This is where you can find metadata for the 187,407 records stored in the Digital Archive of Ontario. 3,174 of those records have digital images hosted on my site, and available for download.
I’ve been working on a project that required this data. The Digital Archive serves it up in chunks, and I decided to make it available publicly as 1 file. This data was downloaded on February 11, 2026. Get the data here:
this is the same field as the “object number” on the item’s official webpage
primaryMedia.value
If you change the endings of the URL to /full, /thumbnail and /preview then you will get 3 different image sizes
displayDate.value
Values don’t have a set format. You will see blanks, and values like: 1850 7/18/1985 1827-1838 approximately 1918 n.d. March, 1985 27 June 1990 October 27, 1986 unknown
Microsoft Excel can open JSON files and turn them into tables. If you’d like to do that, go to Data > Get Data > From File > From JSON
Then choose your file, and turn “To Table” in Power Query
Your “List” column will get a little “left + right arrow” icon on it, click it and click OK to “expand” the underlying fields in each row
A bunch of new columns will appear. Go through the same process, expanding each column:
When done, click “Close & Load”. You will get the whole dataset as a familiar Excel sheet:
This is January’s haul of interesting stuff from the World Wide Web (and from whatever you call that “offline” place outside the computer, I dunno):
I read the online series “There Is No Antimemetics Division” by qntm. I’m a little late to the SCP phenomenon, but I really liked the concept of ideas that prevent themselves from spreading and a war that’s fought in a way that you can’t remember it. I’ll write down my thoughts about antimemetics soon in a separate post.
“It’s Getting Late Yo” – I’ve always been curious about the books Julius Caesar wrote about his own accomplishments. They’re fantastic! But… did he have a ghost writer? How did they make so many copies of his book? Did they have bookstores in Roman times? Anonymous redditor XenophonTheAthenian answers all these questions!
I saw Prokaryote Season at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival last year and regretted not buying it. In January, I read it online through “hoopla”. It’s so beautifully illustrated. Many of the characters are wearing neo-medieval outfits.
Did you know that you could brew a really strong tea and hallucinate off your rocker like a Russian prisoner? If you’re interested, read up on Chifir. There is a lot of debate here (in Russian) about the actual recipe: http://useful-food.ru/chifir/ . I wouldn’t be surprised if brewing in an aluminium cup played a key role, seeing that aluminium reacts with acid.
I think there is some truth to the claims about Chifir. Personally, the very first time I bought quality loose-leaf tea I put way too many leaves into my brew (it was at around 7pm). As I was falling asleep that night, I fell into a half-awake zone where I saw my friends’ faces appear in front of me and other mild hallucinations.
Didja know that Awesome Albrecht Durer drew a lot of doodles in his patron’s prayer book? They’re quite playful and not well known. Check out Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian I from 1515.
Smashing dudes left and right by powerfully turning with your backpacknot suspiciousMy kind of manga. I hope this one is about the difference between VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP.
There is no Protocol Д! She was panicking in the small enclosure.
She’s been up for a long time now. The food had run out and the cabin was unbearably hot.
Something was wrong.
Protocol A was strapping in, staying still, and surviving the NOISE. The noise and the pressure that built up until – just as she was about to break – disappeared all at once. And she was floating.
Protocol Б was to get food. She needed to press the right sequence of levers so bits of dried kibble (beef?) tumbled down to a built-in bowl. She would bring her face down low into the bowl to eat. Then she’d hunt down any floating bits of kibble.
Protocol Г was to… was to do… the something that started a conversation with her team back on Earth. This required pressing a different set of levers. You had to keep adjusting the levers so that the a blinking light and the rate of audible beeping would match up together. A heavy crackle would sound in the craft and she could just make out the voices of her team members.
She searched her memories. There was no other protocol. No Protocol Д. Nothing about returning her back home.
She was panting from the heat and her eyes hurt and she was ignoring the things on the other side of the porthole.
Minutes before, her panic started on a routine call with headquarters. She had opened the communication link (Protocol Г) but the people’s tone was all wrong. The scientists all took turns speaking to her. They told her how good she was. How she was a true hero of the mission. Some of them were getting choked up.
She’d heard this kind of thing before.
During her mission training, one of the others was being spun in the centrifuge but he couldn’t take it. When they pulled him out of the capsule his heart rate was as rapid as a hummingbird’s. His eyes were open and staring into nothing. She watched the artery beating at his neck as it suddenly went still. He was dead.
The scientists made the same noises for him then as they were making for her now.
It all began when she was just another orphan on the streets of Moscow. After the Great Patriotic War there were many others like her. First, they observed her from afar. Then they captured her. Under Communism, everybody had to work: I guess that included her.
They had ambitious plans, those lab-coated scientists who snatched her.
She was put into a gruelling regimen:
Every day they spun her around in the cursed centrifuge. It made her dizzy for hours afterwards and she’d puke after almost half the sessions.
They fed her various mixes of “Space Food”. She could smell flour, beef and fat when she sniffed at it. It was survivable. This bland food made her fondly remember a time when she got a steaming bun from a kind stranger on a freezing day.
Those men were then tried to explore her level of claustrophobia. Each week, her living space was constrained to smaller and smaller enclosures. She hated that she couldn’t move around in these rooms, but she found ways to distract herself. Most of the other trainees could not manage: at a certain point, almost all of them lost their minds. They’d start wailing and thrashing against their little cells. She would watch until a scientist would appear and haul them away – always with a look of disappointment on his face.
The things outside had a look of patient curiosity.
It was Doctor Yazdovsky’s turn to speak.
He was crying and he went on speaking for many minutes.
Three days before the mission, Yazdovsky took her home to meet his children. At the end of all that awful training, that was the moment when she knew she’d become part of the family.
Now he was saying goodbye.
“I’m not dead yet! I’M NOT DEAD YET!!!” she screamed.
How could she had been so stupid?
She’s always been loyal. But she was never one of them. Now that she performed her mission, Laika realized that they were always planning to discard her in space.
There was no return Protocol. She’d always assumed that the scientists would take care of the return. They were going to leave her here to die as the cabin overheated. 225 Kilometres above the earth. All alone.
She was shaking. So angry she was shaking.
She’d always been loyal – but they weren’t.
Then a cold calm descended on her.
She lifted her head to look directly at the Travellers outside.
Travellers have long etherial bodies.
They sway under some gentle flow as kelp moves under the water. Humans – with their laughably weak senses – can’t perceive Travellers. But dogs can.
They’re called “Travellers” because they are always on the move from settlement to settlement. Forever exploring. Nobody knows their purpose on Earth except that they are especially interested in Humans. They observe people and sometimes even try to enter their mind.
A one- or two-year-old child’s mind is easiest to pry open. Invariably, the mind overloads and the child stops responding to their own name. Stops making eye contact. Stops expressing emotion.
When a Traveller forces its way into an adult’s mind, it breaks in a different way. The person hears their name whispered over and over. Finds it difficult to answer simple questions. Starts seeing Travellers everywhere.
Entering humans’ minds never gave them all the answers they were after, but still the Travellers persevered. Perhaps they always think that “this time will be different”?
Travellers are a menace to people. But dogs are immune.
Travellers are terrified of dogs. Laika remembered being young and chasing one with her pack. They had it corned in the dusty yard of a furniture factory. The leader, a thin German Shepherd, tensed on its haunches and sprang forward. He bit into the Traveller’s throat and the whole pack felt a satifsfying crunch in their minds.
Humans came up with fanciful stories about how they domesticated wolves and turned them into dogs. But Laika’s people knew the truth: Humans let wolves into their homes out of desperation. The only thing worse than an irritable wolf in your cave is having your family’s minds turned inside-out by Travellers.
So there came an invitation. And a compromise. Then a partnership. And finally, a physical transformation: dogs.
No dog would speak to a Traveller. That was beyond the pale. No dog would ever betray the Humans to these… these vile things.
But, what the Humans did to her now was monstrous.
Laika looked at the three ghostly figures in the porthole. The stars were winking gently behind them. Slowly, she let her mind open to them. Bodies like wisps of smoke reached out and into her skull. She could see them. And see herself through their eyes… her point of view disintegrating.
Soon, she will give them everything they needed to know about Humans.
She was dead by the time she reached 1,000 subscribers.
What we know: She was in her late twenties. She read a lot of books. Paid close attention to current events. Which is to say that she was very sad.
“Don’t you feel that an ineffable something is missing from the world?”, she asks in one of her early videos.
“Like your teeth don’t quite fit together after a new filling? Like one leg is a centimetre shorter than the other? Like your eyes won’t focus the whole way?”
The world has changed so much from under us. And we are lost.
Every morning, children go to school in a system that’s tuned to make industrial workers from 1910. They graduate with degrees that guarantee a career in unemployment. And while they’re young, these kids can’t even play unsupervised in the street.
Women are more educated than ever before. They work harder and earn more. But their work is undervalued and their salaries are kept artificially low. How much respect does a society have for its women when they elect a president like Mr. Grab ‘Em By The Pussy?
Young men are no longer chewed up by war. But there are no expectations for them, either. No challenge that lets them prove their mettle. Unattractive and unwelcome, they withdraw from society. Becoming the exact kind of parasites their fathers would have chased out from the community in their own days.
Romance is reduced to a series of swipes in a winner-take-all app.
Conversation gets manipulated by billionaires through an algorithmic feed.
Food tastes like a cardboard copy of the real thing.
Ignorance is wisdom.
Work is Bullshit.
And religion… religion has nothing to say about this at all.
NEW LORD was sure that a new religion will rise to tackle all these problems. Which are all really a single problem: an omni-crisis of the spirit.
At first she waited for a saviour. A man to light the path in a dark world.
Then she cried and prayed for that voice. The voice yelling in this wilderness prepare the way for our LORD.
Then she got impatient.
She got agitated.
The man never came.
So she decided to become that man.
Her name was Linda and she was half-Filipino. She was a light-skinned Black woman. She was a white girl with a California tan.
She said our religions were unfit for purpose:
Judaism is still busy pretending that God didn’t break his covenant in 1939 when he allowed his people to be rounded up like cows, gassed like swine and barbecued like ducks.
Jesus’ preaching was radically kind for his time. He delivered a message so explosive that the authorities had to eliminate him. Modern Christianity has abandoned his message. You can be an Evangelical racing to accelerate a middle-eastern apocalypse. Or Orthodox, where statistically your church is in total agreement with your state: the Russian state. You can be Catholic – but it’s hard to claim authority over the spirit world when you’re so rooted in the dirt that you ensure that every roof tile on your temple bears your name.
Islam is a very clear-eyed religion. After the Battle of Badr, the Prophet (peace be upon him) gave a simple guide for discovering Truth: look at who’s winning and you will see who’s favoured by God. After eight hundred years of being broken by European Crusaders, the Mongols, the Russians, pale racists from a bucolic island… it’s clear who is winning.
Confucianism: a daddy-knows-best system where commands flow down from the Emperor, to the governor, to the clan leader to the grandfather, the father, the son. All of this worked a lot better when nobody could read and realize how dumb the daddies are.
Buddhism: pacify the masses by telling them to lower their expectations.
Hinduism: pacify the masses by telling them their born-rich lord actually earned his privilege. Be patient and you will become a lord in time, too.
Capitalism: pacify the masses by telling them their born-rich lord actually earned his privilege. Be patient and you will become a lord in time, too.
The old religions have nothing to say about the new world.
In those first grainy videos, filmed when she still had the bad camera, Linda talked and talked and started explaining her vision for NEW FAITH.
“Curiosity is the seed of Love”
– NEW LORD
There can be no Love without Curiosity.
You don’t really Love a child if you mentally check out when he tells you about his day at school. You may think your girlfriend is hot. But if you don’t care what she’s thinking then you don’t Love her. You can have a difficult, mercurial relationship with your job – but if you are always able to make new discoveries and find new meaning in it, then you Love it.
NEW LORD would go through periods of overwhelm. Spending weeks without posting a new video. She often felt that being a prophet without a flock was a waste of time.
In those periods when she had no energy, no passion, not even grim duty, she could always find a spark of curiosity. She would fan that spark and start exploring some obscure topic. Eventually, by giving over to that inquisitiveness that we all share, she would pull herself all the way out of the doldrums.
The first thing that every child does – that every initiate to NEW FAITH does – is to get curious about NEW LORD. You can’t claim that you Love NEW LORD or even understand her if you never got curious about her.
You start by watching her videos.
Linda recorded a lot of videos. A LOT. She made so many in her short life because of her episodes of hypomania. She’d record four, five videos in a day sometimes. Theologians can tell it’s the same day by analyzing her clothes, the angle at which the sun hits the kitchen wall behind her, the length of her fingernails.
After her messages begin to sink in, it’s time to figure out which ones are fake.
The earlier fakes are simple to spot.
The classic example is a video that was uncovered years ago, in early December. The one where her eyes blank out (An MPEG compression artefact, except no other part of the image is undergoing compression at that time). And she also starts the video with a different number of teeth than she ends it with.
That one was created by the Governmental Department for Economic Stimulation. In it, she talks about the importance of showing others that you care; whether it is through a hand-made item, spending time together at a café, or a thoughtful gift from a local store. The GDES created this video to stimulate shopping during the Christmas season.
Another classic forgery – a video called “Mercy” – is much sleeker. When the young disciple gets to that one they are better at spotting technical manipulation. The only giveaway is the digital watermark embedded in the signal. It claims that the video was first posted to a particular social network. That network started 2 years after Linda was already dead.
In the video, NEW LORD talks about how important it is to appreciate other cultures’ point of view. How to let others be without interference. It was a last-ditch defense effort by the White Rus (Белая Русь) Organization, made right before we murdered their grim-gray oligarchs and replaced them with our own corn-fed boys.
The newest fakes are indistinguishable from the real thing.
“Is it real? Your memory is a liar.”
– NEW LORD
“But I would spot new fakes. I would remember the videos that I had already watched!”, you might be thinking.
And you would be wrong.
After viewing one thousand, two thousand, of her videos you stop remembering the little details. Would you notice if someone changed just one word on a re-play? If you did, would trust your own memory?
Certain Billionaire Patriarchs buy entire video-hosting platforms just to tweak the views and history indicators on NEW LORD’s videos. Sometimes they do this in the open. Sometimes you won’t know that a site’s been taken over.
Altering digital history is simple. All it takes is money.
Previous attempts to re-record her videos on tamper-proof media have run into a familiar problem: the few remaining printing presses and VHS player factories are chokepoints in the process. It is simple to buy and taint them. All it takes is money.
By the time a NEW FAITH adherent grasps all of this they are in their teens. If they’re smart, then they realize that no single video can be trusted but that in aggregate they contain Linda’s message.
Eventually they start to wonder if NEW LORD was even real.
Eventually they understand: it doesn’t matter.
“The human mind is riddled with glitches. Have you noticed yours today?”
– NEW LORD
You can’t take a shortcut through this learning process. Even if you know what the final conclusion will be. It’s one of those glitches in the human mind.
Do you remember being a teen and being frustrated by how stupid your parents were?
You’d look at their life choices and see all the flaws. Mom and Dad would explain why they made certain decisions, but it all seemed like excuses at the time.
Then, thirty years later, you realize that they were geniuses. That they made the same decisions you’d make now under the same circumstances…
These are situations where you can hear the Truth, but it won’t make sense to you until you live the Truth.
When you reach your early twenties, you are ready to move beyond NEW LORD’s videos.
There is a rich body of stories about Linda and her deeds. These stories are passed orally from one follower of NEW FAITH to another. Collecting new stories is a handy excuse to strike up a conversation with strangers, to spend time together and let a friendship sprout. Retelling stories is an activity that can fill an awkward silence at a party. It is something old friends do together. A pretense to spend time with each other.
The Pandemic of 2020 had unwoven our social fabric. The Great Pandemic’s consequences made it seem like an affliction of the mind. But nowadays we see it as an illness of the spirit. It gave people an excuse to care only for themselves and to stop saying “hello” on the street. It radicalized grandparents. It begat a generation of dysregulated children. And it gave permission for quieter members of society to curdle into sickly hermits.
The storytelling, the questioning, the curiosity of NEW FAITH was the cure for our spiritual disease.
The stories about Linda form a modern-day Hadith.
It is harder to put a fake story into circulation than it is to alter a video. But it still happens often. That is why each story carries along its isnad and it matters how “close” a story is to the original teller. For example: a story that was passed from Linda’s sister, to Alexis Zachar, to Eastern acolyte Xavier Arbus, to your mother – that’s more reliable than a story that passed through twenty people. Or a story with suspicious gaps in the chain. In a word filled with adversarial lies, the fact that a story came down to you through multiple chains is the best indication that it is True.
With all these stories about NEW LORD, we have people like @al-Bukhari who write the stories into book compilations. These are useful for future students of NEW FAITH.
But writing things down comes with its own problems. Every time you write a story down, you are really writing about yourself.
There is no way to separate @al-Bukhari’s identity from his compilation of stories. He chose the words to write down. He chose which stories to include in his Sahih Bukhari. He chose the order of the stories to highlight certain themes.
“Somebody had to invent Christmas. Somebody had to invent GOD.”
– NEW LORD
The most common oral stories highlight either Linda’s philosophy or her temperament.
There is the one with her nieces. The one where her sister leaves NEW LORD alone with the girls for too long.
In it, Linda tells her nieces that humans need ceremony to mark key life events: puberty, marriage, birth, death, loss and diaspora, return and reconciliation. In the modern world we lost these ceremonies. So you must invent your own. It’s just that your inventions have to be convincing enough.
She went on to describe how every common Christmas tradition was made up by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. How somebody just decided to invent Kwanzaa – and that’s fine, YOU CAN JUST DO THAT. How biblical Aaron invented a priesthood to provide income for his sons, responsible for praising the same God he tried to usurp a few days before. How a nomadic desert merchant came out of a cave with the secret to forge a super-nation through belief. Oh! but what a lucky coincidence that the Infinite Being spoke the same language these nomads did. One guy invented Buddhism. One guy invented Confucianism. Somebody invented fishgod Dagon, firegod Ba’al and treegoddess Asherah. Somebody invented a moody and jealous god that would very much like to crush all the rest.
After that, Linda went on to say something to the effect of “you have to Love Truth, but some Fictions are very useful”. She proceeded to light up a hundred-dollar bill in front of the girls – to show that money is just plastic that’s imbued with the Fiction of a “country” and the belief that the country is “solvent”.
By the time the girls’ mother returned to the room, Linda – eyes wide talkingamileaminute – was explaining the Money Multiplier, company scrip and private banknotes. The girls were ushered away in a hurry.
They were six and eight at the time.
They didn’t understand what Linda was telling them then. But eventually they did.
It’s funny how the girls would follow such different paths, given they were raised in the same family. Hearing the same message.
The older one would become an archivist. She went looking for Truth in dusty documents and ancient books. If you make a careful study of our nation’s history, you’ll see her materialize at just the right time with just the right book to break an impasse or guide a leader. In photos of old “crisis rooms” where they make momentous decisions, she is always there discreetly at the edge of the action. She would die as an old woman slipping on ice on the way to buy potatoes.
The younger one would become known as Witch Priestess of the North. She went searching for Truth inside her Body. Her doctrine would propel her followers to sever an ear when sealing a social bond; to cut off a finger as proof they’re serious about a political statement. She would die screaming as an old woman at the Battle of the Pass; strapped into her battle harness, rocketfire all around her, hopped up on amphetamines, invincible on painkillers, eyes goggling, mouth foaming.
Nobody fakes that video.
The sisters are buried side by side. Each one has a saucer-sized bronze plaque for a tombstone. Every person’s story is equally small in a big world.
To be honest, I am glad the Witch Priestess and her followers died at the Pass. They were getting extreme with the body sacrifices used to prove commitment to a cause. In time, things would escalate until one could only show seriousness by making the Final Sacrifice.
I’m sure they consider their deaths as a gift of Love to us. I consider it a kind of heresy.
“The easiest path is to die for The Cause. The hardest path is to live for The Cause.”
– NEW LORD
Another classic story is the one about the sparrow.
In it, Linda is still living with her parents. She is digging in the garden with a shovel one day, when she hears a rasping sound in the corner of the garden. She goes to investigate. Under a bush, there is a sparrow that’s been gored by a cat and left to bleed out. The poor thing is alive but the torso is open and she can see intestines.
Now, you should know that NEW LORD Loved animals.
Linda believed that humans have a double-edged sword in their mind called “Us versus Them”. It afflicts all social animals. It makes us forget our differences when we fight a common enemy. But we also use it to label people as “others” in an excuse to hurt them. Before every war, listen closely and you will hear propagandists paving the way by dehumanising the target.
But NEW LORD also had great hope for humanity.
History shows that kindness is always growing. First, we introduced laws to protect cattle from violence. Then, protection for dogs. Later, a ban on drunken husbands beating their wife (but only between 10pm and 7am as a courtesy to sleeping neighbours). Eventually, women gained full status as people. Finally, even homosexuals got to enjoy the same kindness that dogs did. Progress.
“Who do you call a ‘Person’? Now expand that definition. Expand it again. Again! AGAIN!”
– NEW LORD
Sweet agonizingly slow progress. Like molasses.
Linda believed that the only thing that would save us from us is the steady expansion in what we define as a Person. An expansion of the “Human Family”. That’s why Loving animals was so important.
So Linda sees this gored sparrow and Linda lifts her shovel high in the air. She brings it down hard on the bird. Slams it down once. Slams it down twice. The bird is dead.
When I was a teen, I would go bicycling in the city. Once, I was riding on the sidewalk and saw something approaching from the road. It was small and black – a squirrel. It had been crushed by car and its torso was flattened. The hind legs didn’t work but it kept crawling on its forepaws. It was in agony and would die soon.
I didn’t want to kill it, but I knew that it would be the right thing to do. I didn’t have a shovel. I had my bike – a clunky weapon. There were people puttering in their gardens. Surely they would notice a stranger killing an animal in front of their home.
So I let it be.
Was I a coward? Was I practicing Ahimsa? Was I selfishly worried about what the adults would do if I did the right thing?
Linda’s story… It could teach such different lessons. Where was she when she killed the sparrow? Was she in the backyard, and some Peeping Tom spied on the whole incident? Was she in the front yard and so brazen that she didn’t care if her neighbours saw her kill?
That story about the sparrow always resonated with me. Because every time you speak a story, you are really speaking about yourself.
There are also stories about NEW LORD that get personal. Sometimes they are unflattering; they’re about times when she’s vain, selfish or drunk and horny.
My favourite story about Linda is the one called “Joe”. It’s set in he time when Linda was in Toronto temporarily for school, before she returned to New Brunswick. She’s out drinking with friends and she complains that her MP3 player with all the good songs is gone. She knows exactly where it is but she’ll never see it again.
The friends are puzzled. NEW LORD explains: earlier in the month she’d gone out to a small nightclub with another group of friends. There, she locks eyes with Joe and they start dancing. He’s dancing well. He smells right, looks right. They start talking and they get along really well. They go to Joe’s place and spend the night together.
In the morning, Linda wakes up before Joe and quietly sneaks out. She goes down the block and realizes, “Damn, I forgot my music player at his place!”. But she didn’t write down his phone number and she won’t be going back.
“Why?”, her friends ask.
“Because that night was perfect. I want to remember him just the way he was. Frozen in amber. If I went back, it would ruin the story – he’ll say something wrong. Or I will”. We are all creating a story with our lives. You have to intentionally make the story magical.
My favourite story about Linda is the one called “Henry”. It’s the one where she’s a Montreal native and she’s out with her friend, her friend’s brother and his friends. They’re at a small bar and she gets interested in one of the brother’s friends, Henry. Henry is single and seems attracted to her.
Later in the evening, Henry excuses himself to go home. His apartment is within a five-minute walk from the bar. So Linda says she hates using bar bathrooms and asks if she can use his. “Of course”, he says, and they set out.
Back at Henry’s place, Linda goes to the bathroom. She comes out expecting Henry to put some moves on her, but Henry gives her a hug and sends her on her way.
Linda is fuming. How dense are men? She stomps to the elevator and makes her way down.
Henry’s friend text-messages him to see if they’re getting it on. “What do you mean?”, Henry asks. “Well, she doesn’t actually need to use the bathroom, you know? Why would she ever go alone with you if she wasn’t interested in getting in your pants”?
Henry immediately calls Linda. She takes his call as she’s about to push the lobby door to exit. “Oh, hey. Can I actually interest you in coming back…?” Henry asks, desperate.
“No!”, Linda says and walks out.
My favourite story about Linda is the one where she’s attending University in Toronto and her boyfriend has this friend. The friend’s name is Zara. She’s Pakistani like Linda herself.
Zara is short and beautiful. She knows how to do a perfect cat’s-eye effect with her makeup. She has these funny quips. Like, she is fuh-nee. And Linda isn’t just attracted. She wants to DEVOUR Zara.
Eventually, things fizzle out between NEW LORD and her boyfriend. Zara breaks up with her own at around the same time. So, taking a risk, Linda asks her ex if he’d connect her with Zara. And he does it.
The two women go on a date to an Italian restaurant that serves these coffee drinks with alcohol in them. Which Linda definitely orders. It’s 6pm and she’s buzzing with caffeine.
They walk around in the uptown neighbourhood and end up at a mall sitting down to talk. Things are going well.
Zara tells Linda about djinn. She says that these things are minor gods, and you better not run into them when you’re alone. One of her relatives has crossed paths with a djinn. Those things will fuck you up.
This is all a bit strange. A young hot girl who believes in ancient crones’ superstitions.
They say goodbye and Linda heads home.
There, she sends a message to ask Zara if she’s interested in a second date.
Zara replies: “No! You went half-and-half on paying for our dinner. And you didn’t compliment me on my looks even once. My boyfriend, he always paid for me and constantly told me I’m beautiful!”
Linda is surprised – why should she pay for someone who’s not even her partner yet? And, Zara is beautiful, but her body and her face are something she was born with. They are not her accomplishments that she should get praise for.
How dense are women?
This young Latina woman left us without scripture or commandments.
No official church of NEW FAITH.
Don’t get me wrong – many have tried to establish a church. But each attempt collapsed. Not because NEW FAITH has a directive against strict top-down orthodoxy. But because you can’t turn a blind eye to certain things when your whole faith is built on curiosity.
In a way, NEW LORD’s greatest gift to us was the stories. And the connection to each other that we form by sharing them.
Now, what kind of story will you go out and tell?
Will it be about you?
Notes
I realize that it’s ridiculous to describe a world religion in two sentences. I’ve done this intentionally as part of this creative writing post. Take a moment, though, to think about what your own religion has to say about the modern world. Many of them give great guidance to a farmer in an agricultural society. But what do they say to a factory worker in an industrialized one? What do they say about climate catastrophe, doomscrolling, incels, deepfakes and neofeudalist billionaires?
When you’re on top of the majestic St. Peter’s Basilica, the important thing is to remember: financing for the roof has been provided by Pope Pius IX and Pope Leo XIII.
Heya, are you ready for a ride through the latest batch of random interesting stuff?
Yeah?
Lets go!!!
I was reading a book from 1969 about the department store, Eaton’s. There was a reference to an “encased coin” – and it turns out that these were promotional items where a penny was inserted into a holder. Read more about encased Canadian coins here.
We’re always torn between who we are and who we aspire to be.
I was a miserable kid, and I grew up to be a cranky adult. That much will not be changing.
But, I always wish to have a higher energy level. To be crunk instead of lethargic.
And so, you can imagine how excited I was to find CRUNKY. The chocolate bar that perfectly fuses who I am with who I want to be: crunk and cranky!
Crunky is a milk-chocolate bar with tiny wheat puffs inside. It smells mildly like those two ingredients. On top, it has a smooth “Lotte” embossing. Lotte is a Korean company and the bar itself is made in Japan.
At the bottom of the bar, you can see this bumpy texture:
Those are the wheat puff showing.
When you bite into it, there is a gentle crunch sound and you feel the texture of the puffs – a bit like Rice Krispies. This bar reminded me of a time (about 10 years ago) when I created homemade chocolate bars by melting chocolate and blending it with puffed quinoa.
The flavour is that of good quality milk chocolate, with a little bit of a caramel taste from those toasted puffs. Everything is light. These flavours are not punchy, and they leave a mild wheat aftertaste.
A mysterious friend of the blog tried some, and claimed they had it before. Another friend of the blog, Chad G. Petey, said that the most similar North American bar is Nestlé Crunch – made with milk chocolate and puffed rice.
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He knew the plan went tits-up when the first nail pierced his palm.
Father convinced him things would be simple enough:
First, get yourself captured.
Then, the Italians will beat you up. Your nose gets smashed. They parade you around.
Finally, Father springs you free. Right in front of their smug faces.
The Italians will look powerless when their victim slips free – all during the biggest celebrity execution of the year. After the locals smell the Italians’ weakness, they’ll finally get an appetite for an uprising.
Father’s exact words were:
IT’LL BE A CLASSIC ABRAHAM AND ISAAC STUNT
He went along with the plan. He even put his own special touch on it:
You see, the bounty on his head was getting stratospheric. And his little crew was always short of money. That reward money would be a boon for their rebellion: paying for weapons, food, transportation and bribes.
So he arranged for The Boys to “betray” him and redirect the bounty right back into their own pockets.
He set things in motion.
Brother Jude made contact with the Italians. He told them a sob story of how he wanted out. He was done with the movement. The Italians hemmed and hawed on giving him an amnesty. But then they came up with a brilliant idea: Jude will have to betray his leader to prove he was truly out.
Jude reluctantly agreed.
Everything went smoothly from there.
The Boys were having a big holiday dinner. Jude subtly pointed out their leader. The Italians burst in and slapped everyone up, including Jude for good measure.
He was grabbed. A quick mock trial followed. There were some theatrics from their leader: weeping, washing his hands of the execution. The Head Killer oh so reluctant to kill.
After the clean trial came a dirty beatdown. They took him into a nearby room. The Italians held him face down on the clay floor, one man kneeling on each limb. A short fat one whipped and whipped his back. His vision went red and all he could feel was pain. He was pain.
“When will this end?”
SOON ENOUGH, KID
After the whipping stopped they slid a saucer of cold water near his mouth. They left him to lay there and recover.
Then two other guys came in and started a fresh round of punching on his face.
He woke up the next day. Eyes so swollen he could barely see through the bloody slits.
“Father?”
KEEP WORKING THE PLAN
He was marched down a winding alley on full display for the townspeople. He could see so many faces, but they were all blurry. He searched the crowd for The Boys but… would he even recognize them at this point?
Then, he spotted Jude and Thomas.
No, not them. His heart sank.
He was used to calling the shots. But now he’d fully given himself over to the Italians. What a mistake.
“Father, when will I go free?”
ANY MINUTE NOW KEEP MOVING FORWARD
He kept walking and walking and hoping.
He knew the plan went tits-up when the first nail entered his palm.
CRUNCH
That sound! And then came the awful pain.
And then the other palm
CRUNCH
“F… F.. F. F. FUCK!!!!”
He was hyperventilating now.
CHANGE IN PLANS, JUNIOR!
Eyes wide with terror. Darting left and right. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Then he was rising up above the crowd. The Italians were hoisting his pole. He was naked and on display and over the heads of the people.
He hung in the scorching heat of the sun for hours.
He could only register snippets of reality. His mother and brothers crying and saying something. Crows flying in the sky. Clouds rolling over the olive fields. He was thirsty. Going in and out of consciousness.
With one massive effort he lifted his face up to the sun and yelled:
“Father, why have you abandoned me?!”
And now, dear Reader, a word about death.
I used to be afraid of death by drowning. Think back to your time as a kid at the pool. You would dive and try to hold your breath as long as possible. Your chest would spasm, the convulsions getting more and more painful. Struggling against the body’s desire to inhale. A sour feeling all over.
I figured drowning would be like that but even worse. Eventually my will would fail and I’d take a deep breath. But instead of nourishing oxygen, my lungs would fill with salt water. I’d be dying in pain and surprise. Alone in a watery world that’s not meant for people.
And then I had this dream:
I was underwater looking up. The water was a murky greenish black. I was rising towards the surface. The jittering sun and the sky could be seen through the top of the water. Maybe ten metres above.
I was close but had been swimming up for a long time already.
I was running out of air. Getting closer and closer to the surface. Seeing my own hand reaching up. I was getting woozy from lack of oxygen.
Then about two metres away from the surface I died.
That pleasant woozy feeling was all that there was.
There was nothing else. Just that feeling. There was no longer a “me” there, so the last things I saw and those muted feelings went on forever. Eternal. Seeing the sun’s rays through the cloudy water. No rush. No fear. No thought.
It was a most pleasant experience.
The best dream I ever had.
As our protagonist’s head dropped for the last time, I imagine that he felt this sweet haze forever.
He woke up in darkness.
It wasn’t the normal darkness you see when you close your eyes – the kind with purple and yellow dots floating. This was the hard black that told him he was now blind.
Some enterprising crow must’ve gotten to his eyes.
Muffled sounds echoed around him. The occasional drip. It smelled damp and chalky. A cave. He was in a cave.
He could hear his own breath – weak and wheezy. His back was against flat limestone. Awareness of pain was blooming in his palms, his feet, then his contorted shoulders. It was in the raw open skin on his back. In his scalp, where a hundred thorns had poked into his skin. His face was covered with flaking old blood.
He took an inventory of his body. Through the pain, he tried to move his legs and arms. They were rigid and responded with weak jerks. He couldn’t flex his fingers. The tendons were wrecked.
He’d seen this before.
From the state of his body he guessed he’d been dead for an entire day.
They must’ve laid him out to await burial after the Sabbath.
He probed his own mind. He still knew who he was, but he couldn’t remember anything from his teenage years. They were like a word that was on the tip of his tongue but he couldn’t quite recall. There was no smell in the cave. No taste in his mouth. So those perceptions were gone, too.
And the Aramaic.
Shit, he’d been thinking in Aramaic this whole time.
He tried to think up a Hebrew word:
A…… a….. ab…. aaaaaab……..
It wouldn’t come. He knew just how he wanted to curse this cave but no Hebrew word would come.
He’d been without oxygen so long that this part of his brain had died. In the place where the Holy Language resided there was now an oozing black clot.
He will never recite the Bible.
The Bible was his one great joy in life. he’d been a Tanak’h prodigy ever since he was a child. Everyone assumed that this encyclopedic knowledge of scripture was Father’s gift to him. But they were wrong. His love of the Bible and love of a good argument was all his own. And now he’ll never recite it again.
Father’s actual gift to him was the All Knowledge of the human body. This is how he was able to cure the lame leg, right the imbalanced brain, and resurrect the not-quite-dead-yet.
His healing abilities were the reason his most loyal followers were those who sold their bodies: prostitutes and mercenaries. Their bodies suffered the kind of damage that needed constant repair and only one man could consistently fix them. He was quite a sight: running around, with his poultices of greenish mould; his nectars of poppy syrup; his frothing blocks of lye and olive oil.
He will never recite the Bible and he will never speak to Father.
Because Father only spoke Hebrew.
SKE! DKEJLRE EKEKE!
Right on cue, Father was yelling something.
But it was too late. He was beyond caring.
DDHH DWKE!
There were voices outside the cave now. And scraping sounds.
They’ve come to pry open the crypt and start burying him. Awkward youths were scrambling to move the big rock sealing the entrance. The Boys will be there. And his mother, too, weeping.
He heard a familiar voice: Daddy Joe was out there barking orders to the youths. Joe was an experienced carpenter. He knew all the tricks to make the rock move quick. They’ll be inside the cave in minutes.
DDKK ENE ENNNNE WKEE EN. ENEWKE WENENN. EWNE!
He thought about what will happen when they discover him alive. They will rend their clothes. They will scream. They will celebrate.
They will carry out this husk, this eyeless husk of a man. This man who’s crooked hands will never hold a cup. An adult who’ll need to be carried like a baby because his torn feet would never again bear his weight. He will be venerated throughout the land. But he will taste nothing, see nothing. Forever separated from The Book he loves.
The Highest Healer now a crawling cripple.
DKEKEK NENENE! ENEJEW!
Father was screaming frenetically. No need for Hebrew to guess this was something about working a new plan. That there was no other choice.
But in his arrogance Father forgot something.
You always have a choice.
A scrape of stone-against-stone vibrated the cave.
When the crowd pushed their way inside, their eyes came to rest on an empty stone slab. Just a few smears of blood and no corpse.
“It’s a miracle!” they yelled.
Bewildered faces turning to each other. Nodding and smiling.
Through the next few years people would tell tales of how He rose and lived again. Stories of Him appearing by the fire. Him appearing on the road. Him naked by the sea when they return from fishing.
There would be folktales about His wandering. Eventually his travels would end with Him laid to rest in Kashmir – a faraway land where lakes, mountains and sky meet.
But the truth is that he made a choice on that slab.
There is a way to “cancel out” the look of dust. So I took a second scan of each page, slightly offset from the first. If we align the two scans perfectly then you can see how the text “stays” while the dust “moves” between images:
We can remove the dust using a technique called “Photo Stacking” where we use the differences between the two images to create a third “corrected” image.
Then, click File -> Open & Place to add the second image as a layer
Select both layers and align them to each other by clicking Edit -> Auto Align
With both layers still selected, click Layer -> Smart Object -> Convert to Smart Object . Both layers will be combined into one.
Perform the stacking: click Layer -> Smart Object -> Stack Mode and select one of the modes below.
Stacking modes
Maximum
Maximum channel values are retained. The brightest values for a pixel “win out” across the 2 photos – so all the dark blemishes disappear.
This is convenient in our case because we only have dark blemishes.
When the same pixel has “black dust” in one pic and “white background” in the other pic, the white background wins out because it is brighter. Pixels that have “black letter” colour will have the same colour across the 2 pics and will be unaffected.
(If we had white blemishes in the microfilm scan, then Maximum stacking mode would retain those ones!)
Minimum
The minimum (darkest) channel values are always retained.
In our case, the dark blemishes are accentuated. We put them in the final image whenever they appear in image 1 OR in image 2.
This stacking order would be great for eliminating white blemishes.
Average / Median
In these modes, we use either the Average or the Median value for a pixel in a stack.
They are good for reducing noise, whatever the colour/brightness may be. But I think they won’t remove it completely.
In our example, because we have just 2 images – the average and the median stack mode are the same.
If you had many images in your stack, then the difference between the two modes would matter:
Average would soften the image. It would perform a calculation, and set each pixel to the average value across the image stack.
The value of a pixel would be the difference between the Maximum brightness seen and the Minimum brightness seen.
In our example, this ends up highlighting those areas where a portion of the white paper background had a dark blemish on it – across the 2 images.
The reason why you don’t see the black letters, is because they remained the same across the two images. If we had white blemishes appearing on top of them, then the would show up in Range mode.
Standard Deviation
Analytical: measures the distribution of information between the images. Useful for object removal as it clearly indicates areas that will be averaged out with a Median stack mode.
Variance
Analytical: as Standard Deviation, indicates how pixel values are spread between images. More intense distributions are shown very clearly.
Summation
Produces the total value of pixels from each image. Usually results in overexposure, but can be used to lighten very underexposed imagery.
If you are photographing an object at night, with a bad camera, you could correct those photos with the Summation mode.
Additional resources
You can Stack images in Photoshop using the exact same steps. Except, in some versions of Photoshop (CS6 for me) the “Stack Mode” menu option is always greyed out. It seems like the functionality just isn’t there for older versions.
There is a Photoshop stacking tutorial that works even on older versions, but appears to only perform the Minimum stacking mode. It will accomplish Focus Stacking but won’t help you remove dust from an image.
There’s a really cheeky sculpture on a building in Downtown Toronto. Most people pass by it by without noticing anything strange. Oh, but I noticed.
It is above the entranceway to 297 Victoria street – The Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University (oops, sorry, “Toronto Metropolitan University”) The building was completed in 1939 and served as the headquarters for O’Keefe Breweries.
Here’s the sculpture:
It’s a brewery. So we have one guy stroking the other’s barley sheaves, and the second guy yanking on the first one’s hops.
Dear Reader, Have you ever gently yanked on some hop flowers like the guy in the sculpture? They grow in peoples’ yards in Toronto, and I have touched them: my hands get so itchy from the little “hairs” on them that I want to crawl out of my skin. It’s a whole thing. It isn’t something that you’d see brewers doing casually.
Just imagine all the brewery bigwigs standing over the plans in a wood panelled room. The blueprints are spread on a large oak table. Of course, they’re all smoking. They review the plans for the sculpture. One of them sees two fellas that are getting each other off. But he can’t say anything: it takes a gay man to know one, no?! And several other guys in the room are thinking the same thing and they never say anything – and the sculpture gets all the approvals.
This sculptor, through sheer panache, managed to put up a sculpture celebrating homosexuality. In full view of the prudes of Toronto. In 1939.
I love it!
Who is the sculptor? Well, the work is generally attributed to Loring – oh, hey, my girl Loring! Just a 30 minute walk from my home there is a parkette commemorating Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. There are bronze statues by them, and loving portrait sculptures of each other. They were significant Canadian sculptors. And were also gay.
It is possible that the creator is Charles McKechnie. But he apparently died before the building’s construction was started.
Now, this sculptor wasn’t a brazen gambler, taking an irreversible risk here. Take a look at the horizontal seam in the sculpture – just above the men’s elbows. Did the sculptor leave themselve’s an “out”, where they could change the position of the hands in case the scheme was caught?
Or did the sculpture start out looking differently, and the hands were repositioned at the last moment? 😈1
More blind men and the elephant
While looking up an image for the aforementioned meme, I found this drawing of the blind men and the elephant:
This is not AI generated! The artist is David Meng and he also creates freaky monster models, like the cat below. Check out his site https://davidmengartworks.com/sculptures
Music
I’ve re-listened to this album at least 3 times in November:
And I’ve also been liking… Fat Nick. His producer, Mikey the Magician, is 🔥🔥🔥(Listen when your mommy and daddy aren’t at home):
Finally, if you’ve been wanting to make art or thinking about getting out of your comfort zone, this song by Ninajirachi is for you. If you just need a push over the line to actually make a change in your life then send me an email and I’ll be a cheerleader.
This photo post about travelling in Taiwan has really good asides: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/2023-alishan Maxwell’s whole series of travel posts is great, I recommend you read them.
I discovered the concept of “Playing the Game like a Scrub“. This was me when I was an entrepreneur: I held onto certain values very tightly and it lost me money unnecessarily. I could’ve been a lot more successful if I picked my battles more consciously.
Art
Lulu Lin draws bizarre airbrushed faces. (Confession: I collect “how-to” books that feature 80s art techniques like airbrush drawing and marker art)
Jenn is such a good writer. I’ve started following her blog.
November Quote
Some people just win the Face Lottery.
– Uttered by M. out of the blue while scrolling Instagram.
That’s all. Have a wonderful December!
Notes for future research on the Brewery building: Toronto archives box 179812 – 3 indicates that the Victoria st. location was a bottling plant? Or maybe they built another plant on the same street? 300 Victoria O’Keefe’s Brewery Retail Building Box 157913 297 Victoria (Check the Kyle Rae archive records) ↩︎
