#networking edmonton

[bxnetworking]

Networking Events Auckland Tips For Marketers

Most people believe that "marketing = advertising" and that advertising in newspapers, on television, or online is the key to a successful marketing campaign.

A crucial component of effective marketing is networking, but it goes far beyond that.

Professionals benefit from networking by building and maintaining relationships with potential clients, partners, and mentors. Networking is at the core of your business growth, so you'll want to wear your marketer hat when you attend your local networking events Auckland chapter meeting.

There are a number of ways you can market your business effectively through networking:

Among the benefits of networking is meeting and connecting with like-minded individuals, such as industry experts, colleagues, or potential clients. The connections you make can lead to new business opportunities, collaborations, and partnerships. You will be able to find true partners or referral sources for your marketing efforts when you expand your network at networking events Auckland meetings.

Through networking activities, you will learn about the latest trends, techniques, and best practices in your industry. You can gain valuable insights from peers and experts by exchanging ideas and learning from their experiences. Why is this beneficial? Your customers will appreciate you if you reach them in a unique way. Without reading this article, you may never have thought of ideas for reaching them.

In addition to receiving referrals and recommendations, networking has another benefit. Networking events Auckland benefits will be felt almost immediately after your first visit. Your network will be more likely to recommend your products and services if you build relationships with them. For word-of-mouth to occur, customers must talk about you with their friends as well as their family. In the business-to-business environment, word-of-mouth also plays an important role in fostering a mutually beneficial relationship.

As you'll meet individuals with a variety of skill sets at networking events Auckland events, you'll have multiple opportunities for collaborative networking. PR experts could, for example, partner with Web developers, social media specialists, and videographers to offer a comprehensive digital marketing solution. This ability to offer a comprehensive digital marketing solution will be more compelling from a marketing perspective.

Furthermore, peer and industry experts are able to provide feedback and validation at networking events Auckland by networking with each other. By sharing ideas and seeking input, marketing strategies, campaigns, and creative works can be refined. By receiving constructive feedback from trusted members of your network, your marketing decisions will become more confident.

Our success depends on emotional support and inspiration as well! Having a network of marketers in your networking events Auckland chapter offers emotional support and motivation. Marketing can be a challenging and demanding endeavor, and connecting with peers who face similar issues can provide encouragement and camaraderie.

It also doesn't cost much to network! It's easy to feel like marketing is a quick way to sink costs in many aspects. Your website can be set up according to the best SEO practices, for example, or you can spend thousands of dollars on advertising or branding. Networking over breakfast and coffee is not only highly enjoyable, but is also highly cost-effective.

Think about the marketing value of networking when you attend the next meeting of BX | Business Networking Reimagined. Opportunities for marketing at the top of the industry are just around the corner!

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

In this episode of Solarpunk Presents, nonfiction co-editor Ariel Kroon sits down for a virtual chat with Gabrielle Gelderman, an Edmonton, Alberta-based climate grief chaplain and climate justice organizer. They talk about what climate grief chaplaincy even is, the necessity of holding communal safe spaces for grieving especially for organizers, the necessity of feeling grief in order to feel more positive emotions, and climate despair as a corollary of solarpunk hope.

Links:

Gabrielle's Instagram: @theclimatechaplain

Gabrielle’s LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gabthechaplain

Climate Justice Edmonton (CA)

Faith Matters Network (US)

Sunrise Youth Organization (US)

*Note: During the interview, Ariel mentions episode 4.30 of Secret Feminist Agenda; the name of the theorist she cites is Eugenia Zuroski.

Connect with Solarpunk Magazine at solarpunkmagazine.com and on Twitter @solarpunklitmag

Connect with Solarpunk Presents Podcast on Twitter @SolarpunkP, Mastodon @solarpunkpresents@climatejustice.rocks, or at our blog https://solarpunkpresents.com/

Connect with Ariel at her blog, on Twitter at @arielletje, and on Mastodon @arielkroon@wandering.shop

Connect with Christina at her blog, on Twitter @xtinadlr, and on Mastodon @xtinadlr@wandering.shop

[texscan]

[ceasarslegion]

OK...I'm asking....

Yay!

So this happened in what I consider the worst job I ever had. And that is saying something because I very much worked retail in a mall. I had just graduated uni, I couldn't afford toronto anymore, and I needed a full-time job to make ends meet now that the stability of university was gone. So I went to edmonton because I had one family member I could stay with until I got on my feet. And I was not in a position to turn away a job that paid.

So I took a door to door sales position. For telus. I can hear the canadians in the room wincing so to everyone else: telus is one of the three whole mega megacorporations that control the ENTIRE canadian telecommunications network. And all three of those companies are buddy buddy and have us all by the balls. That's why canadian phone plans are the most expensive in the world. Not in the developed world: in the WORLD.

The meth lab incident happened on my 3rd whole day on my own. I was in St. Albert, which is this suburb of edmonton that is like if a kale smoothie and that guy who won't shut up about bikhram yoga had a baby they abandoned in an HOA meeting. Which is what makes this that much more unhinged: it was in the most cookie cutter suburbia part of the EMR.

So I was doing my knocks in my blue Jay's hat and my telus branded polo shirt with my clipboard and I knock on my next door. I'm greeted by a middle aged woman who proceeds to dump on me that she's divorcing her husband of 30 years and moving to New Brunswick. I'm like okay cool I just wanna sell you cable packages, good luck with that?

I write that off and continue along the cul de sac until I knock on this other lady's door. And when I say talkative I mean a real chatty Kathy. She practically grabs me by the collar and plops me down on her deck chairs, shoves a coffee in my hand, and says "HEY TELUS GUY DID YOU KNOCK ON METH GUYS DOOR???" And points to the house of the lady who just told me she was getting a divorce

At this point I have forgotten about my commission. I have forgotten about my shitty supervisor and how every part of this job sucks and how I wanna go back to Toronto. I have thrown away my clipboard I have started sipping her coffee that could very well be spiked with something and I go "you have to tell me about the meth guy"

That house I knocked on? The weird oversharing lady who was getting a divorce? Her husband was running a meth lab out of the basement THEIR ENTIRE MARRIAGE and she ONLY FOUND OUT THEN?? He called it his man cave and said that she wasn't allowed in?? And then one day she went down out of curiosity and it was a METH LAB??? All the bonuses he said he got at work were meth money.

I'm still enamored by how this happened. Did it not smell? Like for those who don't know edmonton there is a HUGE meth problem here. Like across the political aisle we all agree that something has to happen about all the meth, the details get foggy and that's where people argue, but needless to say I have smelled and been offered meth before just by virtue of living downtown. That shit REEKS. Like you know meth smell because it somehow smells like the word "meth." You will know what you are smelling even when you've never smelled it before. And it lingers. It hangs. It gets into walls. I know when I've taken a train car before because the smell of that guy who hotboxed it with meth smoke last week will still kinda be there. There's no way that house didn't smell like ass down to the foundation.

And the "you arent allowed in my man cave" excuse... im enamored by both the sexism towards his OWN WIFE and the way she just... went along with it for 30 years? Never set foot down there? The sexism and the just believing it?

I kept trying to steer the conversation back to the meth lab and this lady I was on the porch of kept actively trying to buy internet deals from me. Like she was the only person I ever pitched who was TRYING to get my bundles. I ended up just handing her my list of products and told her to check off what she wanted and was like "more meth lab?" And she went right to "yknow i think if I was your age I would've been a boy now. We didn't really have those terms when I was a kid" I DID NOT BRING THAT UP MA'AM I DONT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR GENDER CRISIS TELL ME MORE ABOUT THE METH LAB

That job was so shit that that was the only one I ever quit with no back up plan and did not regret for a second. I then went to the mall and handed out CVs and got my retail job by the end of the week from doing that.

[ratatatastic]

I'll tell you a story. I get to work early in the morning, so when I come in—Yesterday morning we had this big back of six TVs, and one of them has a network on it... and the banner is: If the Florida Panthers lose, is this the Biggest Collapse in Sports History? That damn thing is sitting on the TV and you know, you're waiting for—to roll it, people, let's move it! Fifteen minutes!...So I'm waiting by the door for my video guy to come in and say—...We have these banks, it's a new rink, right? All over it—"Get that network off our TV!" 'Cuz I'm sitting there going, "I don't like it!" and I'm 57! Well, what happens if you're 25? And you're going, "I gotta live 50 more years of being a part of the 'Biggest Collaspe in Sports History'..." So from the loss to the drop of the puck, something has to change, something has to get better, and that would be where I think, I worked. Once the puck's dropped then I was done working. And I liked our first [period] so that was good. That was good, I was at peace with it. I wanted to win, and—but we weren't scrambling around in the first [period] trying to find our game.

paul and his way with his words aka he felt exactly the same way i felt with the leadup to game 7 and how media reacted to it like yeah i was very upset at some point i just started sighing like eeyore till someone put me out of my misery

edmonton oilers @ florida panthers game 7 postgame | 6.24.24 (x)

[neechees]

Pre-colonial Native American cities/settlements/meeting sites.

Sivan Vahki: just north of Casa Grande, Arizona, Sivan Vahki or Siwañ Waʼa Ki: was a large farming and trade network site of the Sonoran Desert people starting in the early 13th century.

Werowocomoco: With habitation beginning from the 13th century, Werowocomo was a village that later served as the headquarters of the werowance Wahunsenacah, Paramount Chief of the Powhatan confederacy.

Cahokia: Mississippian culture city dating from circa 1050–1350 CE, containing elaborately planned community, woodhenge, mounds, and burials.

Tenochtitlan: built atop a lake, Tenochtitlan was an Aztec altepetl, and was the largest city in the pre-columbian Americas at its peak. It is considered one of the most impressive cities in North America, and is today known as Mexico city.

Tikal: one of the most powerful ancient kingdoms of the Maya, and dates back as far as the 4th century BC, and may have had a population of up to 90,000.

Omahkoyis: Meeting place and trading and cultural hub for the Blackfoot, and later other tribes as well as settlers. The Blackfoot and their ancestors had inhabited the area as early as 12,000 BC, and would later also be known by other names. Colonizing efforts turned the area into a settlement, known today as the city of Edmonton.

Qusqu: also known as “Cuzco”, the city served as the capital for the Inca Empire from the 13th century up into the 16th century upon colonization. However, evidence shows that The Killke people occupied the region from 900 to 1200 CE, prior to the arrival of the Inca, and had constructed a fortress about 1100 CE.

Uttewas: later known as “Old Masset”, was one of the largest Haida villages on Haida Gwaii, and is home to a number of important cultural artifacts, such as numerous totem poles. Today its land is legally designated as Masset Indian Reserve No. 1.

[dwelling-on-downtowns]

VIA Rail network in 1978

Current VIA Rail network

This is my villain origin story. Why doesn’t Canada have passenger rail to our 4th biggest city? Like. You cannot get to Canada’s 4th biggest city by rail AT ALL. It’s not like there is local rail between Edmonton and Calgary, you cannot get to Calgary by rail. Also Banff, one of our most beautiful national parks is practically one its way to becoming a large parking lot and we could have passenger rail that goes there. But we don’t.

ALSO there’s only two trains a week in Edmonton. This is why Western Canada doesn’t go anywhere by rail, it’s entirely useless to us.

[g5mlp]

Here's the entire My Little Pony 2024 Franchise Overview presentation. This was originally distributed online in mid-June 2023, and we reported on it then, but there are a couple of details that didn't make it into the post.

Download links 2024 Franchise Overview 2023 Marketing Plans Hasbro Brands Overview

Slides 2–4. Various random stats which are mostly not important or not properly contextualized. I have just a slight feeling that the stat on slide 3 implying that MLP is bigger than Barbie at the moment is cherrypicked.

Slides 5–6. Slide 6 is the first slide with specific data about Tell Your Tale viewers. It tells us that Tell Your Tale outperformed Make Your Mark on audience approval and toy purchase basket size, and that it outperformed other franchises on repeat toy purchase rate. There are a few more of these stats on slide 20.

Slides 7–9. Tell Your Tale Season 2 will be real, and will have four specials (the accompanying visuals don't seem to be related, other than the beach stuff for special 2). They didn't really explain what "hair play in every episode" or "more magical moments" will mean, although maybe the former is intended to encourage the purchase of toys.

Slides 10–12. This is basically a summary of things that have already been done within the MLP brand over the last few years. "LBE" means "location-based entertainment".

Slide 10 seems to indicate that there are about 7 songs left to be released in Tell Your Tale Season 1.

On slide 12, from left to right, the featured things are the VR book My Little Pony: Virtual Magic; the Sofia Carson-narrated Calm "sleep story"; the I Can Read Comics Level 1 book Sister Switch; the first issue of the G5 IDW comics; the MLP mascots at the Galaxyland theme park in Edmonton, Canada; a render of the lobby of the My Little Pony & Transformers Playlodge in Shanghai; and the "Flight to Equestria" ferris wheel at Galaxyland.

Slides 13–14. Mostly licensed merch, although the Izzy brushable on slide 14 still hasn't been seen anywhere other than this presentation.

Slide 15. Another indication that Make Your Mark won't get anything in 2024: the best they can say about it is that it will "live on Netflix" (i.e. won't be removed from Netflix), which was probably going to happen anyway.

Given the "new episodes weekly" statement, 328 minutes can be neatly divided into 4 22-minute episodes and 48 5-minute episodes, all for Tell Your Tale. Consistent episode lengths make sense for Hasbro, since they intend to license their shows out to TV networks with standard half-hour programming blocks.

"Linear and AVOD" probably refers to traditional TV channels and ad-supported free streaming sites. Some past MLP content is already available on "AVOD" sites such as Pluto TV.

It seems like G5 music will continue to have that generic pop sound.

It's implied that some of the video games shown will be updated in 2024. Maybe not all of them, though, since the MLP Roblox game (Visit Maretime Bay) was shut down in February 2023.

Slides 16–17. They want to grow viewership a lot and convert it to toy purchases. They call Tell Your Tale their "one & only ponable content series"; obviously, maintaining two ongoing animated shows would directly contradict this statement.

The Pipp, Misty, Sunny and Izzy brushables shown all seem to be new, as is the concept art for the accessories of the former three. The Izzy brushable is probably the same one as on slide 14.

Slide 18. They will do a bunch of promo stuff, including releasing a licensed console video game in Q3 2024. The first and third Tell Your Tale specials are to be the tentpole moments (i.e. big marketing focal points) of 2024.

Slides 19–20. Slide 20 features some more new stats on how well Tell Your Tale is performing; it has 177 million cumulative YouTube views, good repeat viewership and better repeat purchase rate than Make Your Mark.

This image is from a different presentation, "2023 Marketing Plans". This slide reveals the Secrets of Starlight logo for the fourth and final My Little Pony: Make Your Mark special.

The "album launch" could be referring to the My Little Pony Theme Song (Sped Up + lofi remixes) EP that was released today. Or maybe something else?

This slide is from the other presentation that was revealed, "Hasbro Brands Overview". It doesn't really reveal anything that wasn't previously known, although it does suggest that Bridlewoodstock will feature in more marketing content through the rest of the year.

Notes

Almost all of the text in the 2024 Franchise Overview presentation is shown in the Calibri font. It doesn't seem like it was originally intended to be that way, and I think it might be due to custom fonts not being loaded properly by whoever converted the presentation to PDF. In spite of this issue, the presentation is likely genuine, evidenced by the high quality images embedded in it, including a shot from a future Tell Your Tale episode on slide 8.

Slides 15 and 18 both note that future plans are subject to change. However, it's probably somewhat unlikely that Hasbro could return to Make Your Mark in 2024. Even if they were to commission more Make Your Mark episodes right now, and could justify the budget for it, it would probably still take more than a year before the first episodes could be completed. I could be wrong about this, but there's nothing to suggest that it would be in the interest of Hasbro, Netflix, Atomic Cartoons or anyone else (except maybe the fans) for Make Your Mark to be renewed after 2023.

While the TYT Audience Report and MLP Shopper Analysis by AIM & We Are Family both seem to be focused on 2- to 8-year-old girls, it's not necessarily an indication that Hasbro is focused solely on this demographic – they might just be the most lucrative demographic, or the one whose analysis produced the best numbers to show to Hasbro's investors and partners.

[wordsandrobots]

I may have read Wishing on Space Hardware a while ago, but I’m still absolutely floored by how good a writing decision it was on your part to get rid of the Ahab production facilities! Like yes that’ll change the entire solar system unpredictably AND weaken Gjallarhorn! A N D your characterization for Almeria was perfect for that decision!!!

:D

[Spoilers for WoSH and Iron-Blooded Orphans in general to follow; I'm not especially fussed about people knowing what's coming but if you want to go in blind to my fics, please stop here.]

I can't remember when I settled on that as the big plan. It must have begun brewing while I was writing A Handful of Rusted Petals, though the exact shape of the plot only properly took shape with The Ares Affair. Probably the wheels started turning as soon as I learned the peripheral detail that Gjallarhorn controls manufacture of the series' resident 'magic physics' black boxes.

Because while it's never relevant and Iron-Blooded Orphans never positions Gjallarhorn as something to be destroyed (we're arguing over who gets to run the armed wing of the empire, here), there is something tempting about realising their power is resting on an economic lynchpin like that. Even within the narrow sliver of the world we get to see, it's clear Ahab reactors are vital to space-faring society and an Earth reliant on space-based manufacturing. It's also clear the blocs aren't passively under Gjallarhorn's thumb -- they have their own agendas that align or conflict with that oversight by turns. The whole thing with mobile suit stockpiles being dusted off in the wake of the Battle of Edmonton indicates a desire to lessen Gjallarhorn's influence. It'd make sense if there was also a movement in favour of taking over the Ariadne Network and the reactor production. Countries don't tend to like it when a third party can just cut off their vital infrastructure, you know?

More importantly, from a writing point of view, it was something I could tie everything else into, giving me a through-line from the stuff I'd established in To Catch a Falling Star (which I wrote first) to where I was going with a grown-up version of Almiria. I could use the stuff with Iverson to establish the technical side, spinning off the detail of the reactors needing to be built close to a star (still not sure certain about the wiki's translation of that, but the idea has good visuals). I could work in the economic angle, in terms of Earth and Jupiter/Teiwaz's relation to it. I could have some Calamity War flashbacks, to explain why the Crucible was the only manufacturing station left. And it gave me the thematic motif of Hati and Skoll, which was fantastic fun to play with.

Above all, though, it allowed me to illustrate exactly how Almiria's rage had manifested, eight years on. Because there's a very real possibility that getting rid of Ahab reactor production means a long-term decline for everyone, and a considerably higher risk it'll create massive short-term instability. Space-travel gets riskier, space-based construction grinds to a stop, humanity can't reach any further, the technological triumphs of the setting are irrevocably altered, and everyone needs to adjust to a new way of living.

Of course this is Ragnarök, not oblivion. I made sure to position pieces of what could come next: Teiwaz's ascendency, the colonies pulling free of Earth, the blocs dismantling existing arrangements, a slow crumbling of Gjallarhorn as they fought to sustain themselves. Things wouldn't change at a stroke, there'd be a lot of mess, it might very well lead to something worse. It wouldn't be hopeless either. There'd be ways to adapt, to survive, to build something better.

But fundamentally, the point was to illustrate where Almira sits on that metric of 'what do you believe and what can you live with?' And the answer is, she decided there was no cost too high for the sake of seeing Gjallarhorn burn. She was going to have her revenge, consequences be damned.

And there is nothing more dangerous than a human being who isn't afraid of the consequences of their actions.

[beardedmrbean]

A judge on Tuesday sentenced Anjem Choudary, one of the UK's most recognised radical Islamist preachers, to life jail after he was found guilty of directing a banned "terrorist organisation".

Sentencing Choudary at Woolwich Crown Court in  London to a minimum term of 28 years, judge Mark Wall told the 57-year-old former lawyer that he was "front and centre in running a terrorist organisation".

The prosecution followed a joint investigation by London's Metropolitan Police, the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

He will serve more than 26 years behind bars in total due to the time he has already spent in custody, meaning he will not be released before the age of 85, Wall said.

Explaining why he had ordered the lengthy term, the judge added that Choudary had "encouraged young men into radical activity".

Long in the authorities' sights, Choudary has already spent time in jail for supporting the jihadist Islamic State group.

His return to prison comes after a jury last week convicted him of being the "caretaker" leader of Al-Muhajiroun (ALM), which was proscribed in the UK in 2010.

The group was founded in 1996 by London-based Syrian-born cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad with the goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the UK.

Its members have been implicated in a number of attacks, including the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in 2013, and attacks on London Bridge in 2017 and 2019.

- 'Important moment' -

Despite claims it had been disbanded, prosecutors said Al-Muhajiroun still exists under different names, including the New York-based Islamic Thinkers Society.

US law enforcement officers infiltrated the group and attended online lectures it hosted with Choudary in 2022 and 2023, sparking police probes in Britain and Canada.

"There are individuals that have conducted terrorist attacks or travelled for terrorist purposes as a result of Anjem Choudary's radicalising impact upon them," Dominic Murphy, of London's Metropolitan Police, said after the conviction.

Rebecca Weiner, deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department, told reporters Choudary's conviction was "historic" and described him as a "shameless, prolific radicaliser".

"It is usually the foot soldiers, the individuals who are brought into the network who go on to commit the attacks who are brought to justice," she said.

"It's rarely the leader, which is what makes this a particularly important moment."

Choudary, the son of a market trader, became a familiar media figure after staging demonstrations in front of UK mosques, embassies and police stations in the early 2000s.

His ultimate goal, he said, was to fly the flag of Islam above 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's residence.

He was jailed for five and a half years in 2016 for encouraging support for the Islamic State group, and was released early from prison in 2018.

Choudary's co-defendant Khaled Hussein, 29, from Edmonton, Canada, was also convicted of membership of ALM and was sentenced to five years in prison on Tuesday.

[bxnetworking]

The Ultimate Guide to Getting the Most Out of Professional Networking Events

I know that most people believe that networking is similar to, “Oh my goodness, it seems to be nothing but sales, sales, and more sales for small business networking events, with people flinging business cards at one another. It is not only dated but also dated-looking.” Read more here: https://theomnibuzz.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-getting-the-most-out-of-professional-networking-events/

[sapphyreopal5]

Hello love. Anything new on Jensen?

Hello Anon thank you for the ask. I know that Jensen's been awful quiet about the stuff he's said to be working on with the "if things go as planned, it's gonna be a busy year" comments he's made in recent months. I know I speculated on another post when someone here on Tumblr posted about a photo where Jensen was spotted with Justin Hartley, his wife Sofia and a man named Jason Checcini that he may be on his way to go film The Boys, which reportedly started filming April 8 according to this site (although we all know that filming dates can be pushed back). This post was made April 7, 2024.

However, after seeing another post that posted today April 18, 2024, I do believe that he may not only possibly be filming The Boys season 5 but he may have also landed a role on Justin Hartley's show Tracker. Tracker reportedly films some in the Vancouver area, according to IMBD.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Lexi Jensen-DesJardins (@lexi.jendes)

Being who I am, I decided to look up the tour dates for the artist she mentioned seeing in her post where she says she met him in Vancouver. According to Ticketmaster.com, the tour dates for Noah Kahan are as follows:

What cities will Noah Kahan play on his upcoming tour? The We'll All Be Here Forever Tour will take Noah Kahan across North America in the following cities: 03/26 – Vancouver, BC @ Rogers Arena  03/28 – Calgary, AB @ Scotiabank Saddledome  03/29 – Edmonton, AB @ Rogers Place  03/30 – Saskatoon, SK @ SaskTel Centre  04/02 – Winnipeg, MB @ Canada Life Centre  04/06 – Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena  04/07 – London, ON @ Budweiser Gardens  04/09 – Ottawa, ON @ Canadian Tire Centre  04/10 – Quebec, QC @ Centre Videotron 04/13 – Montreal, QC @ Centre Bell  04/14 – Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena 04/16 – Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena 05/20 – Asheville, NC @ Harrah’s Cherokee Center  05/22 – Asheville, NC @ Harrah’s Cherokee Center   05/24 – Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena 05/25 – Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena   05/28 – Cuyahoga Falls, OH @ Blossom Music Center  05/29 – Burgettstown, PA @ The Pavilion at Star Lake  06/04 – St. Louis, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheater – St. Louis, MO 06/05 – Bonner Springs, KS @ Azura Amphitheater  06/07 – Saint Paul, MN @ Xcel Energy Center  06/08 – Saint Paul, MN @ Xcel Energy Center 06/11 – Dallas, TX @ Dos Equis Pavilion  06/13 – Woodlands, TX @ The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion presented by Huntsman  06/14 – Austin, TX @ Moody Center  06/18 – Chula Vista, CA @ North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre  06/21 – Hollywood, CA @ Hollywood Bowl  06/29 – George, WA @  Gorge Amphitheatre 07/01 – Ridgefield, WA @ RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater  07/03 – Wheatland, CA @ Toyota Amphitheatre  07/05 – Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre - UC Berkeley  07/06 – Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre – UC Berkeley   07/09 – West Valley City, UT @ USANA Amphitheatre  07/13 – East Troy, WI @ Alpine Valley Music Theatre  07/15 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden 07/16 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden  07/18 – Boston, MA @ Fenway Park 07/19 – Boston, MA @ Fenway Park

As you can see, the Vancouver concert took place on Tuesday March 26, 2024. The photo post with Justin Hartley, his wife and Jason was posted on Sunday April 7, 2024. Remember, this is just me speculating at this point along with everyone else but I do think it's possible Jensen has gotten a couple roles or is at the very least spending some time in Canada "networking". That's really all I have for you at the moment Anon but I hope this is at least somewhat useful or some interest to you otherwise.

[battle-of-alberta]

Hey, did I say something like Texans don't look up to us as the Texas of Canada? Well, hold your horses folks. It turns out Edmonton is making changes to improve traffic safety that Dallas is taking notes on as a similarly sized city!

To quickly summarize, Dallas has an average of 228 traffic fatalaties a year while Edmonton has 14, despite both having similar populations of around 1 million each. While having automatic cameras is illegal in Texas, there are some other ways they could slow traffic such as installing temporary curbs on dangerous areas, painting crosswalks bright colours, or more scramble crosswalks in places like these.

This particular scramble crosswalk is on Whyte Ave in Old Strathcona on the south side, which is why they're meeting Edith for lunch (I was just here today and the smell wafting from Meat was sooo tempting this afternoon)

meanwhile...

someone's jealous of our urban planning networking swag for once p:

guest starring Bradley Brooks (Dallas, TX) who belongs to my dear friend @thisnameisquitequeer (@sams-scribbles) who neglects her OCs to the point that I have squatters rights until she sends in a swat team to kick me out.

[fatehbaz]

Hannah and Chris: [...] Proprietary relations can thus be situated at the heart of the violence exacted on humans, non-humans and land. In Policing Black Lives, notions of property also play a crucial role in the history of Black life in Canada. [...] Robyn describes the ways in which enslaved Black people have continuously resisted their designation as property. In As We Have Always Done, Leanne writes about the relationships of deep reciprocity, interconnection and interdependency [...] emerging from Nishnaabeg thought and practices. Even within radical movements we often see struggles over ownership [...] creep back into the structures, disabling relations of commonality and solidarity. How can we more deeply/generatively refuse to be – or escape the desire to be – owners of others, the world, the self, and instead develop relations of reciprocity when always confronted with, and to some extent living within (or alongside of), societies built on dispossession and continuous propertisation? [...]

Robyn: A political choice has been made and remade, at the level of political leaders [...], to serve the interests of protecting and expanding private property. The logics of accumulation at any cost have come at great expense to human, animal, and other forms of ecological life. [...] [I]t’s crucial, I think, that we remember that regimes of private property – and, crucially, the carceral state that entrenches them – are continually being contested, have never been written in stone, and are far from inevitable or permanent fixtures of planetary and earthly life.

Our cities, the places that we collectively reside in, are also battlegrounds upon which we are trying, continually, to forward new ways to order life. I think one of the starkest examples we can see of this is the struggles being waged over tent encampments inhabited by homeless communities, who in Canada are largely but not solely Black and Indigenous.

In Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods Park, riot police, drones and air support, in addition to hundreds of regular police and private security and city bylaw officers, were all deployed to “clear-out” the makeshift homes and communities that people had built in in an attempt to eke out safer living during the pandemic and the housing crisis. The cost of this is enormous: the eviction and “remediation” of just three encampments cost over $1.6 million! Elected officials chose, and choose every day, to spend millions of public dollars on criminalizing homelessness rather than address its root causes: the unaffordability of a city caused by the unchecked powers of developers and the mass abandonment of Black, Indigenous, disabled peoples, and people living with mental health issues. This represents the protection of neighborhood property values over the lives of neighborhood encampment residents, and demonstrates the everyday legal violence [...].

But new visions for living are forwarded every day in tent encampments across the country.

Mutual aid encampment support projects like the Encampment Support Networks in Toronto and Hamilton, the Freedom Camp organized outside of City Hall [...], and BLM-Edmonton’s Camp Pekiwewin. As I am writing this our comrades in Halifax are supporting encampment residents against city evictions, ensuring food, water, and medical services where their city has failed to do so. These are all part of a struggle for housing, of course, but they are also struggles over governance, over whether to value human life or the bottom-line of developers and property owners. In city parks across the country, large numbers of people are demanding that we value human life over capitalist accumulation. Here I’d like to bring in the words of Gachi Issa [...], describing the two-week Freedom Camp that she took part in organizing, and the longer-term encampment support organizing that came out of it:

That is one of the most revolutionary things: to build community with people who our government and our society tells us not to: Black, Brown and houseless people standing side by side, to re-imagine what the world could look like.

---

All text above are the words of Robyn Maynard. From: Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Hannah Voegele, and Christopher Griffin. “Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World: An Interview with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.” Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics. 19 November 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[ceasarslegion]

Edmonton City Council acts like it has been critically compromised by car dealership owners for years and they only have transit because that's what cities are supposed to have. I would believe you without question if you told me the LRT expansion drama was a 4D chess move to get people to hate transit and buy cars.

Knowing the tories I would not put it past them. "Yeah shutter all the safe consumption sites and gut all the social support networks the NDP put in. Oh a pandemic and an inflation crisis hit right after??? Why are there so many homeless people smoking meth in the train stations now??? It's a mystery, it cannot be solved."

[allbeendonebefore]

“For all of that, the notion that Alberta’s politics stifles all dissent, or made queer life impossible was not historically accurate. This research illustrates how the largely middle-class activists and organizers strove to make it safe... to be queer in Edmonton. And it makes plain how much further they had to go than their peers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.” “It is suggestive of the challenges of being queer in Edmonton that so much energy and resources went into counselling individuals struggling with their sexual orientation and negotiating the commensurate identities issues.”

this is very hard hitting to me because waking up today in this reality was an ordeal. but it makes me think a lot.

i don’t want to glamourize or valourize the difficulty of being queer in the “tough” city too much because i don’t want to fall into the trap of queer life in edmonton = suffering only but. at the same time it makes me reflect a lot on how i’ve perceived and chosen to personify and characterize my city (is it mine yet? has it always been?) in art over the years and so rambles about that follow

i designed Ed in sub-rural high school a few years after returning to Canada from post 9/11 midwestern America when i was filled with this dissatisfaction of being "home” only to discover that my life was matching next to none of the imagined past i had growing up in Edmonton, and trying to reconcile the gap between this mythical multicultural utopia in the Big City just out of my reach that existed only in my memory and this growing awareness of the rest of Canada looking down on us as a province and as a city- as I discovered firsthand in a rural k-9 school (which even this past year was subject to a horrific hate crime), this was not an entirely undeserved reputation.

of course during this time i was dealing with several battles that didn’t occur to me until later as having any real impact on who i was: all my classmates assuming upon barely interacting with me that i was a lesbian on the grounds of not admitting to liking anyone Ever; being referred to as “that” because my gender expression was considered deviant by my peers; grappling with the sexual deviance associated with hobbies at the time that were far far far from the mainstream at this point (anime and online social networks! gasp); protesting bill 44 without a second thought as to how people would perceive me after; coming out as asexual to relative strangers in a time where there were still only 2.5 orientations and identities barely spoken aloud; and graduating (finally!) into Big City University where I was struggling to reconcile things like being a notorious atheist completely against religious fundamentalism with my Not a Sexuality TM with my Yaoi is for Perverts Which I Am Not with my Feminism is Too Political For Me and so on and so forth.

(so you can see why when i was stepping between ultra religious conservative alberta and weird lefty university life i made these characters somewhat ironically with all the yaoi tropes and demanded that they not be shipped together. lmao. what was i thinking honestly. was it a challenge for others or for me? was it the start of a dialogue or the end of one?)

and sequestered as i was in my little southside university life a certain born and raised Edmontonian from an inner city north side school background, as desperate to escape the city as i was to be repatriated to it, decided this was insufficient and thrust me into directly confronting the fears and anxieties i had picked up through osmosis of Scary Downtown Edmonton. It’s not really a coincidence that the two major changes in Ed’s design (his queerness and his Indigeneity) happened at northside transit stops, both at night, in the company of the incorrigible quatschmachen). I remember us joking about Ed as “the gay cousin” after a particular journey to a discount theatre with a distinct sketchy reputation just a hop skip and a jump from the industrial, uh, charm of the meat packing plants and Belvedere LRT station and, naturally, it stuck. The myth in my head was beginning to grasp onto the realities that I had once been disenchanted by and was desperate to cover up. And it stuck.

And it stuck and I spent a long time “justifying” it in my head, because you have to remember up until this point that personifying a place with any “difference” (in ethnicity, ability, etc) or acknowledging the real struggles of being queer in a place outside of the sacrilegiously gay-and-silly and yes subversive heta-verse... it wasn’t acceptable in fandom. It was rarely done and when it was it was often met with extremely virulent hostility, hostility in similar-but-different ways to the hostility i faced for accidentally expressing “difference” that I didn’t realize I was expressing in rural backwater Alberta.

And it stuck and suddenly it became a gateway into this secret untold history of the city.

And maybe I will write more about that as my research progresses. but there you go, a little insight into why I designed Ed the way I did and why I’ve upheld that particular characterization for all these years. And now a decade after designing him exist the citations to back up my choices, on one hand, and the resolve to keep fighting, to keep writing that history in spite of these odds that look insurmountable from the outside.

it’s tough being the tough city but the battles are worth fighting. and that’s why i do what i do.