Jacob Filipp

Category: Writing

  • October Links

    It’s the time of the leaves to turn ombre, the time when it’s acceptable to start drinking bicerins, and the season when the veil between this world and the next thins and you can see the ghouls on the other side.

    Oh, and it’s time for links:

    Rock Social, where you paint with rocks. Check out Geokash’s entire site, she creates refreshingly unique thinks and the photo-essay of how she made her “geodeck” computer is interesting.

    I also recommend https://hallucinate.site, a massively multiplayer online rave. I won’t spoil the enjoyment for you – put on your headphones and get ready for a fun 3D experience.

    Speaking of music, I’d love to experience this kind of party for once in my life. Hard hitting music in a crazy environment. This is a band called Locked Club, and if you like the sound of Russian hardcore electronica also check out RLGN.

    Friend of the blog, Taylor Troesh, explains the process of writing his award-winning post “100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon“. It took a year and 80 hours to write.

    I really appreciate when people share the process behind their writing: I’m not exaggerating when I say that if Steph Smith hadn’t shared how she writes her blog posts, I wouldn’t have been writing now. At the time, all I could think about was “something is wrong with the fact it takes me 4 months to write 1 blog post”. And then I saw that this is totally normal. This is the effort we never see as readers.
    (Obligatory note: I disagree with anyone, like Steph, who says that “writing is thinking”. I write a lot. You’d be astonished at how little thinking goes on in that pretty little head of mine.)

    Also in the “let me peek behind the scenes” section: VRK quit her job to follow her artistic impulses for a year and this is how the year went. This piece spoke to me personally because I am on a similar journey and it’s great to hear of others’ experiences in the same situation. I previously read Arun Venkatesan’s reflections on his yearlong sabbatical, but it was missing some of the personal details I crave (The fear! The uncertainty! He pretends like he’s a cool cucumber all throughout – yeah right, Arun.)

    The post 11 Fixable Things that Make Life Harder for the Elderly, the Sick, and the Poor was really thought provoking. It lists things that have been disallowed in cities/health insurance in the USA as of ~100 years ago, that artificially create a hellscape for people. This is a good reminder for me here in Canada – the current lifestyle we have was intentionally created and alternative ways of life were shut out. We can remove certain barriers to make life better for all (for example: making it legal to camp in parks & to live in cars gives renters a better BATNA when negotiating with all landlords, across the board).

    I’ve been listening to Toronto goth-rockers The Birthday Massacre recently. I’m perpetually surprised that such a large band had stayed together despite all the vagaries of life over ~20 years. The “Superstitions” album below is especially good. Listen to Diaries and Beyond:

    Artist Takato Yamamoto (from S. Elizabeth’s blog):

    Evelyn Pickering de Morgan

    Evelyn de Morgan was a pre-raphaelite painter, and throughout her career she was the primary earner – sustaining her husband’s ceramics business. When William De Morgan finally perfected his craft he went out of business, lamenting: “All my life I have been trying to make beautiful things. And now that I can make them, nobody wants them.” The story has a happy twist: when William finally abandoned pottery, he became a writing sensation.

    source
    File:Clytie, by Evelyn Pickering de Morgan.jpg
    Clytie

    Enter the gently-animated meat forest of Heatslob’s Meatbag:

    Last month, Matt Duggan wrote about how modern technology had stopped being enjoyable and has become a burden. It’s very exaggerated to heighten the feeling, and that’s what makes it such a good piece of writing.

    A while ago I saw Peter Barakan petting this ridiculous tailed robot and I was hooked. But this robot was never mentioned in the show again. (Japanology Plus: Personal Robots )

    I recently discovered that what it is, is a Qoobo cushion robot with a wagging tail. Made by YUKAI ENGINEERING, makers of creative little robots.

    FRIEND!!!

    Global Village Coffeehouse Design

    I’ve been collecting illustration books from the late 90s, with examples of the absolutely garish design of the time. It was the period when artists were putting down their airbrushes in favour of the clunkiest computer illustration software.

    I recently found out that this style is called “Gobal Village Coffeehouse Design” and there’s even a Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/GVCDesign

    You have to listen to Sade while you’re looking through these, though:

    By the way, the above term was coined by CARI – the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. Their site is an amazing repository of nostalgia.

    Click around and explore CARI while listening to the music CD that was released to promote Microsoft Office 2000 in the Netherlands:

    That CD is from the wonderful time when “World Music” just came from “World” – that one homogenous place where exotic people are always having a famine or a war or something. It’s from a time when your favourite tune with the Native American chanting turns out to feature stolen Native Taiwanese chanting go figure!!!

    That’s it.
    Until next time, have fun surfing the World Wide Web!

  • A-to-Z across Toronto: Second Half

    Note: this is the final part of my journey across Toronto on foot (Sept. 18, 2026). Read the pre-walk background here and what happened in the first half of the walk here before reading this post.

    It’s a week after I crossed half of Toronto on foot, and it’s time to tackle the second half.

    My body is fully healed for this more challenging part – according to Google Maps, it should theoretically be 2 hours longer than the previous walk (which took 9 hours). I’ll pick up where I left off (Union Station) and finish at the far East of town, the Zoo.

    My main concern about today is the 4 hour stretch right up to the Zoo. I’ve been down there as a teen and remember that it’s unbelievably boring. A straight-line walk along a solid fence with no landmarks. I’ve chosen this route because of a certain place I just have to visit: the grandmama of all Chinese Malls.

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  • A-to-Z across Toronto: First Half

    Note: This is my first day of crossing Toronto on foot. Sept. 11, 2026 . Start with the pre-walk background here and read what happened on the second day here.

    It’s the first day of my walk across the entire width of Toronto.

    I leave the apartment at 8:15am to a waiting taxi downstairs. It’ll take me to the starting point at Pearson International Airport.

    We go through a set of mid-sized city streets and onto Highway 401 which bisects the North end of the city from East to West. The ride takes 45 minutes which is enough to get me ruminating. Will I be able to complete this cross-city walk? I keep thinking that “it takes two”: my crossing of the city also depends on whether the city wants it to happen.

    My thoughts drift to how this is a solitary heroic quest. Except, in preparation, my wife bought me a nut mix to keep me energized. And she’ll take care of the kids. And she’d made plans to call throughout the day to make sure I’m safe. No matter what my lyin’ brain says: I am not doing this alone.

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  • A-to-Z Across Toronto: Before the Walk

    Note: this is the pre-depature post for my walk across Toronto. You can follow the first half of the walk here and read what happened in the second half here.

    I’ve lived in Toronto for the past 27 years. I love being “in the street” and have obsessively walked Toronto’s streets, back alleys, side alleys, front alleys and ravines like some sort of territorial dog.

    So when I got the idea to cross all of Toronto on foot, it just made sense!

    I’ve been inspired by Craig Mod’s TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO, an ephemeral journal of his walk across the city of Tokyo. In September of 2026 the stars have finally aligned to make it happen.

    I am writing this “pre walk” post two days before departure to give some background. The walk is called “A to Z” because I’ll be crossing the city between its two psychogeographical ends – going from the Airport to the Zoo. There will be tears, joy, endless monologues, blurry phone pics and snacks. And all that before I even step out of the apartment! 😁

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  • September Links

    Hello Kings and Queens,

    This month I have a short list of links for you.

    I found Derek Sivers’ description of building a house on an “as needed” plan really interesting (“Do I really need a kitchen?”). The book that inspired him, Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn is a good one that I recommend. A while back I saved this page from the book, as an example of building a house in an “Agile” way without preplanning:

    I think the implications of Brand’s attitude were something like: if you’re building a house gradually, without all the money upfront, make a plan that allows you to build the bathroom, kitchen, and everything else around it.

    Derek Sivers’ writing is a very seductive writer. Especially to young men. But I feel that his mind is like that of a boy who’s never grown up and never took on responsibilities. I mean, he’s the primary parent to his son so that’s a big responsibility, but something about his mentality still seems stunted to me.

    Jelly Star – a tiny phone that won’t ravage your jeans pocket (I’m looking at you, my clownishly big Samsung phone!).

    A reader reached out to say that the same company also makes the Jelly Max – a 5G phone with a newer version of Android.

    It’s not ridiculously small like the Jelly Star, but it’s still waaay smaller than the one I’ve got!

    Christian Cleberg has a great blog post about The Night Feeling, that reflects a lot of my own feelings about the nighttime. I like that the night puts a twist on a familiar place and makes it fun to re-experience. Kind of like taking a favourite song you’re tired of, and giving it a re-listen as a remix or a slowed-down version that’s just different enough to keep it fresh.

    Christian also has an interesting “Salary Disclosure” page on his site. I’ve never seen such a thing before!

    My Friend Aaron – a great piece about a young man who sets out to create his own Prediction Market using AI agents.

    I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures.

    In August, I spent some time in the Canadian city of Niagara Falls. Away from the central strip, where the sidewalk begins to warp and big empty lots start to appear, there is a Shreddies factory. I was passing by the dilapidated houses nearby when the smell of ten pigeons hit me. Then, I saw movement in my peripheral vision. On the ground, as tall as my knee, sat a red-tailed hawk. It was finishing off a big fat rat. It was the closest I’ve been to a bird this large. It didn’t like me hanging around so it flew off to finish its prey on the top of a Shreddies transport truck.

  • Links for August

    It’s another edition of monthly links! Here are some interesting things for you to check out in August:

    Tracy Durnell has some interesting takes – and interesting ways of presenting existing ideas. In this tortured reflection on why Tracy won’t buy the lamp that she wants, she highlights how “home decor” is another way of putting you onto the consumerist treadmill.

    How will I be useless to Capitalism today?

    And commenter Chris Glass links to his List of Things I Do Not Need – a brilliant idea. He also links to a piece on Korean Dopamine Sites: fake e-commerce sites that are meant to scratch the itch of shopping without the exenditure. Related: food-delivery experience simulator.

    EP 1320 from Teenage Engineering

    This is… a medieval groovebox. It’s got horse hooves, hurdy gurdies, 2 witches, the illuminated medieval website is unbelievable, the device itself has medieval LED numbers, the promotional video is bizarre. I love this. I wish I was musically talented so I could play this.

    Wiki Spy

    Neal.Fun’s wiki-spy lets you go into a wikipedia rabbit hole – visually! Enter something like Iznik Tiles and start exploring.

    Neal’s Wonders of Streetview is guaranteed to surprise you.

    Something I discovered on Wiki Spy is the “Semantron“, a wooden plank that Orthodox monks play as a musical instrument.

    It gets a little psychedelic:

    “Has not been viewed much”

    The Art Institute of Chicago’s API has a flag called “has not been viewed much” and this site lets you view these less-popular artworks. A good way to find new art and dive into historical topics.

    Aniconic Buddhist art

    Something that came up in conversation. Early Buddhism did not have depictions of the Buddha, but would show an empty seat, footprints and (I believe) and outline of a person.

    Here’s an introduction to some of the fun in studying the bible (authorship, context) in-depth: https://andreafontana.it/en/birth-god-israel-yahweh-el.html
    In Hebrew, it is very clear that Elohim is plural, while YHWH is singular. To the extent that in the story of Babel, God is concerned about the height of the humans’ tower and goes to alert the other Gods (!)

    As a Torontonian, this is the bee’s knees:

    source

    This little guy was unwanted, so now he lives here:

    Enjoy!

  • All Grocery Stores in Canada

    This is a list of all major grocery chains’ locations in Canada

    Locations were gathered between July 24 and Aug. 1, 2026. Included are: Walmart, Costco, NorthMart, Giant Tiger, Co-Op, Arctic Co-Op & all the sub-brands of Empire Co. Ltd, Loblaws and Pattison Food Group.

    Get the CSV file with the addresses:

    2026-07-all-grocery-addresses-CanadaDownload Addresses

    Or see them on a map (full-screen map here):

    Notes

    Locations were collected from the grocery retailers’ own sites: either from the “find a store” tool on their site (majority), by enumerating all store IDs to discover active locations (Walmart – the 1000-2000, 3000-4000 and 5000-6000 ranges only), or through the XML sitemap on the site. These methods could be out of date or not updated to reflect openings/closures.

    If you analyze this data and discover – for example – that there is a food desert in a certain Halifax neighbourhood, then go to Google maps and verify that that’s indeed the case. Double-check your work with that second source.

    These are only the largest grocers – communities are additionally served by smaller grocery stores (sometimes as large as Galleria/C&C/Tone Tai here in Toronto, sometimes as small as a corner store).

    I don’t think that all Giant Tigers and Walmarts sell food – the map makes the rough assumption that they all do.

    An interesting article that I found as part of this research about the two towns with the highest food prices in Nunavut. It helps think through factors like the presence of grocer competition / complementary businesses when it comes to affordability.

    By request, I’ve added latitude and longitude coordinates for each address using the free Natural Resources Canada geolocation service. But it isn’t super accurate, so I recommend double-checking and re-running geocoding using a paid service if necessary. The linked Google Map above had the addresses geocoded by Google so I’d trust it more.

    A similar resource – all grocery stores in LA, from Food Base LA.

  • Felix and I

    In my memory it’s always the same picture:

    He is young – twenty four – sitting at the black computer table by the wall of his living room. I’m looking at him side-on. He’s silhouetted by the huge window with a gorgeous view of the neighbourhood church. Green trees outside. The sun is shining brightly.

    It’s summer. Probably “The Hot Summer”, when our friends G and C came over to hang and see what he was working on. This was at the one-bedroom apartment where he lived on his own for the first time. There was a small fan struggling to hold back the 35 degree heat. It was 20cm in diameter so it was ineffective – it was phenomenally hot and still a good time. He was showing all of us something on the computer screen.

    When he built that desktop he used a mini-motherboard, aiming at a small form factor. But at the last step, when it came time to buy the case, only a comically-large one was available. He took it. This compromise grated on him but it was a pragmatic way to finish the build and move on to what he really wanted.

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  • Proof Of Care in the Age of A.I.

    Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp Now, the same lengthy Pomeranian piece could’ve been blooped out by a bot in 1  0 seconds flat. Impossible to tell if any effort went into writing it. This ease makes it hard to connect with others over shared interests, and harder still to convince people to change their mind about an issue. A . I. is making it easier than ever for people  to put the ir t hough ts into writ i ng. A nd tha t’s a problem. In this document , I will review the l atest ways in which people are restorin g trust in their work in a noisy post-LLM world. Ways of demonstrating that effort went into their message . Ways of proving they care. One-To  -M any, O nline The simplest wa y to make a message effortful is to hand- write it. It takes time to write out thousands of words and there are no shortcuts. It’s tedious. It hurts. It even works for short messages . Try it now: think of a quip you’d like to post to Socia  l Media. Write it out on paper. Take a photo and post tha t. I guarantee that your message wil l hit home be t ter than if you’d written  it digit ally. You can add “extras” that make the task more difficult. For exam  p le, you can manua  ll y ref l e c t each le t t er o f the wr i tte n mess  age. I have only seen a few people do this becau s e i  t make s the te x  t  ha r d e r to rea d at a g  lan c e. Bu t, pe  rhaps, t h a t kin d of fr ic  t io n is w e l co  me in ou r skim-  it-  an d -  fo rg  e t - i t mo d e r n w o r  l  d  ? One interesting qua li ty of handwriting is that you can apply it to LLM  - generated text  by tracing the output of an A.I. tool. The act  of rewriting by hand still proves that you cared enough abo  ut a ma tt er to rise above  ju st copy- pasting the text. O ne  - To  - M a ny,    O ff l i ne Your photo of a handwritten message proves  that you cared enough to write the message  once. But how do you make it effortful to share a genuine message at-scale ? One solution is to hand-write many flyers and distribute them on the street. A physical f lyer  ,  handed out by a living human being , is w ay more effective than a message on a social media feed. The core skill for this approach is to keep  things short: when you hand - write 1,000  flyers you bet ter use the fewest words that  get your message across. If you don’t want  a wrist injury , th at is !  U nfortunately, the Rich and M oderately   Rich have co- opted this handwriting approach  to lobby for their interests in a way that  looks “ organic”. They use machines ca lled  Pen Plotters to make imitation handwritten  flyers at scale. These can have all the   imperfections and variations of the real thing.  Down to having one-of- a - kind fonts created from a particular person’s handwriting . A carte l of bu sinesspeople can pass these flyers over to dozens of gig-workers , who in turn hand them out at various town centres. Over the past three years, the public had smartened up to the use of plotters and this led to the invention of new proof-of-care indicators.  T  a  t t o o s One way to broadcast one’s thoug hts is to   get a big bold ta t too.  By permanen tly writing a mess age into one’s body, tattoos show an unfakeable conviction. What’s more, tattoos display a message to everyone in the vicinity without having to exert constant effort. For as long as real tattoos can be distinguished from the fake thing they remain a good way of proving commitment. They are most practical in places with temperate climate. The key with tattoos is to keep the message a) short and b) evergreen. This message will adorn your body forever so it can’t be something you’ll rethink in the next twenty years. This is easier said than done! Who among us hasn’t seen a young lady with “Meat is murder” down the middle of her torso, or a young man on his hustle with a “ Grind Hard” message across his forehead ? I’m sure that they’ll regret their choice when they are older and their priorities sh if t  ! S tory tellers One unf a keable way to rea ch an a udience  is to shout your message at a busy place.  This harks back to “Speakers’ Corner” in   Hyde  Park   in London, and to other such   spots that were popular un ti l the late  twentieth century. I have personally seen  more people in North American cities shouting   out in public. There is also a rise in the number of people I can only describe  as “  Town Criers”, moving on foot through   a city and spreading true news to  counteract all the false news on the Net.   I believe that this greater use of in-person  communication is part of a migration from the Online World back into the Physical  World. This wave will only intensify over  the next five years Between cities, travelling storytellers are reportedly plying a route and sitting down with the townsfolk to share tales. I hear that this is how the I liad and Odyssey were  first transmitted. Except now, it is more like  Julius Caesar’s autobiographical books: each  story is not just entertaining but aims  to telegraph a message about a person or  initiative.  Story telling requires adapting a message to  rhyme and repetition. The storyteller can’t just read out prepared text, either: the story needs to be adjusted to match the energy of  the listeners, to their identity and to the setting.  One would tailor a story differently whether  the audience are office workers, warehouse  labourers or a group of nurses who’d just  gone off-shift. The challenge with the above is that  regional oligarchs will undoubtedly hire and train people to spread their own propaganda. That’s why the storytellers form guilds and initiate members with a trial in pain, written in the body. A young man typically  becomes a Storyteller by having his skin  cut with razors, row on row, and getting  burnt wood ash rubbed into the wounds. The ceremony itself is painful, and the four-week  recovery is even more so. When they heal, the scars form raised patterns like alliga tor  scales. A young woman usually becomes  a Storyteller by having an artist carve ornate shapes into her face with a bone  chisel.  When telling a story, the listeners can tell   at a glance whether a Storyteller is “the real  deal” and has not been bought. S ubtraction The most extreme means of emphasizing one’s message is by mutilating the body. Some businessmen  in The East may cut off their own ear to  sea l a Billionaire Elevation Deal, or a critical  political marriage. Closer to home , in Designated European Warzone II and in the Euphrates Crucible, we have the practice of government ministers underscoring a declaration of war by cutting off a finger.  Body mutilation is a gesture of unquestionable  commitment. And it gets attention. It is   egalitarian in that it is available even to the   poorest of people. But, I believe, there is  an “escaltion effect” here that will land  people in the same position as the Tibetan  protestors from previous decades, dousing themselves in gasoline and lighting themselves aflame. When you start one-upping each other, there is only one destination where this practice  can lead.  This kind of Proof of Stake is mostly done by followers of the Witch Priestess from the North, and loyal readers of my blog alread y  know that I hold her in low esteem. I ncreasing the bandwidth What’s common to all the methods we reviewed so far is that they are low bandwidth. Short messages you can shout and handwritten flyers are bad at transmitting complex ideas . In past times, this is when the speaker would pen an essay or write a book on a subject,z but A.  I. has made those formats suspect.  I n order to dive deeper into an idea, people have begun to schedule face-to-face gatherings that last one or two hours . And why restrict yourself to talking ? To get the message across, communicators are now performing with their whole body – a dance, a song, a play, or something in between. Smell, touch and taste, too, increase the surface area for their message.  I f a digital video call  is higher-bandwidth than reading a document; if an in-person group  presentation is higher-bandwidth than video; and a 1-on-1 conversation is even higher… then what is  higher-bandwidth than that ? You’d have to do something extreme to your  brain to cram in more content. And that’s  exactly where the cutting edge is: today’s youth are using psychedelic drugs to kick the gates of communication wide open. First, one would gather an audience and have them ingest mind-altering drugs. Then, put the listeners into a cozy and safe environment – perhaps sitting around a fire. The communicator could speak the message aloud. Or, they could push the limits of communication by also ex aggerating their facia l expressions, moving the arms and feet in extreme gestures , by adding  layers of drum music. F rom there it is a short step to painting your body, adding feathers , masks and dancing. Those in the vanguard aim to get the most “juice” from those hours together. Drugs prime the mind for maximal intake.  On any given night, on the outskirts of  our larges t cities, you can find young  people having a genuine dialogue by dancing around burning bonfires, bodies a black silhouette, feathered masks shaking. I n this bizarre digital age of Artificial Intelligence, there is just one thing that I can say for sure: The kids are allright Proof of Care in the A ge of A .I. Previously, if you created a 4,000 - word b log post abou t Pomeranians, people could a ssume that here was a person who really cared a bout dogs. Fine – may be the qua lit y of the wr iting was imperfect – but the sheer effort it took to write so much was proof t hat you reall y cared abou t this topic. Not any more. Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp
    Click here to see the “how this was made” feature

    I wrote this piece by hand and photographed the pages. After that, I wanted to make the text copy-pasteable. So I put the images into one SVG file with a text overlay:

    Pictured: overlaid + spaced out text. Notice the ` spacers and extra spaces.

    The font (Barlow Condensed – Italic Condensed) and the line height roughly match my handwriting’s dimensions. For spacing, the idea was that I’d add spacing characters that’ll be removed in Javascript during the copy-paste event that fires on the webpage.

    I used ` (backtick) characters for narrow spaces that’ll be fully removed, and multiple spaces between words where I planned to collapse them into just 1 space. The hyperlinks are made using Inkscape’s Create Anchor functionality.

    After exporting the SVG file, it required some post-processing:

    • Embedding the font using <style>
    • Replacing the ` characters with Six-per-em Space characters so the backticks don’t show up when selected
    • Replacing the linked local image filepaths with full URLs

    Finally, the SVG is fully added as an <svg> element into the HTML file. I couldn’t trigger on-copy Javascript events if I embedded it as an <object>.

  • What to do with Your Big Ugly Concrete Column

    All over North America, developers are building condominiums with big rounded concrete pillars smack in the middle of the room.

    These columns block the view, block the flow and aren’t practically useful for anything – you can’t even screw shelves into them!

    Here is a list of ideas for what to do with that Big Hulking Column in your life:

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