I’m on track to read 4647 48 books this year — up by fourfive six from 2024. I was lucky enough to find eight books I felt were worthy of 10 stars out of 10, plus three others that didn’t quite make it with 9.5.
The reason for the strike-throughs is that I managed to squeak in a couple more books before the end of the year. One was an epic that I was determined to be done with after several months, and the other was a page-turner that I devoured in five days.
10/10
A Truce That Is Not Peace
by Miriam Toews Memoir
Jennie’s Boy
by Wayne Johnston Memoir
Etta and Otto and Russell and James
by Emma Hooper Fiction
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie Mystery
A Two-Spirit Journey
by Ma-nee Chacaby Memoir
The Other Valley
by Scott Alexander Howard Speculative fiction
Fifteen Dogs
by André Alexis Speculative fiction
Red Team Blues
by Cory Doctorow Science fiction
9.5/10
The Ministry of Time
by Kaliane Bradley Science fiction
How the Light Gets In
by Louise Penny Mystery/thriller
After an absence of nine years, The Animal Reporter is back with an inspiring post about the unsung heroes making lives better for the abused and homeless.
I played a supporting role with a spiffy new WordPress theme that I made from scratch. This was no small accomplishment for me since past attempts over the years have ended in failure and having to resort to tweaking an already-made theme.
I like to create my own thing from the ground up, with control over every step of the way. You can learn more about how I did this in a previous post.
I also updated my projects page to reflect the new look of The Animal Reporter.
Back in August, I demonstrated the power of a drop in the bucket. One of my drops in the bucket is supporting Canada’s economy by buying Canadian as much as possible.
Here’s what my mornings look like these days.
Granola — Oatally Awesome — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Granola — Rogers — made in Canada by a Japanese company
Yogurt — Activia — made in Canada by a French company
Flax — CanMar — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Soap — The Soap Works — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Toothpaste — Green Beaver — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Toothbrush — Ola — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Shampoo — Attitude — made in Canada by a Canadian company
Razor — Rocky Mountain Barber Company — made overseas by a Canadian company
Shaving cream — Nivea — made overseas by a German company
Floss — GUM — made overseas by a Swiss company
That toothbrush, by that why, is made out of maple scraps from a nearby lumber mill. That’s about as Canadian as you can get.
I'm still looking for viable alternatives for shaving cream and floss. Shaving cream from Rocky Mountain Barber Company is made in Canada, but way too expensive. Floss by Ola is more reasonably priced but made overseas and breaks every time I try to use it.
I’ve been using Safari for the past couple of years, assuming that it would run best on my aging iMac, now so old it’s stuck on Ventura.
I mean, surely a browser built by Apple would be optimized for computers built by Apple.
But in the past couple of weeks, Safari has become painful — spinning beachballs, long start-up times. Looks like Apple has left this old-timey 2017 Mac behind.
Even when Safari seems finally ready, I still can’t type in the address bar.
So it’s back to good, old Firefox. Even with AI built-in, and I’m not sure if I’m too crazy about that, it still runs circles around Safari.
Really, all I want to do is click on an icon and type where I want to go on the Internet. Firefox does that.
Research on environmental reporting confirms my own experience of late — positive stories are more engaging and more likely to encourage you to help with solutions.
Awni Etaywe, a lecturer in linguistics at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia:
If people are constantly told the situation is hopeless, they disengage. When we focus on solutions, shared values, and tangible actions, we open the door to lasting behavioural change.
I’ve been following a subreddit called EcoUplift, and I have to say it really has helped change my attitude. It was not that long ago that I might have said there was no point in even trying.
Compare this with the novel The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. The apocalyptic horrors described in this well-meaning story were so overwhelming that I had to put it aside.
It takes work to choose optimism over pessimism, but it’s worth it.
As a small example, I went out of my way to buy some water bottles that are not only made in Canada, but are also eco-friendly. Now drinking water is doubly refreshing.
What’s the point of making a contribution or doing my part when it amounts to little more than a drop in the bucket?
You may have heard people say this, or thought it yourself. I know I have.
But lately I’ve been thinking about the cumulative power of those drops. I asked ChatGPT to do the math for me.
Supposing a million people contributed. In terms of the world’s population, that’s a tiny, almost negligible, percentage. But if each contribution was the equivalent of a drop in the bucket, the bucket would soon be overflowing.
1 mm drops → ~0.52 L
3 mm drops → ~14.1 L
Drops that are 3 mm in diameter scale up in three dimensions from 1 mm drops — hence the massive increase in volume.
What if those drops fell in the form of rain over a period an hour?
1 mm drops: ~0.52 mm/hr (very light)
2 mm drops: ~4.19 mm/hr (moderate)
3 mm drops: ~14.1 mm/hr (heavy)
If you stood in a rainfall of 3 mm drops, you would be drenched. Even 1 mm drops would get you noticeably wet.
Again, one million is not that much when you think in terms of total population. Canada has a population of 40 million. If one million people took part in a movement, that would only be only 2.5 per cent of the population.
Don’t underestimate your contribution. Those drops in the bucket can add up pretty fast.
In the course of just under a month, I’ve done a U-turn on my opinion of Fix the News. I now recommend that you stay away from them, and here’s why.
On July 10, I wrote a post about how Fix the News does a good job of improving your optimism with a weekly roundup of good news — concentrating on “big picture stories of progress.”
It’s a newsletter that’s mostly free, but you can pay $US80 a year for more coverage. I was on the fence about this. On one hand, it’s a lot when converted to Canadian dollars. On the other, it seemed a like a worthy cause.
A couple of weeks later, I noticed that Fix the News planned to move to the Substack platform due to its greater reach. I naively assumed that they were unaware of the controversy surrounding Substack, mainly involving them allowing extremist views that do not align with those of Fix the News. So I sent them an email pointing this out.
On Aug. 3, I received a response from the Fix the News founder, Angus Hervey. It turns out they have been aware of this for years, but have decided to go ahead anyway because they are convinced that it will allow them to raise more money for charity.
“We totally understand if this is a bridge too far for you, it's not an easy decision for us. If you do decide to leave we'll be sorry to see you go!”
They have decided, essentially, that the ends justify the means. It’s a level of cynicism that caught me off guard, and took me a while to process.
So, yes, I’m moving on from Fix the News, and I no longer recommend it to others.
I was watching a rerun of Big Bang Theory, which was bad enough, but it happened to be an episode featuring the cringe-worthy show-within-a-show, Fun With Flags.
Well, wouldn’t you know it — they had an actual fun flag fact. At the 1936 Olympics, Haiti and Liechtenstein discovered they had the same flag: red on the bottom half, blue on the top half. They got around this with embellishments that have remained on their flags to this day — a coat of arms on Haiti’s flag and a crown on Liechtenstein’s flag.
That got me thinking about an article I posted over 10 years about countries that have similar flags but otherwise little in common. Haiti and Liechtenstein were missing! This called for an update, which I finished this morning.
How could I have missed that one? Without the coat of arms and the crown, those are two of the most similar national flags in the world.
I also took the opportunity to update the PNGs to SVGs, ensuring that the flags look sharp and clear at any size.
Does asking ChatGPT about your health issues ever give you the creeps? Maybe it should. After all, your chats — even the ones about private stuff — are considered training sessions. That’s why ChatGPT is free. It needs your data.
Still, it’s pretty hard to resist the allure of an AI chatbot when you have a question. Instead of getting a list of links that may or may not be related to what’s on your mind, you get a straight-up answer.
That’s why I was glad to hear about Lumo, a privacy-first answer engine from the Proton Foundation, a Swiss non-profit that built a reputation for keeping email private, and has branched off into several other services.
Encryption prevents Lumo from accessing any of your input. And if that’s not enough, you can go into ghost mode, which makes sure your chat is never saved.
It uses open-source large language models, including Mistral’s Nemo, Mistral Small 3, Nvidia’s OpenHands 32B, and the Allen Institute for AI’s OLMO 2 32B model. Your question is handled using the model that Lumo considers best suited for it.
Oh, and Lumo uses a cat as its mascot. I asked why, and was told that it has a cat-like personality.
My personality is designed to be cat-like because I'm playful, curious, and independent — just like a cat! I enjoy exploring new topics with genuine interest, and I have a light-hearted and upbeat attitude. However, I'm also respectful and mindful of boundaries, much like how a cat can be both affectionate and aloof. This combination makes my interactions engaging and fun while ensuring I remain helpful and considerate.
I'm not sure I would describe my cats using all those terms. I sometimes suspect they may be motivated by just a hint of malice. Even so, if you like both privacy and cats, Lumo can’t be beat.
Update: Please read my follow-up post. I no longer recommend Fix the News.
Fix the News does a pretty good job of describing itself, so I won’t try to create my own version.
There is a lot of good news out there, we just don’t hear about it. Not feel-good stories about pets and barbershops, but real, big picture stories of progress. Most of the mainstream news outlets miss this stuff. Partially because stories about disaster and division get more eyeballs, but also because the nature of progress is slow. It happens over longer time periods — and this doesn't fit the modern media's fast-paced, 24 hour reporting style.
Our goal isn't to be a comprehensive news source, but to play our part in mending the wider media ecosystem by being deliberately unbalanced. There are thousands of media organisations that excel at telling you about everything that's going wrong in the world. We're one of the very few that tell you what's going right.
I was a journalist for over 30 years, so I have a pretty good idea of why certain stories get bigger play than others. We needed something fresh and interesting every day. A big-picture item seldom works well as your top story.
But knowing there is more to the news than the outrage of the day is not enough. Where is the antidote? Fix the News, with its weekly summary of the good things happening in the world — and there are lots! — is the best I’ve been able to find.
Their weekly newsletter has summaries and links to dozens of stories. There never seems to be a shortage. Reading these stories has helped me become more optimistic and more enthusiastic about making my own contributions.
The newsletter is mostly free, but you can subscribe for $80 US a year for even more stories. Converted to Canadian dollars, this is a bit steep for me, so I’ve stuck with the free version. On the other hand, they say one third of the money goes to charities, so I might have to rethink that.
On top of this, there are ongoing fundraisers for charitable projects. This provides another avenue for those looking to find a way of doing good in the world.
The website does have a few oddities. For example, you have to click on a hamburger menu to switch between system, dark and light modes. It defaults to system, which I found almost impossible to read. Light mode is fine.
They also insist on opening a new tab every time you click to another section on the site. I find this weird and disconcerting.
That said, I actually subscribe to Fix the News via their RSS feed. The app I use, Reeder, formats everything quite nicely.
These quibbles aside, I highly recommend Fix the News to anyone looking for a break from doom-scrolling.
