Mark Godin

a graphic showing the pantone numbers for the two core colors of the toronto blue jays. they are skydome blue (pantone 293) and Stieb Navy (pantone 282)

a hat and canvas tote with the pantone number for Dodger Blue (294 C)

I regret to inform everyone that my pedantic brain couldn’t let me live until I knew whether or not dodger blue and blue jays blue are the same blue. They are ONE PANTONE NUMBER APART.

Was following the baseball game using MLB’s live online tracker. There is something incredibly sad at the end of the 18th (!!!) inning, watching those tiny sigils, CF and 1B and C and all, wandering desultorily off the little green diamond, like a dejected alphabet wiped from a board.

Rendering unto Caesar: Receptions of the Bible as a source for secularism - Hannah M Strømmen, 2025 In this article, I identify a key trend for demarcating the “secular” as a Western, Christian achievement. I analyze how the New Testament story often known as ...

My article on the use of “Render unto Caesar” to support secularism and exclude Islam is published in Critical Research on Religion (open access): doi.org/10.1177/2050...

9. As a species, we have figured out war to an astonishing degree. We are still working on the ability to hold peace.

Real peace requires self-determination and justice. It requires trusting that differences do not make us enemies.

Ruin a book with a car:
The Lada of the Rings

thought the worst thing would be going about daily life while everyone just ignores the collapse of society but it turns out the actual worst thing is having 27 conversations per day that go “did you see the news alert? yeah, bleak times we live in. anyway, can you get this to me by Friday?”

Ruin a song by adding the word “literally” to the title:

New Orleans is Literally Sinking

Even those who follow the lectionary then have to decide either to focus the sermon on one of several readings or try to tie three or four together. And some congregations will have local customs concerning how many readings are read during a service.

It can vary tremendously even within the same tradition. For example, with Canadian Presbyterians, most ministers choose based on the weekly Revised Common Lectionary readings, but are free do otherwise. Some ministers will preach through one book over a month or two; others choose by theme.

Though, some days the answer would be maple in every category except “cake”. I have yet to have a maple cake that properly highlights its maple flavour. The closest was a maple butternut cake served to me once in the Eastern Townships, but the star there was the even rarer butternut flavour.

Dessert mode: ACTIVATE!

Best pie: Shoofly
Best ice cream: Chocolate star anise
Best doughnut: the kind my mom used to make by deep frying sometimes
Best bar: salt caramel brownies
Best cake: Pistachio rose
Best other: maple butter tarts

Persons of Story A review of KATHAPURUSHAN (1995), and some thoughts on personhood, of story and otherwise.

vajra.me/2025/08/31/p...
“We are at home in the body, but that homeliness makes us parochial. What is required of us is a practice of empathy that is deeply inhuman and unheimlich: to care about every one of us as if they were someone we loved.”

For the second time this week, a magpie has flown to the sill outside my study window and knocked with its beak, then paced noisily before leaving. What story am I being invited/dragged into?

AI Killed My Job: Translators Few industries have been hit by AI as hard as translation. Rates are plummeting. Work is drying up. Translators are considering abandoning the field, or bankruptcy. These are their stories.

“It’s not overly dramatic to say that we risk losing the capacity for cultures to understand one another better if we’re all simply feeding output into each other’s automated translation systems.”

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-...

By @bcmerchant.bsky.social‬

Many translators paint a picture of how, despite there being no revolutionary advance in automating translation, the floor began to fall out from the industry around 2023. OpenAI, it seemed, made 'good enough' translations acceptable, and demand for quality work evaporated.

so i personally think healthy gratitude practice is not a denial of the pain on this timeline it is an acknowledgment. it is not an invitation to sit back because everything is just fine, it is a CALL to step up and help when you are in the position to. to CHOOSE kindness and service

This looks like a wonderful resource for gardeners in Canada. If only there were something similar for Sweden…

Alistair MacLeod. Not as well known as some of the authors on this list, but his short stories and novel centred on Cape Breton Island are composed of sentences which sing and shine.

And for the non-Shannara classic: Magic Butthole: For Sale—Sold

1-3-5-2-4-1 or 5-2-4-1-3-5.

AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums "This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”

'“I don't think that people appreciate how few people are working to keep these collections online, even at huge institutions,” Weinberg told me. “It's usually an incredibly small team, one person, half a person, half a person, plus, like their web person who is sympathetic to what's going on.'

Nobody knows how this ends. Nobody knows what’s going to matter and what isn’t, in the end. Nobody’s even going to be able to agree on when the end is. That’s not Living In Unprecedented Times, that’s just living, period.

You want to see a redemption arc?

Give people room to do the work to redeem themselves.

Then, let them do it.

Don't snooker yourself into doing more work than they'll do themselves to change the story of their life.

And don't write puff pieces about Nazis. It's embarrassing.

What takes courage is recognizing that just because someone is terrible doesn't mean we should be terrible TO them. It's honoring their potential to be better by not depriving them of the chance to realize it.

It doesn't mean excusing, explaining, or accepting their bullshit.

I think it's important to realize nothing - what one editor thinks, what one person who reviews your book thinks, what reader #2 thinks is somehow THE truth about your book, like you have to outsource what you think to someone else for it to be true. You just have to find your real audience.

Who Pays for Cheap Language Instruction? - Boston Review The industry’s hidden costs.

This was foreseeable www.bostonreview.net/articles/yul...

It is unsurprising that the people pushing a mediocrity machine in order to stop paying workers can only come up with the same, banal, mediocre justifications for its use—justifications that have been proven to be false time and again.

AVP is shorthand for the popular film franchise "Anglicans vs Presbyterians"

"that's not Christianity" ok how does this help trans people or muslims or gay people persecuted in the name of it? how is it anything other than handwashing and retreat into the belief your faith is the only pure and good one - harms caused by coreligionists be damned?

The front cover of a scientific journal titled Ornithologist, dated 1 April 2025. The main headline reads: “BIRDS: DECODED - Groundbreaking New Science.” Below that, a subheading says: “What are the UK’s birds really saying? Pioneering new research provides the answers.”

WORLD-FIRST: Ground-breaking research published today in the Ornithologist Journal has, for the first time, translated common UK bird vocalisations into equivalent phrases in the human language.

The results tell us a lot!

Extracts below... 🧵