turns into a queen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSOnnle3zbA

The whole video is a fascinating account of the design process, from idea to prototype to finished item, but if you're impatient and want to skip right to the eyeball kick, it's at 12:27-12:35. And if you want to print your own, the files are $12 (cheap!):

https://www.patreon.com/WorksByDesign/shop/queen-pawn-3d-printing-files-614491?source=storefront

Regrettably, not every tech project is a good one. This week, Google abandoned its AI ethics pledge. Unlike most AI ethics pledge, which are full of nonsense about not accidentally creating a vengeful god that turns the human race into paperclips, Google's AI pledge was actually very important, in that the company promised not to make AI that violates human rights, international law, or privacy. There comes a point where harping on Google's abandoned "don't be evil" motto can feel a little hacky, but in this case, I'll make an exception. My EFF colleague Matthew Guariglia tears Google a much-deserved new AIhole over this latest heel turn:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/google-wrong-side-history

Not all bad technology is evil. Some of it is merely very, very stupid. How stupid? Check out Thom Dunn's Wirecutter review of The Heatbit Trio, a space-heater that uses Bitcoin-mining GPUs to generate some of its heat, very slightly offsetting the cost of warming your room – but at a rate that would take decades to recoup the $700 price-tag. Thom got some spicy quotes from Molly White for this one – possibly the first time she's been cited in a home appliance review:

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/heatbit-space-heater-review/

Staying with crypto freaks for a moment here, Adam Levitin dissects the cryptocurrency "industry"'s latest chorus of aggrieved whining over "debanking":

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/debanked-by-the-market.html

As Levitin writes, banks aren't kicking cryptocurrency "companies" off their books because the government wants to punish them. Banks have a very good reason to want to avoid doing business with high-dollar scams that have highly correlated implosions, which is to say, times when everyone wants their money back from the cryptocurrency "company" the bank is handling charges for. For a longer explanation that gets into the nitty gritty of bank supervision, check out Patio11's excellent, detailed explainer:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/

As all the real heads know, "crypto means cryptography," and cryptographers continue to contrive privacy marvels. This week, Kagi – the best search engine, a million times better than Google – released a Privacy Pass authentication plugin, which lets you login to Kagi and run searches without Kagi being able to connect any of the searches you make with your account:

https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass

As an sf/crime writer who sometimes (often) searches for information on committing ghastly crimes and 'orrible murders, the fact that my favorite search engine will be technically incapable of tying those searches to my identity is quite a relief. Read my review of Kagi here:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

If you're one of those marvel-contriving hackers, cryptographers, security researchers or tinkerers, you should really consider attending this summer's Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), 2600 Magazine's (now) annual (formerly biennial) hacker con. They've just posted their CFP – get those submission in!

https://www.hope.net/cfp-talks.html

Well, I have to post this and get ready for this morning's virtual book tour event with Yanis Varoufakis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

But before I go, one more link: Kevin Steele's 2005 essay on Hypercard, "When Multimedia Was Black & White," an absolute classic, and a beautiful meditation on the art and promise of early hypertext:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240213190609/http://www.kevinsteele.com/smackerel/black_white_00.html

I've known Kevin for most of my life, long before he helped found Mackerel, the pioneering Toronto multimedia company. Long after Mackerel, Kevin went on making wonderful things. In 2023, he published a monumental act of portraiture – a "sequential art" time-series of panoramas of Toronto's hip, ever-changing Queen Street West strip:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/13/spadina-to-bathurst/#dukes-cycle

Comparing Kevin's more recent work with that lovely old essay reveals deep correspondences and the progress of a unique and creative soul.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/15/intermixture/#debunking-debanking

[myvinylplaylist]

Roxx Gang: Things You've Never Done Before (1989)

Promotional Copy

Virgin Records

[cupidjet]

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele accused of Covering up for Whitpain Township

“Cosby Got a Trial. Whitpain Got a Pass. Courtesy of Kevin Steele.” byu/norta3 inWhitpaintownship

[biglisbonnews]

Pluralistic: Portraits of Queen West (13 Sept 2023) Today's links Portraits of Queen West: Kevin Steele's "sequential art" book of the glory days of Queen Street West. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Portraits of Queen West (permalink) Portraits of Queen West is Kevin Steele's extraordinary photo-book, a work of "sequential art" featuring time- and space-series of a single – rather glorious – stretch of Toronto's Queen Street West: https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through Mackerel Multimedia, the pioneering Canadian multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s – one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world: https://craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html Steele's pioneering work – in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash – helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto's most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable. Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "view source" affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against enshittification. Mackerel didn't survive the first great multimedia mass-extinction, but it launched the careers of a whole generation of talented web-writers and builders, and not just its former employees, but also the millions who were touched by its work. I haven't seen Steele in person in decades, but I follow his work – not as a multimedia artist, but as an urban photographer. Kevin and I follow each other on Flickr – the once great and great again photo-sharing site that survived decades of abuse from Yahoo and Verizon before being taken indie and rescued by the Smugmug folks. Back in November 2010, Kevin started posting photos of individual storefronts on Queen Street West to Flickr. They were painstakingly labeled and dated, and they multiplied. By the end of the year, there were a couple dozen of them: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1294552799 A year later, there were hundreds: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1326088799 Today, there are over 1,200 of these: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1 Now, I know Queen Street West very well. It was once one of Toronto's most bohemian neighborhoods, where my paternal grandfather's fellow refugee Benny Yacht has his schmata shop and where my maternal grandfather took my mother and her siblings to trade in their comics for credit at cramped, crammed used bookstores. I discovered Queen West as a pre-teen, thanks to Bakka Books – now Bakka Phoenix – the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world. I haunted Bakka, and, on the way, found myself drawn into the other stores around it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/48476314831/in/photolist-2gRFMvz-2oJJDCY There was Silver Snail, a massive comics shop, but a bounty of used bookstores, vintage clothing stores, thrift shops, the indescribably great electronics store Active Surplus and, later, nightclubs like the Rivoli, the Diamond, the Bovine Sex Club and the Zoo Bar. For a critical decade of my life and more, the stretch of Queen Street that Steele obsessively documented in his Flickr feed had been the center of my life. I watched it thrive and grow – and then collapse into a kind of self-parody, as the original landlords (like Bakka's landlord) died, and their failsons and faildaughters kicked out longstanding tenants and replaced them with multinational "brands" that turned Queen West into a less-convenient, open-air version of the sterile Eaton Centre mall. Steele, it turns out, was having similar feelings of dismay as the organic, grown, chaotic delight became groomed, sterile and homogenized. After a 2008 fire wiped out an entire block of Queen West – including Duke's Cycle, a city institution that eventually shuttered after more than a century of service – Steele began his documentation project. Steele had started documenting the street in 2001, but that fire turned a hobby into a project. Over and over again, Steele returned to the street, meticulously photographing the same storefronts, capturing a time-series that eventually spanned 16 years, from 2001-2017. Steele gradually stitched these photos together into panoramic collages, reproducing whole blocks: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=linearpanorama&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1 It is these "linear panoramas" that form the backbone of Portraits of Queen West. The book runs 162 pages, and it meant to be read forwards and backwards – start from the front cover and turn the pages to see the north side of the street, along with insets showing details (like the storied Graffiti Alley), and then flip the book over and start again, seeing the south side. For more than a decade, I've thrilled to my unexpected trips through Steele's time-machine, as he posted his space-and-time-series images of a vanished urbanism, an old, good city that paralleled the old, good web. I got a peek at a PDF of the new book that collects these extraordinary image and immediately pre-ordered a copy. Steele and his publisher Black Eye Books are crowdfunding presales of the book on Crowdfundr; the hardcover is CAD40 with shipping (there's also a deluxe edition at CAD55, which comes with a signed bookplate and six postcards): https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest After a string of ghastly mayors – each finding new depths of depravity, selfishness and mismanagement to plumb – Toronto just elected its first progressive mayor in a generation, the wonderful Olivia Chow, for whom I used to ring doorbells support of her city council campaigns: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/olivia-chow-wins-election-as-torontos-first-chinese-canadian-mayor Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The enshittification of the old, good web continues apace, but there has never been more energy to build a new, good internet – and banish the enshitternet of Big Tech to the scrapheap of history. In the same way, Toronto's much eroded urbanism, pluralism and liveability are both at their lowest ebb in my lifetime – and also at their most hopeful moment of the century. In 1998, the dead-eyed Romneyoid Premier of Ontario Mike Harris "amalgamated" Toronto with its suburbs, putting it at the mercy of car-addled out-of-towners in an act of gerrymandering that all-but-guaranteed that city residents' political choices would be swamped by suburbanites who could be convinced to vote for laughable Tory bumblefucks like Rob Ford. Overcoming the gerrymander required a massive turnout – not merely a supermajority, but an ultramajority of politically motivated, organized, committed, pissed off Torontonians; Chow's election is a minor miracle that part of the wave of other historic reversals, like the DoJ awakening from its coma to drag Google into court on antitrust charges. We are a long way away from making a new, good internet that's a worthy successor to the old, good internet, and at least as far from a new, good Toronto that the people of the old, good Toronto would have built but for Tory wreckers and the Christmas-voting turkeys who elevated them to office. But both are possible – and both demand that we fight for them. Steele's beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn't just memorialize the world we lost – it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win. Hey look at this (permalink) Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI https://www.404media.co/revealed-the-country-that-secretly-wiretapped-the-world-for-the-fbi/ (spoiler: Lithuania) Celebrating Ten Years of the Marrakesh Treaty https://www.copyright.gov/events/marrakesh-treaty-tenth-anniversary/ (h/t Proton411) Gilead Delayed Introduction Of New Version of HIV Drug, With Fewer Side Effects, Maximizing Its Patent Monopoly And Profits https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/gilead-delayed-introduction-of-new-version-of-hiv-drug-with-fewer-side-effects-maximizing-its-patent-monopoly-and-profits/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Little Brother in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/books/review/Grossman-t.html #15yrsago Mounties review Tasers, conclude that they’re dangerous, misused and under-researched https://web.archive.org/web/20080917202538/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/09/12/taser-review.html #15yrsago Mom accused of stealing daughter’s identity to attend highschool and become a cheerleader https://web.archive.org/web/20080916071716/http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipppcZU-H4xC9lQiAOQFSF-cfrdAD935H3G80 #15yrsago DHS: HOWTO stop (other governments’) creepy spooks from reading your hard drive and email https://web.archive.org/web/20080913005403/http://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/US_DHS:_Foreign_Travel_Threat_Assessment:_Electronic_Communications_Vulnerabilities_2008 #10yrsago Feynman lectures as HTML https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html #10yrsago David Cameron appoints a Witchfinder General for copyright https://torrentfreak.com/uk-prime-minister-appoints-new-anti-piracy-enforcement-advisor-130913/ #10yrsago Google’s lobbyists go big on climate change denial, raise money for Inhofe & Competitive Enterprise Insitute https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/13/googles-lobbyists-go-big-on-climate-change-denial-raise-money-for-inhofe-competitive-enterprise-insitute/ #10yrsago Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel apologizes for decades of police torture https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0912/Chicago-Mayor-Rahm-Emanuel-apologizes-for-two-decades-of-police-torture #10yrsago Why fingerprints make lousy authentication tokens https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/iphone-5s-thieves-may-mutilate-owners-in-bid-to-gain-access-to-fingerprintreading-handsets-expert-warns-8808577.html #10yrsago Porno copyright trolls Malibu Media sanctioned by court for “extortionate” tactic https://www.techdirt.com/2013/09/11/copyright-troll-malibu-media-sanctioned-bogus-copyright-abuse-intimidation-tactic/ #10yrsago EFF’s guide to NSA reform bills https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet #10yrsago Doomed to repeat history: Kafkaesque FBI watchlist screwups of the 1940s https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/sep/11/tale-two-irvings-mistaken-identity-height-red-scar/ #10yrsago Cognitive blind-spots of Silicon Valley successes http://quarry.stanford.edu/xapm1111126lse/docs/02_LSE_Cognitive.pdf #5yrsago Mandalay Bay to mass-shooting survivors: we’ll donate $500 to charity if you stipulate that we’re suing you https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mgm-las-vegas-lawsuit-donation-20180911-story.html #5yrsago This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction https://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2093892/science-fictions-new-golden-age-china-what-it-says-about-social #5yrsago Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/12/europe-just-voted-to-wreck-the-internet-spying-on-everything-and-censoring-vast-swathes-of-our-communications/ #5yrsago Sony: OK, OK, we don’t own Bach https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure #5yrsago Machine learning scientist quits Google over plan to launch censored Chinese search tool https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/ #5yrsago Charter, ordered out of New York State, begs for its life https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/charter-negotiating-with-ny-to-avoid-being-kicked-out-of-the-state/ #5yrsago 20% of New York retail space is sitting vacant https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-storefront-vacancy.html #5yrsago Viral road-rage video sparks mob violence in Beijing, revealing deep regional rifts https://www.whatsonweibo.com/fury-and-loathing-in-fengtai-how-one-incident-sparked-chaos-in-beijing-neighbourhood/ #5yrsago Six years ago, North Carolina Republicans passed a law decreeing that the seas weren’t rising https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-carolina-didnt-like-science-on-sea-levels-so-passed-a-law-against-it #5yrsago How anarchist organizers in rural Puerto Rico rebooted their power grid after the privatized power company abandoned them https://www.newsweek.com/puerto-ricans-restore-power-after-hurricane-maria-1114070 #5yrsago “Spread Pricing” transparency reveals the millions CVS rakes in by gouging Medicare and prisons on prescription markups https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-drug-spread-pricing/ #5yrsago Trade negotiators are increasingly unwilling to entertain “corporate sovereignty” clauses https://www.techdirt.com/2018/09/13/corporate-sovereignty-wane-as-governments-realize-more-trouble-than-worth/ #1yrago Survival of the Richest: Douglas Rushkoff on the eschatology of libertarian exit https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn #1yrago Spotify steals from artists, a Spotify exclusive https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake) https://craphound.com/news/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-audiobook-outtake/ Upcoming appearances: EFF Awards (San Francisco), Sept 14 https://www.eff.org/awards/effawards/2023 DIG Festival (Modena, Italy), Sept 22 https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/ Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2 https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8 https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16 https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/ Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25 https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances: Sci-fi and Amazon's empire (The Workers' Speculative Society) https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/doctorow An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse (Defcon 31) https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2031/DEF%20CON%2031%20video%20and%20slides/DEF%20CON%2031%20-%20An%20Audacious%20Plan%20to%20Halt%20the%20Internet%27s%20Enshittification%20-%20Cory%20Doctorow.mp4 Life Doesn’t Have to Zuck (Bungacast) https://bungacast.podbean.com/e/362-life-doesn-t-have-to-zuck-ft-cory-doctorow/ Latest books: The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023 The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ (Latest Medium column: "The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles. https://doctorow.medium.com/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers-ad0a6b09f7e6) Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/13/spadina-to-bathurst/

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[thereadingmoon]

don't you love it when your gender nonconforming protagonist rages against the capitalist machine for the few people in the vast universe worth saving and caring for

[arc-hus]

The Ford Foundation, New York City - Kevin Roche

[appelsider]

Trails x DRRR!! Collab ✨

⭐️Credits:

@alyossan : Rean || @aegisasu : Crow || @azumishard : Elie || @kimikoyokoyami : Lloyd & KeA || @ lunaflor : Aaron || @breadmasterlee : Van || @crossgenesis : Altina || @tofuloafu7 : Millium || @raichana : Kevin || @verniedk : Ries || @appelsider : Swin || @solmango-art : Nadia || @lurebreaker : Renne || @miyo02 : Estelle || @seiransong : Joshua

[soranatus]

Steel By Kevin Wada for DC Pride (2024)

[nureyevs-worst-alias]

My favourite thing about penumbra is that there are four types of additional background voices

- Harley Takagi Kaner Snarky Voice™

- Harley Takagi Kaner Preppy Voice™

- Harley Takagi Kaner Virtual Assistant Voice™

- Kevin Vibert Dumb Goon Voice™

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Portraits of Queen West

Tomorrow (September 14), I'm hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco. On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy.

Portraits of Queen West is Kevin Steele's extraordinary photo-book, a work of "sequential art" featuring time- and space-series of a single – rather glorious – stretch of Toronto's Queen Street West:

https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest

Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through Mackerel Multimedia, the pioneering Canadian multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s – one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html

Steele's pioneering work – in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash – helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto's most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable.

Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "view source" affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against enshittification.

Mackerel didn't survive the first great multimedia mass-extinction, but it launched the careers of a whole generation of talented web-writers and builders, and not just its former employees, but also the millions who were touched by its work.

I haven't seen Steele in person in decades, but I follow his work – not as a multimedia artist, but as an urban photographer. Kevin and I follow each other on Flickr – the once great and great again photo-sharing site that survived decades of abuse from Yahoo and Verizon before being taken indie and rescued by the Smugmug folks.

Back in November 2010, Kevin started posting photos of individual storefronts on Queen Street West to Flickr. They were painstakingly labeled and dated, and they multiplied. By the end of the year, there were a couple dozen of them:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1294552799

A year later, there were hundreds:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1326088799

Today, there are over 1,200 of these:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1

Now, I know Queen Street West very well. It was once one of Toronto's most bohemian neighborhoods, where my paternal grandfather's fellow refugee Benny Yacht has his schmata shop and where my maternal grandfather took my mother and her siblings to trade in their comics for credit at cramped, crammed used bookstores.

I discovered Queen West as a pre-teen, thanks to Bakka Books – now Bakka Phoenix – the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world. I haunted Bakka, and, on the way, found myself drawn into the other stores around it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/48476314831/in/photolist-2gRFMvz-2oJJDCY

There was Silver Snail, a massive comics shop, but a bounty of used bookstores, vintage clothing stores, thrift shops, the indescribably great electronics store Active Surplus and, later, nightclubs like the Rivoli, the Diamond, the Bovine Sex Club and the Zoo Bar.

For a critical decade of my life and more, the stretch of Queen Street that Steele obsessively documented in his Flickr feed had been the center of my life. I watched it thrive and grow – and then collapse into a kind of self-parody, as the original landlords (like Bakka's landlord) died, and their failsons and faildaughters kicked out longstanding tenants and replaced them with multinational "brands" that turned Queen West into a less-convenient, open-air version of the sterile Eaton Centre mall.

Steele, it turns out, was having similar feelings of dismay as the organic, grown, chaotic delight became groomed, sterile and homogenized. After a 2008 fire wiped out an entire block of Queen West – including Duke's Cycle, a city institution that eventually shuttered after more than a century of service – Steele began his documentation project.

Steele had started documenting the street in 2001, but that fire turned a hobby into a project. Over and over again, Steele returned to the street, meticulously photographing the same storefronts, capturing a time-series that eventually spanned 16 years, from 2001-2017. Steele gradually stitched these photos together into panoramic collages, reproducing whole blocks:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=linearpanorama&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1

It is these "linear panoramas" that form the backbone of Portraits of Queen West. The book runs 162 pages, and it meant to be read forwards and backwards – start from the front cover and turn the pages to see the north side of the street, along with insets showing details (like the storied Graffiti Alley), and then flip the book over and start again, seeing the south side.

For more than a decade, I've thrilled to my unexpected trips through Steele's time-machine, as he posted his space-and-time-series images of a vanished urbanism, an old, good city that paralleled the old, good web. I got a peek at a PDF of the new book that collects these extraordinary image and immediately pre-ordered a copy.

Steele and his publisher Black Eye Books are crowdfunding presales of the book on Crowdfundr; the book is CAD40 with shipping (there's also a deluxe edition at CAD55, which comes with a signed bookplate and six postcards):

https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest

After a string of ghastly mayors – each finding new depths of depravity, selfishness and mismanagement to plumb – Toronto just elected its first progressive mayor in a generation, the wonderful Olivia Chow, for whom I used to ring doorbells support of her city council campaigns:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/olivia-chow-wins-election-as-torontos-first-chinese-canadian-mayor

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The enshittification of the old, good web continues apace, but there has never been more energy to build a new, good internet – and banish the enshitternet of Big Tech to the scrapheap of history.

In the same way, Toronto's much eroded urbanism, pluralism and liveability are both at their lowest ebb in my lifetime – and also at their most hopeful moment of the century. In 1998, the dead-eyed Romneyoid Premier of Ontario Mike Harris "amalgamated" Toronto with its suburbs, putting it at the mercy of car-addled out-of-towners in an act of gerrymandering that all-but-guaranteed that city residents' political choices would be swamped by suburbanites who could be convinced to vote for laughable Tory bumblefucks like Rob Ford.

Overcoming the gerrymander required a massive turnout – not merely a supermajority, but an ultramajority of politically motivated, organized, committed, pissed off Torontonians; Chow's election is a minor miracle that part of the wave of other historic reversals, like the DoJ awakening from its coma to drag Google into court on antitrust charges.

We are a long way away from making a new, good internet that's a worthy successor to the old, good internet, and at least as far from a new, good Toronto that the people of the old, good Toronto would have built but for Tory wreckers and the Christmas-voting turkeys who elevated them to office. But both are possible – and both demand that we fight for them.

Steele's beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn't just memorialize the world we lost – it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/13/spadina-to-bathurst/#dukes-cycle

EFF Awards, San Francisco, September 14

[aetherixs]

juno steel, unhinged bisexual lady detective that he is, will always resonate with me but buddy’s monologue in ‘the heart of it all’ is my roman empire

[thetireonstageright]

“i met kevin paul on grindr”

DAVIS PLEASE

[verenahe]

[geekcavepodcast]

"DC Pride" Returns for 2024

DC Comics' has announced that DC Pride, its anthology celebrating LGBTQIA+ characters is retuning for 2024. The 104-page comic is presented in a Prestige format.

Content in DC Pride 2024 includes:

Phil Jimenez's autobiographical story about the "fantastical worlds that shaped him, brought to life by Giulio Macaione"

Nicole Maines and Jordan Gibson's tale about Dreamer's pilgrimage to her ancestral planet of Naltor

Gretchen Felker-Martin and Claire Roe's story that has Poison Ivy and Janet from HR on a spore hunt in Portworld

Jarrett Williams and D.J. Kirkland's tale of a boys' night out in A-Town with Jon Kent Superman, Jay, Bunker, and Ray

Jamila Rowser and ONeillJones' story of Natasha Irons Steel facing Traci 13 at the Oblivion Bar's Pride party following their break up

Ngozi Ukazu's tale of Jackson Hyde Aquaman getting a ride to the Fourth World in time for the Love Festival

Calvin Kasulke and Len Gogou's story about Circuit Breaker's unstable powers landing him in the Phantom Zone

Al Ewing's Blue Starman story

Preview of Melissa Marr and Jenn St-Onge's The Strange Case of Harleen and Harley

Character pinups

DC Pride 2024 goes on sale on May 28, 2024. The anthology will feature a main cover and a 1:25 card stock variant of the main cover by Kevin Wada, an open-to-order wraparound variant cover by David Talaski, and foil and card stock variant covers by Babs Tarr.

(Image via DC Comics - Kevin Wada's Main Cover of DC Pride 2024)

[soranatus]

DC Pride (2024) anthology cover by Kevin Wada