Category: Reading (Random Links)

It’s weird that a lot of the media I have consumed lately – Wolf Hall, The Tudors, and Conclave – revolves around cardinals and Popes. Yesterday I was talking about papal conclaves with Rodd and he told me in all seriousness that they check the genitals of every papal candidate these days. “What?! No way,” I scoffed. “Yes way! It’s because there was a lady Pope once. They even have a special chair,” he claimed. A few minutes of research later, I crowed as I revealed to him that the papal toilet chair is a myth. He remains disappointed.

A company in Tasmania has purchased an ecologically-damaged 5000-hectare property called The Quoin that they are restoring and rewilding. I was stunned when reading this story to realise that the folks behind this effort are my friends Cameron Adams and Lisa Miller from Canva.

The news story was linked on Metafilter, and here’s what I wrote as a comment there:

I was one of the early Canvanauts (as they call themselves), working there for 16 months across 2015-2016. The job involved a pretty serious pay cut for me, but I was burnt out after working in streaming video (“How many ads can we cram in this before people stop watching?”) and it was so nice to work on a product with no ads, and that people loved enough to pay for. Cam was a colleague and a friend, and I met Lisa and their kids on many occasions. Melanie (CEO) and Cliff (COO) interviewed me and I worked with them on a daily basis. I didn’t always agree with every decision they made, but it was clear to me that their ambition did not extend to screwing over users. Even back then, when Canva was far from the unicorn it is now, the founders put their principles into action. I remember in particular a company offsite in Manila (we had a large team there) where the entire company spent a day giving back. I went with a group of colleagues to a shelter for women and kids who had been sex-trafficked, and we played games and I taught them to knit and it was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done in my whole tech career.

It’s wild to me now to see people that I am still Facebook friends with referred to as some of the richest people in the country. No, billionaires shouldn’t exist. But I’m really happy to see that these three continue to do good with their fortunes, and I’m proud to have contributed in some tiny way to important projects like the Quoin in Tasmania.

“There is No Safe Word” – How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades

I read the whole thing, even though I hated it after the first section. It’s terrible. Those poor women. I don’t know how to separate this from my previous feelings about his art. I feel like so many things I enjoyed are now tainted and gross. We saw The Ocean at the End of the Lane in London in 2021, and I wept at how beautiful it was. It’s all corrupted now. Time to toss my last few remaining books of his.

And yeah, I do feel some hypocrisy at tossing my Gaiman and Rowling books but keeping a shelf of Dahl. He was an awful person too, who said and did some pretty terrible things. Somehow it feels different, like he’s historical evil rather than today evil. He’s not actively hurting people walking around the world today in the way the others are. That’s  what I tell myself, anyway. 😕

This Guardian article on the prevalence of flaking out on plans includes a quote that really spoke to me:

“Increasingly with gen Z and millennials there is a fetishisation of introversion,” said Andrew, 23, from Brisbane who works in telecoms sales. “Web comics and memes make a moral comparison to extroverts, who are supposedly loud, obnoxious people. Introverts are [depicted as] moral people who own cats and crochet. But our generation is also experiencing record high loneliness, so I think we shouldn’t praise choosing loneliness or celebrate [extreme levels of] introversion.”

YES. As an ambivert, I’ve noticed this tendency online for a while now, and it annoys the crap out of me. Choosing to be at home alone is not more virtuous than enjoying the company of others. There’s nothing wrong with it, but introverts always seem to imply they’re better people for it. “Fetishisation” is a good word.

I didn’t plan on starting 2025 with a cry, but it seems fitting. What a lovely piece by Jeannette Cooperman about her friend choosing how and when to die. (Via Metafilter.)

“[W]hy do boomer men refuse to slow down?” A really good piece from The Guardian about how difficult it can be for older men to accept that they can’t do everything they used to, or that they want to. Or as I put it to Rodd: “Oh look, someone wrote an entire article about our Dads.”

Al Green covering R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.” I was a huge R.E.M. fan in high school and college, but this song was never one of my favourites. I really like this version though!