READER. I thought I had lost all of my Firefox tabs. All 918 of them. While trying to recover them, I mistakenly shut down my browser again, preventing the "restore last session" type of dialogue from happening easily. And my Time Machine backup is not running on my work computer, which has remained my main web browsing machine. I had LOOOTS of podcast episodes banked on there. Plus different windows with extensive bibliographies for special research topics. ("frandroid, why don't you just bookmark the pages?" "Shut up Pinky!"). I was fairly despondent. I have a back up going to last September which has the bulk of my special topics, but the podcasts seemed to be lost. Finally today while I was looking at something different, I realized that there was a different "restore session" button than the about:sessionstorage dialogue in the 'fox. I clicked on that and it restored a month-old session I had tested with, so I was overjoyed. Finally I searched the trash bin, found a session backup dating to just before I lost my tabs, and restored that. Magic!! I am so relieved.

Alright, on with our regularly scheduled program. The first item is pretty nice "me" stuff but the second one was fun.

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Chasing Leviathan - Understanding Modern Kurdish History with Dr. Djene Bajalan

In this episode, Dr. Bajalan describes how Ottoman, Turkish and Kurdish modernity were intertwined and how the idea of their respective nation-states developed in relation to each other, esp. In the crucial decades of 1910-1930.

(The PKK held a symbolic "weapons surrender" ceremony today, where they put 50 automatic rifles in a big container and set the whole thing on fire. Empty symbolism, clearly, which matches the Turkish' state own emptiness in this "diplomatic process". To demonstrate the point, an hour after this symbolic demonstrating of good will by the PKK, the Turkish air force bombarded a PKK position in Northern Iraq. What a clusterfuck. I've promised a follow-up post about this... It should come up soon.)


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Better Offline - Silicon Valley Fashion With The Menswear Guy

So it’s been a bit of a trend this year, if you have a successful podcast (probably one which pays appearance fees), to have dieworkwear come on to talk about whatever? So Ed Zitron didn’t miss his chance and had him on to talk about the style a variety of tech executives, from Zuck to Jensen Huang (nVidia). At the end of the episode he discusses buying the best leather jacket for your taste. The thing that I love about him is that he’s all about “figure out your style, then rock it” kind of fashion guy, rather than the old school “this is the style now, forget everything you knew yesterday” thing.

...

I love Ed Zitron to bits, but other than in this episode and a few other interviews, his ranting about AI is getting pretty repetitive. I think I'll focus on listening to Tech Won't Save Us more than him.

So even though I've been selling zines for 25 fucking years now, there are two big zine things I have never done until now:
1) put out my own zine
2) organize a zine fair.

Amusingly, the second item is happening before the first one. I had thought about organizing a small bar-hosted zine fair for a while (Cut 'n Paste in Toronto used to be held at Sneaky Dees (a sizeable punk-ish bar with two floors), and the first zine fair I visited, Generous Margins, was held at the Sugar Refinery). I long have had a bar-owning friend who is open to the idea. Then last fall, Canada's largest fair, Canzine, was cancelled because the guy running it and Broken Pencil got cancelled for a second time in a few years, this time for being a rabid, lying, libelling, fabulating Zionist. So he decided to just destroy his two indie institutions. Then this spring I learned that SOMEONE ELSE had held a bar fair (which I missed by a day), so now I was like IT'S ON!! This summer I was talking to a new zine friend about it, and he told me that he and some other people were getting together to organize a new zine fair, to ostensibly replace Canzine. So I have joined this collective, we have held a few organizing meetings so far, and it looks like this thing is serious!!! I'm very excited. It's going to be on a smaller scale than Canzine (it had between 150 and 200 vendors, depending on the year/venue--we could probably cram 80 in our venue but others are a bit more conservative/chill/insecure about it, so we're looking at 56 to 70. It's going to be an application fair so we'll see how many people we decide to let in and possibly adjust the number of tables in consequence.

We were discussing whether to have sponsors or not (not soliciting them, but even just allowing them to ask for the privilege), and while I was in the "sure, we could do more things with more money" mindset, one of the collective members, incidentally the person who had organized that spring bar zine fair, was like "if they're not selling zines, even if they're an indie business, they're still a business trying to use our reputation to make more money". I'm not absolutist like that (I'm fine with indie book publishers/bookstores paying hundreds of dollars for a table if they feel like it), I dig this anarchist/zine purist take and I feel like we're in good company. (We're going to have a notice for potential sponsors to write to us to ask to sponsor, but it looks like we'll be picky. At most we'd probably have three sponsor tables anyway.)

The Dig - How Zohran Won w/ NYC DSA

If you're like me in the left, you're excited that Zohran Mamdani has won the NYC democratic nomination for mayor, esp. in light of the insane amount of vitriol and Big Money put against him. So Daniel Denvir decided to interview the co-chairs of his campaign. They discuss how this absolutely did not come out of nowhere, but is the culmination of years of running smaller campaigns and capacity city building on the part of NYC DSA. One of the top organizers there cut her teeth on the Obama 2008 campaign, so you could say that the seeds were first planted there.

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On a related note, I dislike the tag #PodcastFriday now because I do my write ups on most OTHER days. :P. I created this tag in the mold of #FollowFriday tag from Twitter's early days, but meh. :). Sometimes I bank them but this episode is totally exciting to listen to.