The wind and rain has swung east again and it’s stormy and very dark out, and so I’m out of the house and spending the day at the library which is such a nice bright and warm place to be. As I walked in I see that my friends Erica Olson and Marysia McGilvray have announced a S?wx?wú7mesh History Book Club for 2026 and I’m excited by that. It picks up on an initiative my friend Pauline Le Bel and I are doing to raise money for a Welcome Figure on Bowen.
Back in the day on the blogs we used to issue hat tips to other bloggers who steered us onto some good stuff. Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for this hefty article by John Lanchester on financialization published in the London Review of Books. And a hat tip to Patti Digh for this truly great list of book recommendations.
Happy 25th anniversary to Coastal First Nations, an incredible organization that has worked hard to protect the central and north coast of BC including Haida Gwaii and northern Vancouver Island. When people ask me what reconciliation really looks like I point to that organization, rooted in First Nations jurisdiction and governance, working in partnership with community, western and Indigenous scientists, knowledge keepers and experts. It’s a remarkable organization and long may it continue to represent the best of what can be in this country.
Managing tankers in the central coast is a key challenge for Coastal First Nations and everyone else who lives in the region. In Strong Coast yesterday, Kashmir Falconbridge, the deputy mayor of the community of Port Clemence on Haida Gwaii, writes about why diluted bitumen tankers should never be allowed on the north coast, specifically the Hecate Strait:
The strait is shallow, which makes the waves steep and violent. Winter storms regularly produce seas of eight to ten metres. Historical accounts describe waves reaching ten to twenty metres during exceptional storms. Short interval waves slam vessels from unpredictable angles. Currents tear through channels at speeds that can overpower even modern ships. Even our seasoned mariners will tell you that the strait demands respect at all times.
The Wall Street Journal installed a vending machine powered by AI and it ran a business for a while until it sunk it into the ground. Which, if you read the Wall Street Journal, is what much of their core market does every day. Even the way it signs off is so typical of how CEOs wrap up operations with their staff.
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It’s nice to see a systemic look at what’s plaguing the healthcare system in BC. Today, The Tyee publishes an article on emergency room capacity, and the strain on the acute care system brought about by several decades of decisions, the consequences of which are coming home to roost. This piece is part of a longer series The Tyee is publishing on the hospital overcrowding in British Columbia.
It’s been a wild weather week here on the south coast of BC. The rains and southeasterly winds have subsided, which always means a backing northwesterly and last night while it was calm here on the east side of our little Island, a few kilometres away the west side was being battered by 100km/h wind gusts and several trees came down over power lines, making today a hunker down at home day for most of the island. The cold front came through around 1:00am last night, when the wind direction swung almost 180 degrees and went from 10km/h to 70km/h+ gusts. The library is closed as the staff were trapped on the other side of the island, so I’m just quietly enjoying the sunshine and calm ocean here on the east side and listening to the water drain off the mountains and into the sea.
It was a torrid weekend for sports in our house. Tottenham had a terrible performance in Nottingham losing 3-0 to Forest. It’s hard to know what is plaguing Spurs, but the joy seems gone from the game for many of them. And it’s diabolical that we have perhaps the best centre back pairing in the league (if not one of the best in the world) and yet, we’re conceding silly goals. Things were looking good after the midweek Champions League win against Prague and the 2-0 Premier league win against Brentford. We sit in 11th place. On the ice, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who have been on a decent run of form lately, choked against the Edmonton Oilers and lost 6-2. Edmonton is my daughter’s team and she and I watched the game together. It was a lopsided energetic in the TV room on Saturday night. Much was redeemed though yesterday. The Leafs had a fantastic come from behind win against Chicago with a couple of very late goals to erase a TERRIBLE first period and a 2-0 deficit. And The Vancouver Goldeneyes returned to the city after an extended road trip and stopped a three game losing streak to take a 2-1 win and slot themselves in at second place in the standings.
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I’ve had many conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the long term cost of isolation that is exacerbated by the ease of online connection. But, as folks who know my complexity work will know, connections and exchanges are two different things. I can engage in all kinds of people and bits and digital entities now. But why then are we more lonely than ever before? And why are we losing the ability to be in real life conversations? Harrison Moony. catches the moment in this article from The Tyee.
But how do you commit to a discourse when you can’t be sure that the person you’re talking to even exists? The tech libertarians don’t even want us. We’re too hard to manage, too human, and that’s why they’ve flooded their sites with fake people, more likely to say what they want, and much easier to reconfigure, like Grok, if they don’t.
Seeking human connection online today feels like being the last one who hasn’t been body-snatched.
That’s a good analogy.
Paul McCartney is also addressing this head on and trying to show that it’s not just an analogy. Actual bodies of work are being snatched up by AI and he has spearheaded an initiative to protest this with an album of the sounds of creativity when the artists have disappeared. The project is called “Is This What We Want?” and it’s a question worth asking. As usual, Ted Gioia, whose blog pointed me to the work, does a masterful job of unpacking the cultural implications of this moment. It’s one of the things I love about live sports to be honest. You need actual people to play it, it’s a form of creativity that is very somatic and body based and the outcomes are always unknown. That’s perhaps a post for a different day, but it’s certainly an overriding concern for me these days.
For what it’s worth, This blog is always hand written. If I ever use AI here I’ll let you know.
A different disappearance in the Canadian cultural milieu happened this week in the world of sport. Valour FC, the Canadian Premier League team in Winnipeg announced that it is wrapping up operations. They were part of probably the biggest sporting moment of my life in 2023, when our TSS Rovers became the first semi-pro team to eliminate a professional team from the Canadian Championship.. We’ve been rivals since then, playing them again in May in Winnipeg where they nicked a 1-0 win against us in the preliminary round. Nevertheless, it absolutely sucks for supporters to lose their club. It sucks for players and other workers to lose their jobs. Like the rest of the global economy, soccer is a billion dollar thing only at the very highest levels in the 0.01%. Everywhere else it’s about community and connection and hopes and dreams. People make it possible. Intangibles are essential. When it dies, a little bit more community dies with it. Support for your local clubs matters because it will keep it viable AND because you will experience connection and belonging and friendship and purpose. The billionaires want to sell those to you on their own terms. Resist and make community in spite of them.
Friday night professional women’s hockey arrived in Vancouver. The Vancouver Goldeneyes kicked off their history starting with a puck drop by Christine Sinclair and then a 4-3 come from behind overtime win. It was the third game in a row that a professional Vancouver women’s sports team has won from behind if you go back to the second leg of the NSL semi final and the final of the NSL. This win happened in front of a packed house at Pacific Colosseum and. Vancouver became the first PWHL team to have its own logo permanently marked at centre ice. It’s a very special time in women’s sports in this city. Both the Northern Super League and the PWHL strive to be top tier leagues in the world of professional women’s sport. The PWHL already is. NSL has made a strong start, based on the “state of the league” address that founder Diana Matheson gave prior to the Cup Final last week. It remains to be seen how profitable and sustainable the league can be over the long term, but it is walking and talking like a top five global league after just one season, and that’s probably well ahead of schedule.
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No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.
World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.
Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.
I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.
Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.
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Happy 23rd blog-iversary to Ton Zjjlstra’s blog. He is one of the originals, and a person I still read daily:
My blog has always been a way of sharing things that stood out for me, responding to what others shared, and especially enjoy the type of conversation that creates (thanks to all of you who engage).
Mine too, although in the dark social media years, it became a bit dormant as I posted on Facebook and twitter, where the engagement was much higher and often more interesting. But not any more. The cost of those platforms was too high, because the speed of interaction eroded my attention too badly. I’m in recovery from those platforms, and part of that means taking back this space. The empty carbs of social media engagement have been replaced by the delicious savouring of much more infrequent but much more thoughtful connection.
Speaking of which, it seem that since June I’ve been in a pattern that has established itself as a practice. My posts generally fall into two types of categories now. There are the longer essays that relate in some way to my professional life. If you’ve subscribed by email to this blog, or follow me on LinkedIn those are the ones you will see. You might get a few a month.
The other kind of post is the old school blog post, like this one, very much in the vein of Ton’s quote above. These are things I have noticed that I think you might enjoy too (or not), and these notes become my little memory palace. They are literally about anything. In a way my blog has become my searchable “morning pages” for writing and getting things out of my head before my day starts. I’ m not sure every reader of this blog has an early-21st century idea of what these meandering thoughts are, but essentially they are annotated links. A “web log” if you will. If you subscribe to my blog through RSS, or stumble upon it through a search or a link posted to Mastodon or Bluesky, you get these ones as well. Enjoy the typos, poor grammar, half-thoughts, broken links and strange questions!
We can engage on those platforms, but I’m happy if you have something to contribute to the conversation here, where the whole world will see it and can engage instead of just those who are members of the various walled gardens and exclusive clubs that are the social media apps.
PS. I had my own 23rd blog-iversary of Parking Lot (the actual name of this blog) on September 6.