property rights

I have been uncomfortably adjacent to architectural practice, education, capitalism, and ~the lifestyle~ for fifteen years now, and have worked in roles providing direct support to architecture students for ten. (Greg, if you are reading this, let’s look back and laugh at the production work I happily put into your thesis gratis sometime.) For reasons I will not get into here (because they will inevitably be taken out of context and used against me) I have major issues with architectural education writ large, most of them ethical. Despite this, I still count several (ex-)architects among my friends-around-the-world, and Elise Hunchuck is someone whose presence I was so delighted to be in a handful of times, even if I feel like my timing was a little misaligned with hers. When she asked if I’d be interested in submitting a lesson to her New Schools for Space summer school a few years back, my feelings about architecture were at another low, just located elsewhere in the province this time. Sometimes my spite manifests productively.

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A list of things

I can’t plan beyond the end of the day beyond accepting meeting invites for next month and scheduling some myself. Long-term planning in a public-sector position dependent on open-source software development cycles was an amusing proposition in the Before Time and now it feels somewhat meaningless but nevertheless I/we try.

Mita Williams inspires me to write in small chunks again. Here are some things that have happened not this week, but in the last period of time that feels like a week.

  • Assembled a dream panel for the online Access Conference (the GOAT): Logistics: the people and technologies that manage our stuff, with Max Bowman, Gillian Byrne, Mike Campbell, and Dustin McMurphy. Really happy that the virtual environment allowed us all to be a part of it.
I think this should start at 3h04m in. Hope so.
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Fluffy things

If my online brand is cute things on the internet and openly available then I guess I will use this time of crisis to recommend resources to get us through. Some of this might only be available in Canada, my bad.

Land & Sea, “The Perfect Little Goat” (2007, CBC Newfoundland)

D was asleep on the couch but I was not, so I scrolled through CBC Gem looking for wholesome content. Land & Sea NFLD > Season 48 > scroll down > this sounds lovely. We have been planning a trip to Newfoundland since the day of my now-manager’s job interview, and I was on the hiring committee. It was the day my boo met my work pals for the first time, and he arrived after lunch, where the candidate takes a little break and the conversations around the table get more social by telling us about the volunteer puffin patrol in St. John’s, where wayward baby puffins – pufflings – get disoriented and need to be picked up on land. A bunch of people I really like came here from St. John’s so I wanted to watch something that reminded me of of them. Anyways, meet some friendly goats, including one who, after getting blowdried at the groomer, goes through the drive-thru to get a donut. It is not from 2013, the metadata’s incorrect.

The Nature of Things, “Puffin Patrol” (2016? who knows, CBC)

See above. Maybe we will get to cycle Newfoundland this summer, who knows. The Nature of Things > Season 55

Buddy (2018, Heddy Honigmann)

In Dutch with English subtitles, described video available. I am halfway through this exceptionally strong doc on guide dogs, I stopped it so we could watch it together in the morning. I spent exactly 30 hours in Amsterdam and the only Dutch word I came home with was “geleidehond”. Buddy features people who live with service dogs, and the incredibly intimate relationships they have. It foregrounds the different access needs of real disabled people, not their surrogates, smashes stereotypes, and is also cute and charming. These dogs are legit The Best Buddies.