Happy Pi day! I'm more of a fan of tau but not here to slice things up. This week was met with a lot of reading; a return to Livtet and more planning for the rest of the year.

Writing

In lieu of the current focus of Canadian sovereignty under supposed threat by the current president of the United States, I wrote a short note about the nature of most colonial countries and the want for a broader lens in what's really going on. The sense of panic is unique in that it's afforded to a country that would never see itself ever being subject to some sort of foreign rule since it's done its time as a fellow imperial power. Something about leopards and faces comes to mind.

I wrote something short about the new direction I'm taking Livtet in. What I haven't mentioned but hinted at in that post is that I do want to make this into something folks can use for self-hosting and using to share their own libraries. I'm not sure if I'll host a service for the such but I do want to use this to add more options for folks in the social Web to share things that isn't just microblogging — we have so many things we can work with. This is my contribution!

Reading

I finished World Wide Waste on Monday and wrote my closing thoughts on the book on Bookwyrm. Some points were made in the book but it yoyo'd between blaming pollution and waste solely on consumers and then on companies themselves. I have a physical book and I have to say, it was hard reading the book. Without explicit markers for footnotes, I didn't know if I was reading the opinions of the author or if they were quotes — the extremely reduced use of typographical hints had me read each page about twice and open the associated links on my phone or browser to see what parts were quoted. You have to have time to read this kind of book and it's part of the reason why I avoided finishing it for some time. I want that time back. It is interesting to see the suggestions in this book be a bit of a soft retraction of things mentioned in an earlier book of McGovern from 1999 — what really provoked that?

I've been enjoying Lurking; a read on the evolution of folks' evolving relationship with the Internet. Some of it is before my time and exposure to the Internet but seeing the window at which they begin to overlap has given me some newfound understanding of how folks older than me (and more invested in the Web) choose to go about it. There's things in another book, Black Software, mentions but I was a bit sad to see the omission of some of the older Black social networks like AfroNet and the blogs. I think this is an attribute of the nascent nature of social networking history (it's still pretty novel of a field of research; ~30 years); but the notable ones like Black Planet were up there.

Other books that I'm reading slowly are World Eaters, The Spear Cuts Through the Water, Distributed Blackness and Haiti: State Against Nation when time permits during the week. I'm very eager to get deeper into Trouillot's works; I was inspired as I'm looking into the role that faith had in the Haitian Revolution^[1].