My experiment printing light-on-dark with my Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress finished up last week, and I’ve given the cards that resulted a couple of extra days to dry; they are now available for sale in the Queen Square Press shop.

Letterpress ink is generally quite transparent, and so simply printing yellow-on-black was going to result in something too faint for my tastes; I attempted to address this by printing first with opaque white ink, letting the cards dry, and then overprinting with yellow. The result is very interesting: the GLIMPSE looks different from different angles, something you can see quite clearly in the photo here. Sometimes it’s very yellow, sometimes it’s reflective to the point of looking silver.

All the various glimpses seem appropriate, given that my idea was to capture the zeitgeist, the tentative peek at the end of the pandemic.

Cucumbers were really the only food that Catherine truly abhorred. As a result, I lived in a cucumber-free household for 28 years; it was as if cucumbers went extinct in 1992.

This week, as part of my weekly online Charlottetown Farmers’ Market order, I added an Atlantic Grown Organics cucumber, and I’ve built cucumber into our last two suppers. Wow. Fantastic.

All hail the cucumber, back from extinction.

This Zoom forum thread about being able to story gallery view provides a fascinating look into the many people, from teachers to dancers to actors to game developers, for whom this feature would be a big improvement.

I noticed that, after a recent update, my Zoom did, indeed, allow me to drag people around gallery view; what I didn’t know is that if the host does this, then the order can be deployed for everyone:

Your custom order will be seen only by you, or the host can deploy their custom view to all participants. This order can be released and the order will revert to the default.

Our five year old LG washing machine started rusting last year, under the detergent drawer. Initially I treated this as the start of an inevitable, unstoppable process of decay, but I decided, instead, to see what I could do about nipping the rust in the bud.

I went to Home Hardware and picked up some sandpaper, some painters tape, and a can of glossy white rust paint. I stripped the rusty area down to bare metal, finished cleaning it with vinegar, and then masked the area with the tape and plastic.

The spray paint took a bit of getting used to, and I started off painting much too close, but I quickly learned my lesson. I ended up applying three thin coats, 20 minutes apart. I removed the tape while the paint was still tacky, and then waited 48 hours before reassembling the washer.

The result isn’t gallery quality, but it’s satisfying nonetheless. And the rust is stopped in its tracks. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to get more than the 7 years we got out of the last washer.

Via my niece A., who is among the most progressive people I know, I have come to learn more about neopronouns.

Culturally I am a member of an interesting generation: those younger than I are completely down with pronoun fluidity, those older have a tendency to couch their acceptance, if acceptance is indeed something they can muster, with “yes, but it makes everything sound so awkward.”

I have some familiarity with progressive language upgrades, as the honorific Ms (as an alternative to Miss or Mrs.) came of age on a timeline that almost exactly mirrored my own:

As such, I’ve been referring to women as Ms for my entire life, and it’s never seemed anything other than natural and proper.

(It’s likely time that Ms gets supplemented with a non-gendered honorific like Mx).

Which is to say: what feels weird on the tongue but just in the heart will soon, with repeated use, become part of how we speak naturally.

All of which leads me to bravx, which appears to have some early tentative use as a non-gendered alternative to the masculine bravo and the feminine brava. This post is a bookmark to come back to in future years to see how that worked out.

Sarah McKenna Brown wrote her 2010 thesis on couchsurfing culture: Travel as Homemaking: The Building of Mobile Intentional Communities.

This thesis is a product of my interest in movement and social transformation. I was drawn to the practice of travel because of my desire to learn about the world and myself and to do this learning in the service of my commitment to social justice. Travel is a profound metaphor for the work of personal and social change; the journey that takes individuals and groups from one ‘place’ to another is a movement that can be physical, mental, or spiritual.

This project is an account of a journey I undertook to participate in and observe the phenomenon known as couchsurfing. The people whom I encountered while couchsurfing were engaged in processes of re-finding, expressing, and creating meanings. In my movement, I am self-reflective, processing what I observe and who I am, then reflecting it to others so that we have the opportunity to see multiple perspectives. Couchsurfers, the Rainbow Family, artists, and activists seek to imagine themselves as creative individuals, knowledge-makers, and relationship-builders. As activists, they believe in a world that will never be fully realized because it is constantly being made.

It’s an interesting read, one that reminds me that it’s the happenstance of travel that I miss most dearly.

I was in Amazon Rekognition this afternoon–their ”image recognition as a service” product–and notice a new “PPE detection” tab. I uploaded a masked photo of myself to try it out and, sure enough, it reported a 99.9% degree of confidence that I was wearing a mask. It also reported only 88.4% that my mask was covering my nose; I have a large nose, and a lot of it was showing, so I don’t blame the robots.

The mask I’m wearing, one I wrote about in October when I purchased it, was a Medium Rare-brand; it served me well until this weekend when the flexible wire nose piece finally snapped in two from metal fatigue. Unable to abide the glasses-fogging the resulted, and with The Cook’s Edge closed on Sundays, rather than replacing it I purchased two new masks, from Bentley, the luggage shop in the Charlottetown Mall of all places. If you can’t trust your luggage supplier to keep you health, who exactly can you trust?

I admire the spelling out of all the possible mat-exchange cadences. Although I prefer fortnightly in place of bi-weekly, as the latter can mean both ”every two weeks” and “twice a week.”

See also the same comparison from 2009.

A work in progress, next in the series of COVID-zeitgeist projects that started with TRY in 2020. They say you can’t print light-on-dark with a letterpress and get satisfying results; I’m setting out to discover this for myself, first printing with opaque white and following on with overprinting in yellow. Once I was done with the white, I noticed this glimpse of the GLIMPSE on the roller.