Rob Teszka

YouTube video by Piemations BOO!!! - A Halloween Music Video

Well this is enormously enjoyable youtu.be/NZx9fAk22Qg?...

Excellent! May more hyper-niche essays hit your Venn bullseye.

Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzl...

I stumbled upon this wonderful, extremely niche essay about poetry, close reading, odd fads, T.S. Eliot, animal imagery, and the infamous cryptic crossword setter Torquemada: publicdomainreview.org/essay/beastl...

I think it would be pretty fun if, whenever someone would write

"THIS"

underneath a post they vociferously agreed with

They instead wrote

"Quite."

"Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps."

- Emo Phillips

Just been thinking about this line more and more, recently...

Look Out, Vancouver! I’m Dressing for Joy | The Tyee Regional blandness was getting me down. Here’s how I turned things around.

This article for @thetyee.ca is fantastic and wonderfully timed as I have just been thinking about how Vancouver seems to be afraid of standing out, fashion-wise--and yet whenever I'm out and about in period dress after a tour, so many people enjoy the hat & bow tie.
Wear what makes you smile!

I am genuinely offended that Spotify's discovery playlist keeps recommending me electroswing no matter how much I don't listen to it

I genuinely think the reason execs were so certain AI could replace other workers is that they know it could replace them and they just assume everyone else does as little real work as they do.

We all agree that we like arts spaces & they make communities feel good & neighbourhoods nice to live in. Right?

And yet: look at what happened to The Giggle Dam in PoCo. And what happened to the Opening Nite Theatre in Mission.

Landlords and city halls shouldn't be able to kill venues so easily.

Would that even be possible? Would the landlord just be able to say "no. Dollarama will make me more money."? Would Pitt Meadows City Hall just say "that sounds like it'd be too much paperwork. denied."?

And if so: how the fuck are community-owned arts & culture spaces supposed to exist?

Ive been wondering: what if the community got together and raised funds to buy the Hollywood 3 and run it as a co-op performance venue? Keep one of the screens, convert the others into a stage for local theatre and/or a cabaret for comedy, improv & music. Apply for a grant, try and make it work...

The landlord is demanding an unreasonable amount, forcing them to close. And what for? To put in another fucking Dollarama!

I don't need to tell you this, but *we, as a society, need to decide we want to protect independent businesses, especially arts & culture spaces*

Sign the Petition Save Hollywood 3 Theatre in Pitt Meadows

Oh hey, a petition to save one of vanishingly few independent cinemas in the Vancouver metro area: chng.it/HmbZ8pzrYV

The Hollywood 3--previously Harris Road Cinemas--fuckin *rules*. A local, independent, second-run house with cheap popcorn!

Guess what?

I love this quote from the article:

"But the best ideas often come from wandering, from play, from slowness. Real understanding takes time. Sometimes, it takes failing. Sometimes, it takes boredom."

You cannot replace the process!

It is yet another way we are willingly giving up control to some other corporate-owned interest. They tell us its empowering: "anyone can make anything now!" Meanwhile, it's terribly, insidiously the opposite: nobody knows how to do it themselves.

...a capitulation. It's giving in to the corporate, industrial, product-oriented mindset. The only thing that matters is how much *stuff* gets done. But in so doing, we abandon understanding of the process, curiosity for other approaches, care for the people involved, and the benefits of learning.

This isn't a "but we have calculators so we dont need to do math"situation. Calculators don't replace problem solving. You still have to think about and understand the problem in order to deploy the calculator.

The enthusiastic uptake of LLMs by students and academic institutions is...

Having curiosity and working through a problem or trying to create something yourself are *vital* in not just learning things, but also--and I genuinely believe this--in having a full and complete human experience.

Like, there might be a way we could make it more energy-efficient, teach people to expect inaccuracy, make sure only people who consent have their data used, etc etc

But ultimately, it's still cutting out such a crucial element of learning

(AKA fancy autocorrect)
which is that it's designed and encouraged to be used as a replacement for *process*.

All of the other ills are potentially fixable (barring the will of corporate interests preventing anything that harms their bottom line):

The crisis in education isn’t AI — it’s meaning By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer In the age of AI, effort has become optional. As students, we no longer need to flip through textbooks or reread chapters. As one homework app asks, “Why scroll thro…

I really like this article by Ashima Shukla in SFU'S student paper, The Peak: the-peak.ca/2025/06/the-...

It captures one of the things that I fundamentally dislike about AI

I think, from now on, every time someone mentions "AI" I'm gonna go "oh, fancy autocomplete?"

A Third of Conservative Millionaires Say They’re More Likely to Leave Canada Now More Conservative millionaires are thinking about leaving Canada than their Liberal counterparts with the right-leaning party at risk of losing a fourth straight election.

I love a headline that can be responded to with just "Good."

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

This thought brought to you by some magic I saw performed recently

But eventually, if you stick with it and care enough about it, there'll be some you -don't- like. And that's the start of developing your taste.

This is not necessarily a bad thing! Folks new to a hobby all start here, I reckon. Everything is new and wonderful!

An idle thought on the way to a haircut:

If you like everything, you have no taste.

This popped up in my RSS feeds and I have been thinking about it. I think efficiency and streamlining are antithetical to creativity and learning. The latter are messy, non-linear; the former, too focused on just one thing.

"Big breakthroughs, big changes, always come because at some moment you are taking yourself out of your comfort zone, and this will never be an optimization process. Optimizing everything results in missing opportunities sometimes." - Alessio Figalli