Andrew Dunham

here you go

A map of the world titled "Global Rat Distribution Map", coloured in red and blue. Pretty much the entire the world is read ("inhabited"), except the far north, Antarctica, and Alberta in Canada which are coloured blue ("Don't Inhabit").

This also leads to one of my favourite maps that look like a shitpost: the global rat distribution map.

Canada’s passenger rail lines are getting revived after decades of vanishing service Across North America, there is a grassroots clamouring for the return of railway lines that once provided a reliable and affordable alternative to cars and planes

Gift Article!
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Trains are good and we should have more of them.

www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/f39d95c...

Best gas masks “How did these people go out and get gas masks?” AG Bondi asked.

me, emotionally writing an essay on the use of force by federal agents: ok but what if i packaged this in the most insane way possible www.theverge.com/policy/86857...

If you're running around telling people not to use Signal right now, you're either dangerously foolish or actively fighting against the cause, and I believe we lack the time to sort out which is which right now.

A lot has changed between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 20, 2026.

Taiwanese ambassador to Finland performs with his metal band at Taiwan-Finland cultural event! 🤘✊️
That's what I call great ambassador

Show Up Toronto - November 18, 2025 Hi friends and neighbours, The Palestinian Flag Raising ceremony at Toronto City Hall went forward yesterday despite legal challenge from a Zionist group....

The latest @showuptoronto.ca newsletter just went out, with 68!!! events this week alone. The city is hella active and there are so many places to channel your energy. Tell your friends and loved ones! buttondown.com/showup/archi... #toronto

Today is a good day to remember, and to say, that the #MeToo movement was right, and was righteous, and has been vindicated over and over again. There was no overreach. There was no excess. There was no they-went-too-far.

So much work remains to be done.

Something the US needs to accept too is that without a large-scale correction imposing consequences on a large number of people, the crisis of governance here will continue indefinitely

It's always nuts to me when ppl say things like "we live in one of the most dangerous places", are constantly fearful of violence. The stress people must feel at all times is crazy. I walk through downtown Hamilton with very little worry knowing it's one of the safest places on Earth (from violence)

My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

This is a great response to Bill Gates' climate memo.

Sickening words and ideas. A deeply disturbing but very important read. I think Canadians need to realize that our country also includes this kind of organized white nationalism and hate, and that we need to be doing all we can to work against it.

Two cats sitting on top of cages and looking at the ceiling

Two cars on the floor staring up at the ceiling

Two young kittens in a cage taking notice

A cat standing on her hind legs to reach for a moth

A moth got into the shelter tonight and it was the event of the season.

Clouded Skies for Open Networks Last week, I finished an essay about platform design affordances and content moderation expectations and community-level context collapse on Bluesky for Tech Policy Press and set it aside to cool befo...

I wrote about tensions and troubles for Bluesky on @techpolicypress.bsky.social and then I wrote about the TPP piece on wrecka.ge and now I am posting about it the post on Bluesky. Look at this cloud.

www.wrecka.ge/clouded-skie...

Justin Ling: Canada needs to make its voice heard around the world. Here’s one clear way to do that. To create stronger connections internationally, Canada can’t rely on the United States. We need to use our own soft diplomacy tools

Oh and here's a gift link www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Oh and here's my missing ")" 🤦‍♂️

Once they add the Bluesky-inspired "Packs" feature (blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-...), I think it'll be easier to onboard people... though as an admin of my own server, I'll freely admit that my opinion is still fairly coloured by my experience.

Though, Mastodon is just now fixing two of the larger pain-points for the average person in v4.5.0, IMO: it supports quote posts, and fetches replies from other servers (so you don't have the "some replies to posts on other servers are invisible" issue that trips up so many people.

Yeah, I think there's a tension right now between "easiest to deploy", which is clearly Mastodon, and "most familiar for the average person", which is ... probably Bluesky? Certainly easier for people that have previously used Twitter, anyway.

"What social media platform(s) do Canadians use" is a different, and IMO harder question to answer, and frankly I think that Mastodon and Bluesky both have challenges here. Today, I think Mastodon is much more tractable, but who knows how projects like Gander, Northsky, etc change that going forward

It's not perfect (e.g. migrating between servers loses data), but that's less of an issue for something like an official government account which (presumably) won't migrate servers all that often.

ottawa.place Mastodon instance for residents of Ottawa, Gatineau, and surrounding regions. <br/> Instance de Mastodon pour les résidents d'Ottawa, de Gatineau et des régions avoisinantes.

Not saying it's perfect for every use-case, but IMO Mastodon would be *great* for the 🇨🇦gov. It's easy to self-host the entire stack, it can be read without an account, and you can bridge it to platforms like Bluesky without a ton of work.

(I host, run, and use my own Mastodon server @ ottawa.place)

Also just for fun, I went looking for the most remote Canada Post building (vs. one that's located in another store/building). I don't know if this is the *most* remote (and it's not the most northern), but this building in Nain, NL is probably a strong contender:

maps.app.goo.gl/sB7KSmboNona...

This is very much a proof-of-concept, but it's interesting to think about how Canada Post might look in 5 years, 10 years, or even later.

(also I got to play around with React for the first time in a while, and Vite for the first time ever!)