#Queen Street West

[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

[pennanbrae]

Busting loose while making a wrong turn.

[abitmoredetail]

Orange morning sky to the east, Shaw Park #toronto #queenstreetwest #shawpark #morning #orange #sky #cntower #whitesquirrel

[portraitsofqueenwest]

1106 Queen St W, December 2009

[marvinjob]

1001 Queen Street West

[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/

[thedailymobile]

“Jagged Little Sills”

© EricBrazier.com

[uglyandtraveling]

Welcome to another adventure on my channel! Join me as I take a leisurely springtime stroll through one of Toronto's most vibrant areas – the Discovery District. In this vlog, we'll wander along Discovery District, soaking in the sights and sounds of spring. From blooming flowers and bustling streets to the stunning architecture and lively atmosphere, there's so much to see and experience.

[phantom-of-the-apartment]

[the-elusive-writer]

Following the sun 😌✨

[teamnefarious]

299 Queen Street West Has Been Revived

Photo Courtesy of Sean Menard

299 Queen Street West used to be a place loved by thousands in Canada. It was the place where MuchMusic took off and ended up taking on MTV. MuchMusic became a household name in Canada where you could get new, innovative shows about music. They specifically highlighted Canadian artists.

But like most things this place was taken over by corporations and is now a shell of itself.

Sean Menard grew up watching MuchMusic like the rest of us. He was even on one of their shows as a fan at one point called Electric Circus where you would have fans dancing to songs.

That was the magic of this station. They would have an entire show where fans could come and dance to their favorite songs to get people interested in music.

Menard has since grown up and has decided to tell the story of 299 Queen Street West which was the location of MuchMusic. He was granted access to their entire archives.

The film starts out at the very beginnings. When they would film in the control room and talk about music. He showed the entire transformation of this station into what it became from it's humble beginnings.

The film touches on a lot of it's most popular VJ's and interviews. And showed the exact reason everyone loved them.

MuchMusic would open their doors to the public and have the streets shut down so people could watch performances from live artists. Menard showed a lot of these amazing performances.

He showed the entire evolution of the channel and the shows on it.

The documentary itself is very good. It's put together well with some really nice voice overs from the more popular VJ's. During the screening tour for this, he brought out some of the main stars of the movie, Rick Campanelli and Erica Ehm.

During the Q&A after the movie Menard let everyone know that there are studios and record labels trying to get the movie's release completely shut down due to the music he shows in it even though MuchMusic granted access to their archives. He is covered under fair use of course and had permission to make this movie, so hopefully this doesn't get shut down so more people can experience the magic of MuchMusic one more time.

If we had one suggestion it would be to have included some of the other VJ's and personalities that were left out.

Overall, we loved this documentary and it felt really nostalgic and magical to experience this all over again.

[abitmoredetail]

Mara Korkola, No place 276 (2013) #toronto #queenstreetwest #camh #marakorkola #forest #paintings #oilpainting

[loverboybitch]

pictures from my day off today.//.

[marvinjob]

194 Queen Street West

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More with Rihanna and ASAP Rocky in West Hollywood.

[rabbitcruiser]

Los Angeles was founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola) by 44 Spanish settlers on September 4, 1781.