Hello there,
I am sitting on the deck of a small cabin at Bodega Ridge, on Galiano Island about 1.5 hours from Vancouver. I have been here all this week on corporate retreat. Now I am taking a break enjoying the chirping of the birds, squawking of ducks, and croaking of the frogs as I reflect back on this month.
May has been a month of connections. We started the month with a three-day basic archery course with me and my two daughters, which was a lot of fun (post below). We had two visitors to Kyoto from Kelowna! After a long hiatus I joined a web developer meetup in Kyoto for the first time. With Asian Heritage Month in the Okanagan my family hosted a movie night from Japan (we watched One Big Hapa Family which I have blogged about previously). And just last week I flew here to British Columbia to spend a week in-person with all my company teammates surrounded by the beauty of the Gulf Islands, and meeting some cool people on the island doing computer art, building tree-mounted internet architecture, shoemaking and tiny house-building, and a particle physicist teaching data science online and making glider sails.
♾️
I had to step out to do some work. Looking back on those connections I mentioned above I realize can't even process them. It is just too wild! So many new avenues to explore. The world is full of people doing wonderful things, and I am happy for the privilege to be able to meet them.
Take care on whatever island you are on. Stay warm. On my way back to my cabin I took a look at the moon thinking about how that experience unites so many of us.
Good night,
Chad
🖋 From the Blog
Golden week archery
Took the kids shooting. Learned about more than putting arrows into paper.
Possible LLM future and the inequity of a Reverse Turing Test
How a digital prosthetic can be cancelled out — an opportunity to practice prefigurative politics.
🧭 Elsewhere
Started watching this video series on Project Drawdown’s Roadmap Link →
Map of languages spoken in China Link →
My fav secure messaging app Signal can camouflage itself as a weather app Link →
📖 What I’m Reading
From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power by Saul Newman (28% Complete)
So far this has been a very easy to follow comparison of Marxism and Anarchism as a way towards Newman’s thought on post-modern (ahem… post-structuralist) anarchism, aka post-anarchy.
You just read issue #49 of chadlibs. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.