Why did you start blogging in the first place?

2001, I was a year or so into my first dedicated learning technology job (RIP TechBC), but still had the dream of being a working writer. I had taken classes and made a few ineffectual moves seeing if I could become a freelancer for magazines, but lacked confidence and connections and had a baroque writing style. I’d created websites via HTML/FTP (I remember thinking a tutorial by some guy named Alan was the best one), but struggled with things like database back-ends. So when I discovered Blogger (pre-Google), it was immensely appealing to be able to create a more robust site with relative ease. I thought a blog might be a place to practice my writing and collect some samples. Or, as I put it in my first post:

Oh yes, the purpose. Perhaps this particular bit of anxious technocultural speculation could be avoided if only a purpose was articulated. So I’ll admit to the following ambitions:

a) I want to use this page as a collection of resources.
b) I want to use this page as a marketing tool.
c) I want to use this page to further my development as a writer.

Of these, the weblog form is an ideal match for ambition a), of dubious value for ambition b), and possibly antithetical to ambition c).

A writer writes, yes, and if the blog promotes the act of creation, then I suppose that it is indeed aiding the production of crappy prose for readers around the world to ignore.

But so far, about ninety per cent of the time spent on this project has been dedicated to fiddling about looking for resources, and ineptly massaging the HTML in the template.

See what I mean about my writing style? And my confidence? I still struggle with both, but blogging was a huge help. It turned out that learning technology was a marginally more viable career path than magazine publishing. Blogging provided the opportunity to think through writing and to share in a discourse with smart, interesting people, which was what I wanted out of a writing career anyway.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

I’m on WordPress, in large part because I have been here for years and it still does the job. I have been troubled by moves and developments to the platform that have made it less accessible and user-friendly. And like others I hope Matt Mullenweg will chill out and re-connect with an earlier version of the person who did so much good in the open web space.

I also have a certain responsibility to thousands of users and projects on Trubox and the OpenETC, and I don’t see an alternative to supporting them on any other platforms, particularly open source ones.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

More than I can remember.

To go back to the early days of Blogger… back then it was quite straightforward for Blogger to publish to your own space via FTP, so it was not long before I had my first domain, which I loved.

Shortly after, I got work as Learning Object Project Coordinator at UBC and started “Object Learning” with Dave Winer’s Radio Userland, which helped me to grok RSS. One day I was sitting next to David Wiley at a boring meeting and watched as he restlessly installed Movable Type on his server. He asked if I wanted a blog on it, and I used that space for a while. Then D’Arcy Norman installed Movable Type on an underused learning object repository server that I oversaw at UBC. This was when I changed the name to “Abject Learning” and first started supporting blogging for others, activity that created some organizational unease at the time. A nasty crash curtailed my rogue pirate tendencies. A large number of people came together (thanked here), and we went legit via WordPress with UBC Blogs (and its CMS cousin) and that service is still humming more than a decade after my departure. I wrote a snide post (but correct, dammit!) that prompted a prominent professor from another university to complain to senior leadership that I had insulted him on a UBC website. I soon moved my blogging back to my own domain, partly in tune with the vibe of #ds106 in 2011. You had to be there, man…

People joked I should change the name of my blog to “Ubject Learning” at that point, but I figured I was purely Abject.

I’ve tried or been a guest author on countless blog platforms that have come out since with varying degrees of commitment and interest.

How do you write your posts?

This is a tough topic. Over the years, my quick posts have mostly moved to one social media platform or another. So my posts that make it over the line here tend to be longer or more substantive.

Now a new set of insecurities hobble me. My Director role positions me differently. Some of the challenges I would like to work through via blogging have sensitivities attached. I also feel less confident in my grasp on the current landscape. I feel like writing something that’s been said better by someone else is a waste. A lot of my stranded drafts start out as a rant, and then I start to see why airing my belligerent and ill-formed opinions might be unwise and unproductive.

In recent years most posts evolve over a few days until I get to the point where I hate them slightly less. Then I usually need a few passes to remove unneeded words and phrases and to tighten up rambling passages.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Seeing something that angers and appalls me is a common prod. I also get the itch after a particularly stimulating or satisfying project or event. Those posts should be easier, but for me they aren’t. I once tried to say why:

One of the ways I’m a bad blogger is failing to post about the good stuff when it happens. Usually because the best moments are the hardest to get right, and I worry about seeming obnoxious in celebration, showing the right amount of gratitude, or trying not to leave anyone under-recognized. In life something shitty usually comes along soon enough, the good vibes recede, and the opportunity is lost.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

Even when I get something that feels OK, I usually let it sit a little longer. If I am being particularly feisty or ill-tempered I might ask someone to look it over first.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

As much as I give the impression of finding the process agonizing, I do get satisfaction from a lot of posts. Looking back (as I did for this exercise) feels like wading through pictures in an old album, sometimes literally. I dig those rare occasions where I get past my overthinking and doubts and write purely for my own enjoyment. I’m always grateful for the times I share appreciation of someone, because those someones won’t always be around.

Any future plans for the blog?

I just hope I can get over myself and do more of it. It is one of those rare activities that I never regret doing, even if I end up regretting the effects of something stupid I write.

I’ve been wondering if the ongoing degeneration of the social media sphere might prompt more of my ephemeral or personal sharing back into the blog. I’m not sure this is the right blog for that…

The current design of Abject is something I have mixed feelings about. I genuinely enjoyed building it, and take unseemly pleasure in how often you can hit “refresh” on the main page without repeating a header image. But the big post landing images on the current theme somehow work against the idea of more frequent and shorter posts. I still like the look of the site, but it is probably a turn-off for many. I also know the current design is bulky and inefficient. My working plan is to create a subdomain minimalist site, use it for quick hits, maybe tie it in to the Fediverse.

Or, maybe I should finish those two mostly-written ongoing drafts that I want to publish.

I’ll tag a couple OpenETC colleagues: Anne-Marie Scott, and Clint Lalonde.

“Suppose he had espoused his opinions on AI, I reflected: they probably wouldn’t have carried the weight he fervently hoped they would—significant opinions, even halfway significant opinions, even insightful opinions, being so exceedingly rare. Anyway, I decided, if there was anything the human race had a sufficiency of, a sufficiency and a surfeit, it was opinions on AI, the Niagara of viewpoints, the rushing rivers of hot takes, of oceans of perspectives, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of thoughts and arguments being shared across the internet at that very moment, with only a handful worth reading, let alone taking seriously. I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written about it. One less set of opinions to clutter up the discourse, one less perspective to add to the noise and echo endlessly from forums to social media to news outlets and back again, ad infinitum.” — (With apologies to Joseph Mitchell.)

—

If you want to talk about learning technology in 2024, you’ve got to have a take on artificial intelligence. I’ve been waiting for someone to give me an Award of Appreciation for my relative silence on the subject. So far, no gratitude. No stackable, portable microcredentialed badges. Not even a gift card.

Then again, anyone who has endured the years of doom-mongering that has piled up here can guess how I feel. I don’t trust the motives of people who are poised to benefit most. I can’t get over how AI enthusiasts have so little respect for the value of human creativity and thinking, and such disregard for the people who make a living from skillfully exercising those things. There is the hand-waving away of environmental effects. The sneering condescending pedantry proponents use when they talk about “ethics”. And how the precautionary principle doesn’t seem to apply to… Oh, I’d better stop, before this devolves into a take.

As part of a university’s learning technology team, I don’t have the option of opting out of the AI hubbub. I try to keep up with the reading, pro and con. We’ve developed a resource intended to help our community make informed and effective decisions. My colleague Brenna Clarke Gray has written with her usual brilliance in her Digital Detox series, this year and last, and I’ve felt so lucky to talk at length with her and others here. Bad vibes aside, I’ve put in heaps of hours with various generative AI tools. Whatever useful things these tools can do, I want to understand them. I’m always looking for examples of mind-blowing practice, or techniques that will somehow unlock the boundless potential that the thought leaders assure us is already here.

Having appreciated the 2024 Middlebury Digital Detox on Demystifying AI, I’ve taken to re-using Tom Woodward’s materials from his workshop “Prompting Matters: Getting more from your interactions” when I do my own “prompting basics” sessions here. The information seems to go over with participants, and has led to some good discussions. I’m grateful for Tom’s characteristic generosity and lack of ego when I told him I was lifting his stuff, and generally just dig how he approaches the work, saying things like “my general guidelines for prompts are to do all the stuff your 9th grade English teacher told you to do when writing a paper.” He even has a take on AI that I’d like to make the last word on this here blog post:

LLMs and AI are big enough that I can’t be pro or con. I like certain potentials. I could have some real fun with aspects of these massively different technologies. I could also worry about so many things. I think Gardner’s old bag of gold analogy applies in lots of ways. Unfortunately, what we have learned is that if there is a bag of gold, capitalism will sell you plenty of high-priced, addictive, radioactive-lead-asbestos, gold-like items created by destroying the most beautiful areas in the world using slave labor. Soon no one will remember what real gold even looks like or that we didn’t have to do it this way or that most of the problems were created by pure greed. The companies will then charge us for rehab.

His career in education spanned five decades: he was at the Open Learning Agency in the early eighties, and over the years he made immense contributions to the Justice Institute of BC, TRU Open Learning (retiring as our Associate Vice-President), Royal Roads University, and elsewhere. But his influence and impact goes far beyond the places he worked. He was a true leader in the educational community, a fantastic collaborator, and a thoughtful and passionate practitioner. His values and his work live on with the many people he mentored, guided, encouraged and assisted. “Open Learning” was not just a place to Irwin, nor was it simply his profession. If you were lucky enough to know Irwin, you know that he approached open learning as a calling, a set of noble principles, and these were things he lived up to in all respects of his life.

As impressive as Irwin was as an educator, thinker, and leader it was as a person where he was truly exceptional. Kind, thoughtful, caring and unbelievably generous. He was not afraid to make tough decisions or do things that made some people unhappy. But whatever he was doing, the values of staying human and the mission of the open educator were always paramount. And of course, you can’t discuss Irwin without remembering his exceptional sense of humour, utter lack of pretence and ego, and immense talent as a musician.

He was the best friend anyone could have. And I will be forever grateful to him. This is where I get sloppy. Ever since it was clear his illness was serious, and especially since he passed, I’ve been wading through photos, videos, and countless recordings of jam sessions. Sharing grief with friends, knowing that many others feel the same way. I was expecting this, but am still not settled with the loss. So before I throw some more or less random memories down, I want to share a memorial.

I’m thankful to Brenna for thinking to establish a scholarship in Irwin’s name. This scholarship will be dedicated to TRU’s Open Learning students. Irwin was deeply committed to the Open Learning mandate, and the mission of serving students who might otherwise be shut out from higher education. (We’ve recently started collecting some of these stories on this site.) If we reach our goal of $25,000, the Irwin DeVries Scholarship Fund for Open Learning Students will be endowed in perpetuity. If we fall short, all funds will be dispersed to Open Learning students.

In case you are wondering, we discussed this scholarship fund with Irwin last year, and he was moved by the idea. He did not want us making a fuss about his illness. We were hoping to do some kind of online fundraising teach-in with his participation, but this all moved faster than we expected. We’ve also gotten the go-ahead from his family.

We understand there are many worthy causes and needs, but if you wish to contribute to this memorial (tax deductible in Canada), there is a form at: https://www.tru.ca/irwin

[UPDATE, May 8: I just learned that we have reached our goal, and that the scholarship will be endowed. Immense thanks to the many donors.]

—

I guess that is the important stuff, but I also need to share a few more personal memories. I’ve seen a number of people express things since the news of his passing, and a lot of the same themes come up. Gratitude for his support and mentorship is a common one: “he believed in me, and it meant so much”.

Irwin’s seemingly dazed, distracted and absent-minded manner also comes up a lot. Many of my favourite Irwin stories start from this. Though once you knew him it was clear he was keen and perceptive and didn’t miss a trick. His mind was always going. A friend observed to me “I think he was just infinitely curious about the world and sometimes its wonders overwhelmed him.”

So as much as I want to celebrate the leader, the educator and sage I also treasure the true friend, the beer and travel buddy, the bandmate and master of jams, and the legendary goofball. His sense of humour was eclectic as the rest of him: sometimes dry as a bone and drawing on real erudition, other times pure uncut silliness. He laid down some of the most brutal puns ever inflicted on humanity, and I usually reacted with visceral disgust. He’d act as if he was sorry, but we knew he’d pun again.

I would not have come to TRU if it wasn’t for Irwin, though I didn’t know him well when I applied for the job in 2012. I was not at all sure I wanted to leave a good job at UBC, and a home in East Van that our family loved. Irwin was on the hiring committee, and I immediately felt a rapport. The thought of working alongside him as another Director at Open Learning seemed intriguing.

I hope it’s safe to say now that Irwin went outside the lines with the protocols and rules of a university search with me. He gave me a lift back to the hotel after the interviews and told me flat out he would love it if we could work together. He also said in the coming days I could ask him anything I needed in order to make my decision, that he would answer with total honesty, and that it would stay completely between us. I took him up on that, he lived up to his word, and it made all the difference.

—

After I arrived at TRU, I found myself placed in all sorts of situations that were new to me. In the subsequent weeks, months… hell, years I was barging into his office any time I saw his door open to ask his take on whatever new and often trivial development was baffling or appalling me. His response was always a sly smile, saying “hey man”, and nodding at the door, which meant I should shut it and sit down. I knew then and now how lucky I was that he gave me so much time. And that what I understand now as “mentorship”, from a highly experienced and skilled leader, felt at the time like talking shit and cracking jokes.

—

Shortly after I started at TRU, the Open Education Conference had its 2012 event in Vancouver. I was a co-organizer with Scott Leslie, who had the brilliant idea to host the conference dinner on a boat, along with a jam session of some the musicians in attendance. It was so much fun to drum along with talented musicians, and it was the first time I played with Irwin… You can see us in this clip. It’s a song most of us are playing for the first time, and of course Irwin plays guitar beautifully and with restraint in the background. (A lot of memories with dear friends loaded up in here.)

Irwin told me after that he wanted to play music with me in Kamloops, and we set out to find a band. And a few fits and starts became Breaking Band. We were so lucky to have Dave and Ronda Olds give us the regular use of The Bassment, and with them and Matt Dyck we played most Tuesday nights for five years, along with a handful of house parties and assorted odd gigs.

A thing I have always appreciated is how when we get together everybody seems to get a sense of the collective mood and we jam accordingly. Some nights we focus on trying to get a tricky cover to sound right. Some nights we compose an original song. Some nights we jam freeform and maybe stumble on something we love. Some nights we randomly pick songs we know and try a few we don’t know. Some nights we only play a few songs and tell stories and laugh. Now that I think of it, we laugh no matter what.

I will forever love all my Breaking Band-mates, and Irwin was an incredible part of it all. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of popular and underground music, from decades past and the present day. It was hard to stump him… Most times, all you had to do was name a song title and he would play it pretty well. Give him time to listen and run it through a couple of times, and he could nail anything. He was also a gearhead and audiophile… He could get lost in his many effects pedals, and we made fun of how often he spilled his beer, but he was also so generous as a musician you had to love him. Looking back, I still cannot believe what we had as a social hobby.

And it wasn’t just there that his skills as a musician shone. Irwin was always up for wherever and however music was being made: full gear rock outs in rented studios, living room acoustic singalongs, playing with synthesizers just about anywhere. We might play an old fave hit (or cheeseball tune that made us laugh), play long extended psychedelic noodles, or work together to write a song. He had solid production skills and loved making records with others, or in his home studio. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to know a few people who are highly skilled musicians, yet able to play with anyone, even complete beginners, and the result is always huge fun. And Irwin is right up there. I have hundreds of hours of poorly labeled and disorganized raw recordings of jams with him, usually recorded off a phone. A lot of it probably not impressive from the listener perspective, it was the participation that was the thing. What strikes me is how often when a song ends, the next sound is usually one of laughter. These samples are probably not the best examples, but they came up quickly when I went looking, and the memories made me smile, so I will go with them.

“You May Be Right” – Irwin and I duet Billy Joel in Michelle and Kevin’s living room. What does it say we all know the words? Irwin starts us off by saying “so, you wanna just play some notes and see what comes?”, which was a common song starter.

“Salamander Scanner” – my living room along with Grant and Harry, absurdist lyrics made up on the fly by Irwin after some wordplay, as he loved to do. (OK, I admit it, I love this stupid track so much because it is the closest we ever got to sounding like a Guided by Voices song.)

Alan Levine wrote a wonderful reflection that captures how music framed Irwin’s qualities as a friend, sharing some fun clips along with some fantastic photos. It was so great to have Alan in town.

—

Irwin and I knew how lucky we were to have some of the work trips that TRU brought us… The ones prompted by the OERu and its diverse international alliance of open, online and distance institutions were especially memorable. I still cannot believe I got to see South Africa with Irwin and my then-new friend Rajiv, and we may have experienced Peak Irwin when we somehow lost him on Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned) — remember what I was saying about his dazed and distracted manner? Rajiv and I were feeling very concerned as the last boat of the day pulled off the island with Irwin still very much missing. He arrived later on the staff boat, having received some scolding from them, as apparently he was the most confused tourist they had ever had. I still don’t know how we lost him. Just one of many unforgettable adventures on that trip.

There are too many other episodes and memories on the road with Irwin to recount. But as I sit here I remember when we got Michelle to join us in a weird word game based on the 5 R’s in Edinburgh. Or hotel room jams in Utah, where Irwin almost got our instrument rental kiboshed after an hour of negotiation because he correctly thought the music store owner was charging too much money for mediocre instruments. As easygoing as he was, he had a perverse side and could be very stubborn if he sensed unfairness. I still gave him hell at the time for almost blowing a painfully constructed deal where we had no alternatives for gear. Later, of course, we laughed about it.

I shot these videos when we were at the National Music Centre in Calgary. We had a long layover, so D’Arcy Norman took us out for breakfast and we hit the NMC. We found the interactive activities good reason for silliness.

—

Irwin once got me out of bed in Hobart, Australia at 4:00 AM after a lot of knocking on my hotel door and eventually getting the front desk to call me. He informed me that my house back on Paul Lake had just burned down, that my family was safe but everything I owned was gone. I was set to begin the long trip back to Canada in a few hours. We went for a walk on the empty streets, then stopped in an all-night coffee shop as I tried to process what was happening.  As always he was there for me: caring, wise, and ready to marvel at the crazy dark absurdity of it all. A few hours earlier, we had sat up late drinking whisky and sharing gratitude for our good fortune in life, and of being in Australia together with inspiring people. As the sun came up in the coffee shop that morning, I mostly remember us sitting at the table making each other laugh at how weird life can be.

My family broke up around the same time, and my son left town to be with his mom. It was the low point of my life. I was lonely, now middle-aged, living in a short-term furnished basement, and had no social life in Kamloops outside of work. The work itself was frustrating and seemed pointless. I looked at my life, had no idea what I thought I was doing, and felt like a total wreck. Irwin’s own living situation was unconventional. His home was hours away in the lower mainland, and he commuted back most weekends. So he too spent his workweeks in a small rental… Suffice to say that during this tough period we saw a lot of each other: band practice on Tuesdays, we’d often make one another dinner, and/or meet at the Fox ‘N Hound for a couple pints after work. I was a miserable mess, making a mockery of self-care, but Irwin could not have been a better friend, or better company. We had a lot of fun, he listened to my endless moaning and self-absorbed ranting, and he would talk straight to me when I was in danger of sinking or inflicting more damage on myself. It’s more fun to think of the high points, but I’m most grateful to Irwin for being there when it was very low.

Maybe my most treasured conversations were after band practice. He and I would both be blissed out from rocking out, but also too amped to sleep. So we’d usually sit in his living room for a nightcap, listen to music, and have long meandering chats that frequently got philosophical. Irwin knew pain and struggle. He’d talk about his lifetime of kidney disease, the times spent in dialysis, the transplants (including one from his wife Jean), and the ongoing fragility he felt about his health. Between the post-jam vibes and the life lessons, a common theme from him was how precious and amazing life was. One reason why he had such contempt for people who were mean, or petty, or who were wrapped up in their ego or power trips was that they failed to appreciate just how amazing it was to be alive. Here we were, paid to work in a field dedicated to learning! We got to play music, to laugh, to meet and spend time with amazing people that we admired and enjoyed. Most Tuesday nights, he’d have me grinning and shaking my head in disbelief with him, amazed at how lucky we were to be alive amidst so many wonderful people and things.

When Irwin told his friends last year that he had cancer, as usual he was calm and reassuring. He said it had been caught early, and the prognosis was good. I worried how his constitution would respond to chemo, and sure enough it ended up being too much for him. He let us know he had stopped treatment, that he wanted to use his remaining time with family and friends. Last month, he and Rajiv came to Kamloops for a long weekend. He was thin, but otherwise said he felt great and he was the same person he’d always been. We jammed music in my living room. Connected with old friends. Had beer with colleagues at the Fox. We talked and gossiped about work. He indulged my stupid complaints and grievances. Rajiv, my son Harry, Irwin and I made a backroad trip to the Falkland Pub in the terrain surrounding Kamloops that he always enjoyed.

He seemed so good, I thought we would have more visits, and we made plans for future jams and friend connections. I got a little sloppy and sentimental at times. I even told him that I didn’t really hate his puns that much. Later he took advantage of that by unleashing some real howlers. As we were saying goodbye in front of my house, I told him as clearly and directly as I could what he meant to me. And I’ll always treasure what he said back. He was the epitome of grace and kindness. Of course I will miss him. I’m sitting here now at our usual table in the Fox, where I have been writing this over the past couple evenings, with tears in my eyes. But I am so, so glad to have known him, learned from him, and that he was my friend.

— “Parsley in Her Teeth” – co-written (and with horn) by David Olds

Thank you Tom Woodward for some of these photos, including the cover image.

I know a few people who’d done LfC assignments in the past and heard nothing but good things. A few months back there was an announcement to staff that this year’s deadline for applications was impending, so I took a look at the available postings and saw that a couple of them involved e-learning skills, and impulsively tossed in an application.

Flash forward a few months and I find myself in Nairobi, Kenya, on a three week assignment as an E-learning Development Advisor with a truly inspiring organization called RefuSHE. It was quite an involved process by a lot of people to get me here. Hours of asynchronous and live online training for WUSC’s “flagship international volunteer cooperation initiative”, IGNI+E, which is intended “to help address the root causes of youth unemployment in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Jordan and Côte d’Ivoire – particularly for young women.” I took courses on intercultural sensitivity, gender equality and social inclusion, environmental sustainability and climate action. There was a lot of training on the more direct requirements of an international assignment, such as maintaining physical and mental health, and various elements of safety and security.

Even if my engagement had ended before I came to Kenya, the training would have been a worthwhile learning experience. For some reason I expected the live online session participants would be in a similar place to myself, working professionals in Leave for Change programs. But in fact the vast majority of participants were young and passionate people looking to build experience in international aid and development careers. Most of their assignments were of much longer duration (up to a year) than the few weeks of a LfC stint, and they were already living all over the world. I was the only white male in my cohort of about thirty, and I’m fairly sure I was also the oldest person by a fair margin. The sessions were well-structured and allowed for a lot of time for conversation in breakout groups, and it was fascinating to learn from such an impressive collection of young people who had already accumulated a wealth of life experience.

I have to express my gratitude and admiration for how WUSC has arranged this stay. The administrative requirements of acquiring work visas, etc… are significant, involving a lot of documentation, medical exams, vaccinations, background checks, etc… and I found it intimidating at times. My Canadian case manager was patient and understanding. I am particularly thankful for the efforts of my WUSC contacts here in Nairobi. From the moment I was picked up at the airport I’ve been well supported, the accommodations are more than comfortable, and the in-country orientation and assistance I’ve received here has been exceptional.

I’ve been at work at RefuSHE for about a week now, working on their online platform SHElearns, which was first put together during the COVID pandemic.

SHElearns was created by refugees for refugees. The eLearning platform helps refugee women develop the entrepreneurial and wellness toolkits they need to invest in their talents and create financial stability for themselves and their families. Through customized skill-building video content and digital tutorials led by refugee entrepreneurs, SHElearns is paving the way for urban refugee business development and wellness.

Working with RefuSHE, the hope is to take the existing SHElearns platform and to make some updates to improve the user experience, the instructional effectiveness, and the means for determining how learners are benefiting from the experience. The system is built on LearnPress, a plugin for WordPress with a lot of LMS-like functionality. So far I have mostly been getting to know the system and trying various adjustments and experiments on a cloned dev environment that I’ve set up via Reclaim Hosting. I’ve made some recommendations to my hosts, gotten excellent feedback, and now we are moving into the phase of collaboratively implementing and documenting them. I hope to share more details on this work as it moves along.

The videos on the platform are really impressive, and often moving:

By far, the most impactful part of the experience has been learning more about RefuSHE, and spending time at their location in Nairobi:

RefuSHE serves one of the world’s most vulnerable populations – refugee girls. Our programs prioritize the needs of young refugee women and girls living in urban and peri-urban Nairobi who have been separated or orphaned due to war, conflict, violence, and drought. They have fled instability and persecution in their home countries across East Africa in search of protection and essential needs like clean water, food, shelter, and health care.

Urban refugees who live outside of designated refugee camps have less access to resources and face unique risks. Unaccompanied refugee girls and young women are particularly vulnerable to sexual and emotional violence, physical abuse, domestic servitude, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, illiteracy, forced or early marriage, early pregnancy, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)/Female Genital Cutting (FGC), xenophobia, extortion, human trafficking, and persecution from host communities.

The RefuSHE space feels like a small campus, with a lively and diverse set of refugees and staff engaged in a range of services and activities including case work, mental health work, learning spaces and workshops providing hands-on vocational training, childcare and food services. I’ve taken some photos, but since I should not be photographing the refugees (or anyone, without permission) they don’t really capture the vibe, which is lively, upbeat and very welcoming. A lot of smiles.

I’ve mostly been working with Peter and Loise, who among other things work in the information and communication technology department. There is a classroom that seems to always be full of girls learning applications like MS Office, but also having fun playing Kahoot games or making digital art. It can get delightfully loud at times. I can’t get over how kindly I’ve been hosted, not least with delicious meals.

So far it has been an overwhelming, humbling and enlightening experience. Nairobi is one of the more energetic and at times disorienting places I’ve been, and I am perpetually a little confused and frequently exhausted. But so many people have gone far out of their way to make me feel welcome. I hope I can make a contribution that justifies the effort in bringing me here, not to mention the honour of working alongside and amongst these incredible people.

So yes. Elon Musk picked a fight with a wheelchair-using Icelandic entrepreneur with muscular distrophy on a public twitter thread, hoping to humiliate a parasitic do-nothing employee, and instead revealed the damage done as he continues to smash his $44 billion toy against the pavement because it doesn’t make him feel as good as he hoped it would.

But at least he is a genius at tech. To be fair, his “make it up as we go” approach to change management is seemingly organizational best practice at this point.

They’re given contradictory advice and directions based on Musk’s ever-changing whims. Some have been told key data centres or offices will be taken offline or closed to save costs and taken preparatory work to do that, only to have orders arrive that the decision had been reversed as their owner panics at another outage on the site.

—

Tim Klapdor wrote an interesting post on the nature of “Heirs and Hierarchy”, and how those who benefit from it are more invested in its preservation than in the organizations they supposedly serve:

Before I struggled with the thought that hierarchy was problematic because it was the default method of organisation. What we lacked was imagination for how to do things differently to better suit the way we need to work, particularly in complex domains. That the problem was the difficulty in moving anything forward while ladened with the inertia of what is easy. Now I can see that there’s another element here: desire. That some people don’t want change because they seek power. Or that they feel they deserve it. It is their right.

It’s difficult to say to what extent this attitude bleeds over to leadership (and thought leadership) in higher education, though the example of Temple President Jason Wingard is an eye-opener:

Until this past November, Jason Wingard’s role in the potential hostile takeover of higher education was that of doom merchant. In order for the mollusk to seize control of public education funds, it has to persuade a cross-section of well-placed stakeholders, especially in government, that the existing system is hopelessly inefficient and its professionalized workforce antiquated, indolent, or corrupt. In order for the exorbitant profits, exploitative practices, and legal exemptions demanded by EdTech enterprises to be accepted, the prevailing wisdom must be that US education is not just broken but also a danger to other sectors of the economy, and thus the terms of the lawyered-up envoys from Silicon Valley and Wall Street must be accepted as the lesser of two evils.

Last summer, Jason Wingard authored what he called his “‘burning platform’ memo” for Inside Higher Ed, intended for “every university and college president and administrator, across the country.” “The value of the college degree, in my analysis, has reached its peak and is on the wane,” he warned. Wingard’s proposal: “[L]everage our industry and corporate partnerships” and “pursue entrepreneurial investments that seek to incubate alternative ventures.” In the typical fashion of crisis-mongers, he was not seeking counterproposals. “This is nonnegotiable,” he wrote. “[T]his is our only path forward.”

From the New Yorker, “The End of the English Major” by Nathan Heller: “Enrollment in the humanities is in free fall at colleges around the country. What happened?”

—

I first read Patricia Highsmith this past year, and I blasted through all the Ripley books in about two weeks. This looks like a good primer for moving further afield: “Her concepts are daring, her portrayals of men in the throes of personality disorder and psychopathic leanings are equally repulsive and propulsive, and there is enough sublimated autobiography in her work that searching out the facts of her life reveals all manner of infuriating contradictions.”

—

In 2013, the writer William T. Vollmann wrote of being swept up in the search for the Unabomber, and explores his redacted FBI file in “Life as a Terrorist”:

Were I to be shown in accurate detail why it was necessary for me to be kept under surveillance, possibly for the rest of my life, I might be able to accept these invasions of my privacy for the collective good. The ostensible purpose of this surveillance is to protect us, and our freedoms, from terrorists. What remains uncertain, since secret, is how terrifying the terrorists presently are, and to what extent rights and liberties may be undermined in order to save us from them. I cannot say how many intelligence operatives might be hampered or endangered by greater oversight; on the other hand, if the Unamericans continue to have their way we will never know how many innocent people they have imprisoned, tortured, and perhaps murdered. I would be abdicating my responsibility as a citizen were I to rely on the Unamericans to decide such questions.

—

This nifty annotated version of Sam Bankman-Fried’s “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview” by Molly White (who runs Web3 is Going Just Great) was shared with me this week.

Cory Doctorow is hardly the first commentator to compare the crypto bubble to the “AI Bubble”, particularly since so many people have pivoted from hyping one to the other.

…even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

—

Brenna Clarke Gray has wrapped up her excellent AI-focused series on this year’s Digital Detox. I found her take on whether higher ed can be nimble enough to save itself to be convincing and sobering:

If we could release the stranglehold of the fear of cheating that stops many of us from engaging with these tools, we could consider where and how AI might be a part of the assessment conversation. It would also allow moral space to have open conversations with students about these tools, including their troubling ethics. And if the answer is that as institutions we want to stop contracting with services rooted in exploitation, we can start to ask the same questions of some of our other ed tech contracts, whether Amazon Web Services or Apple/Microsoft/Google or surveillance and captioning tools that rely on the gig economy.

Brenna also shared this policy observatory from the OECD, policies, data and analysis for trustworthy artificial intelligence and it is an impressive resource. The dashboard for Canada has already proven useful.

A few other resources on AI and ChatGPT that I found worth the time:

“ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web” by Ted Chiang:

This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull,  “The False Promise of ChatGPT”:

In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.

And Kirby Ferguson’s fourth installment of “Everything is a Remix”, this one on “AI and Image Generation”:

—

In local news, Scott’s Inn in Kamloops has been purchased by the Rocky Mountaineer company and will no longer be a motel for the public. I’m hoping the restaurant will survive, it is a dying breed of old-school western Canadian restaurant and much of its menu can’t be found elsewhere in town.

Back in 2014, when my house burned down at the same time a sixteen year relationship had ended, I moved into Scott’s Inn. When I told my twelve-year-old son where I would be living, he exclaimed, “Dad! You will be just like Alan Partridge!” And sad to say, during that period I kinda was…

Even as we were in motion, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to capture what was happening. Even a simple “tour diary” post would quickly sprawl into a mass of impressions and anecdotes that would defy any sense. Beyond the amazing tourism, I felt like this was a rare opportunity for shared reflection not only with Jim but with an array of friends who all seemed to be at their own vivid and pivotal points in life. And while Jim and I enjoyed talking over the many synchronicities and recurring themes as we moved along, forging it all into a coherent narrative or some sense of meaning eludes me. I feel as if I’ve experienced something significant, but still not entirely sure what message(s) if any to pull out of it, much less to share.

So for now, I’ll state the obvious. I feel so incredibly fortunate to have had the chance to visit so many fascinating places and to see so many people again. I know COVID is not over, but there was a sense that this tour represented a novel social reconnection or rolling reunion not only for us but for most of the people we visited as well. Most of them were people we’ve known a long time, and that we had not seen in years. For the most part, they were people roughly the same age as us, and going through a lot of the same broad life events. I was struck by how everyone seemed to be making bold moves to make meaning of this stage of living, and it was fascinating and gratifying to take stock with them and compare experiences, and realize how much of what I heard resonated so powerfully.

And while I hold off on recapping these encounters here for now, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer immense gratitude to Jim. He kicked all this off last summer by coming up with this plan, and then by inviting me along. I’ve always had a blast with him, and we’ve had some riotous times and travels together over the years. But never one more rewarding than this. We were both a little more sensible and settled this time round, but not at the expense of laughs or of making the most of the moments. He was an impeccably considerate and good-humoured travel buddy, and I will always be thankful to have had this opportunity for adventure.

I hope to return to this trip with a series of small vignettes and roadside reports over the next few weeks. Maybe I will. Small bites feel more manageable but my track record in these respects is poor. But whatever I share here or elsewhere, this was a far more meaningful and valuable experience to me than I would normally expect on a vacation, and I can only hope the learnings and the reflections continue to percolate and bubble up as I move along.

I have a few other posts in the hopper: some developments at work I’m eager to share, further thoughts on open platforms building on a post I wrote last summer, and I still hope to find a way to let this space fill some gaps as Twitter continues to break down and I find my way with Mastodon. And giving myself permission to just dash off a quick post, even when I am feeling worn down and I know that whatever results will not feel satisfying… and then hitting “Publish” anyway. Like now.

I’m about to head off for a two week jaunt along the US west coast, much of it riding shotgun for the Bava’s game repair scavenger hunt. Starting with some days in Los Angeles, hitting the desert, and then slowly and raggedly making our way north. Expect to see some other folks along the way.

Other than a few short trips within the province, this is my first travel holiday in almost exactly three years, when I was in Mexico with my mother. That was a weird trip, news was already emerging about this strange virus circulating in China and the lockdowns there. By the end of the holiday, I was working much of the days because I knew there wouldn’t be much time once I got back to brace for impact.

I did have a three week stint off work in Kamloops last summer, and looking back I realize this was a departure point for me as well. It was my first sustained downtime since the pandemic had hit, and spending some time with some special friends, my brain and body finally started to crawl out of fight-or-flight mode and I began to feel things again. I tried to identify some harmful patterns I’d been mindlessly looping inside and made an effort to break them up. I tried living as if my life was something worth living. As the numbness subsided, I felt a more profound lifting of a long heavy sadness… one that went back many years. I think I started putting better energy out into the world, and much better stuff came back at me.

Life is still very full, and I work myself into an anxious state if I think about certain things for too long. I’ve got a long way to go before I get to where I want to be. But overall, I’m finding myself feeling unfamiliar sensations like happiness and hope. Feeling better in my body and my mind, a little at a time, forgiving myself for the setbacks when they happen.

I want to do more blogging, and been giving some thought to how I have been approaching this space lately. Given the tumult of Twitter, I’m less engaged over there, and still finding a rhythm on Mastodon.  I’m wondering if I might go back to how I blogged many years ago, with more casual, sometimes more personal posts.

I am looking forward to sharing some of the work the LT&I team is doing. There have been some significant organizational changes, but what has not changed is I am absolutely thrilled with the people on the team. I expect we are going to be challenged to meet the evolving needs of our university community, and I know we will be hit by the unexpected, but we are finding our groove and I am really grateful for what this group is doing. I also find them to be delightful people and I dig working with them. I know how special that is. Looking forward to sharing a little more of what we are doing soon.

One of the fun things coming out of our group right now is Brenna Clarke Gray’s latest series for the TRU Digital Detox, with this year’s theme The Robots Are Coming: AI and the Education Revolution. As ever, I am in awe of Brenna’s effort, insight and writing, I highly recommend checking it out. Not least, because I really don’t want to talk about ChatGPT today. I’ve got a flight to catch.

Preamble soundtrack: Bat Hearse, “The Day Don McLean Died”

One of the ways I’m a bad blogger is failing to post about the good stuff when it happens. Usually because the best moments are the hardest to get right, and I worry about seeming obnoxious in celebration, showing the right amount of gratitude, or trying not to leave anyone under-recognized. In life something shitty usually comes along soon enough, the good vibes recede, and the opportunity is lost.

So what follows is an attempt to recapture a little of one such time.

Readers know of my long connection with freeform radio station WFMU, which goes back to reading the book Radiotext(e) in 1992 and then becoming a fanatic listener shortly after they pioneered online streaming in the late 90s. The station’s ethos and eclecticism shaped how I thought about music and the internet, and I admired station manager Ken Freedman for how he seemed to run such a tight ship tossed about on roiling seas of madness. I long dreamed of having him join an open ed tech gathering, as I thought he would have a lot of relevant insights, and that came true when he keynoted the OpenEd 2009 conference that I co-organized. People say it is dangerous to meet your heroes, but Ken was the absolute coolest.

In addition to his work as station manager, and his regular Wednesday morning music show, Ken has co-hosted what’s been described as a radio stunt show mostly called Seven Second Delay since the early 90s. His co-host is Andy Breckman, a longtime comedy writer (early Letterman, 80’s Saturday Night Live) and entertainment producer, and a non-stop irreverent joke machine on the air.

One of the long-running recurring jokes on the show has been Andy’s feud with his nemesis, Don “American Pie” McLean. Early in his career, Andy had been a comedic folk singer, and once opened for McLean. As Andy relates:

…my dream tour was a disaster and I’ll tell you why. Don McLean — Mr. “Starry Starry Night” — Mr. “And I Love Her So” — turned out to be the most bitter, petty, insecure scumbag I ever met.

The tour started like this: we were on the plane. McLean glanced out the window. he said he saw a shooting star. I said make a wish. He said “I did, but it didn’t work. You’re still here.”

…One morning in Calgary, I met McLean in the lobby of our hotel. He had bought a local paper, and was reading a review of our show. But he wouldn’t let me see it. All he said was “Well, they hated us.” Then he crumpled up the newspaper and threw it away.

After he left, I fished the paper out of the garbage. It’s true, the reviewer did hate McLean. He called McLean pompous and out of touch. But the reviewer LOVED the opening act! It was one of the first rave reviews I’d ever gotten, and McLean didn’t want me to see it.

A few years later, McLean demanded the piece be edited to add his side of the story:

Little did I realize until I got around this guy a little bit that he was a thin skinned egomaniac and a dreadful stage performer. Maybe he could have had a career in Winnapeg where they liked him. Anyway, things went downhill and I disliked Breckman for precisely the type of low blow remarks in this piece. It’s like I have my own Mark David Chapman but without the balls since it took scared little Andy 17 years to get up the nerve for character assassination. There’s something very tattle-tale about all this, but he still seems to be what I thought he was, a dufus.

Over the years, Andy has kept up his end of the feud, at one point offering $200 to anyone who could get Don McLean to say Breckman’s name onstage, and McLean responding with threats to sue if his shows were disrupted. So when Ken wanted to prank Andy on-air for a show, it was natural to have a Don McLean angle.

Ken put out a call on the Seven Second Delay newsletter (which Andy never reads), requesting help on a prank by creating fake websites. I emailed back, saying my skills were very basic (I was playing around with Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles) but if he couldn’t find anyone better I would try. Evidently he couldn’t because he wrote me back with his idea. Ken wanted to drop on Andy that Don McLean had died in some kind of hot air ballooning accident somewhere in the southwest. He asked me to create a variety of online stories of the breaking news that he would show to Andy in-studio as people called in to convince him it was real.

It was maybe the highest pressure and most terrifying writing assignment I’ve ever been entrusted with… A whole episode of my favourite show hung on my ability to create convincing news stories in order to fool someone who has been a prankster and jokester his whole life, someone with a well-honed bullshit detector. I pored over stories of balloon crashes and accidental celebrity deaths, trying to get a feel for the wording and cadences of how different outlets presented them. The technical/visual part ended up being relatively simple, limited by my lack of skills… I could share the stories as JPEGs that would show in a browser, but they couldn’t scroll or be clicked on. I obsessed on the wording, scouring the text for any gaffes… trying my best to provide lively fodder for the show without going over the edge and giving it all away.

I reproduce my side of the prank below: the screenshots of the stories that I gave to Ken, and audio selections of the show that align with when they were shown to Andy. So you can get a targeted sense if you like. That said, I think the episode is pretty great overall, and you can listen to the whole thing (via the playlist or listen here). The prank starts to take shape about 20 minutes into what seems like a fairly normal show. When I listen to the archive, I am taken back to the unbearable suspense of listening along live, wondering whether Andy would take the bait, agonizing that I would blow the whole thing.

The prank is initiated with just a listener calling in to share the news of McLean’s death. Andy is having none of it.

But with the CNN story on the monitor, Andy’s reaction is quite different. “I swear I felt something an hour ago.” He’s shocked, but the zingers and his deep loathing of Don McLean cannot be held back.

Andy wonders if Don McLean would top Sid Caesar in the New York Times as celebrity death of the day, and right on cue…

Andy only followed one account on Twitter: Don McLean. I figured he might want to check that page. He talks it over with producer Andrea Silenzi.

I may have pushed my luck too far with the TMZ story, Ken senses that Andy might be suspicious and does a nice job of covering.

Believing his nemesis is now dead, Andy riffs down memory lane for half an hour, processing his very mixed feelings. This next clip is probably the funniest bit of the show to me, where Andy pulls out his long-running joke that he actually co-wrote “American Pie”.

Finally, as the show ends… the reveal. Ken was nice to shout me out. I can’t express how relieved I was feeling at this moment.

The following week, Ken and Andy looked back on the prank. Remember how I said I’d done my best to take out jokes, knowing that Andy had such a keen sense for them? In fact I couldn’t resist a couple. One of them was that TMZ headline. The other was a line in the CNN article describing McLean as “an avid balloonist”, which for some reason made me giggle when I wrote it. That small slip nearly torched the whole thing:

A few months later, I was in New York City with Grant Potter, and Ken gave us a tour of the station. He could not have been more generous with his time (even though the annual WFMU Record Fair was the next day), and the experience was all I could have hoped. When introducing me to DJs and staff, Ken usually called me “the guy who introduced me to Nardwuar” (another story), or “the guy who helped me with the Don McLean prank”. The DJs usually either ignored it, or drily said something like “oh, you’re that guy”. They may not have been impressed but I was pleased.

Reading Adam Johnson’s “People ‘Feel Unsafe’ Because Visible Poverty Is Everywhere” last night hit me hard, and I haven’t been able to shake it. A few key excerpts:

Homelessness is used interchangeably with crime despite it not being one—beyond a social one inflicted upon homeless people, rather than carried about by them. Countless headlines and news broadcasts daily conflate poverty with crime. It’s so routine one hardly notices:

…There has been a sharp rise in Visible Poverty in urban areas. As disruptions by the pandemic created a whole host of externalities, pandemic aid was cut by bipartisan consensus, and rent prices spiral out of control, there are simply more visible poor people.

…When the average person is accosted by someone suffering from Visible Poverty and mental health issues outside of a Starbucks, their response is, “Why isn’t this man in jail?” not, “Why did society fail to care for this person?” Because this is what they are conditioned to think, by the media, politicians, pop culture, and decades of carceral ideological framing. Cruelty is baked into our puritan culture, reinforced daily by everything from Perseverance Porn to nonstop pandemic-themed Welfare Queen tropes.

…And we wonder why people’s response to Visible Poverty is to make this horrific sight intelligible by blaming the poor and demanding they be “swept” up. Until this visceral, widespread reaction to Visible Poverty—fueled constantly by local media that’s little more than an appendage for the real estate industry—shifts, the political dynamic of mindlessly pumping more and more money into prisons and police cannot change.

Though Johnson’s piece tackles the issue from an American perspective, this dynamic is very much in play here in British Columbia. On a (wonderful) visit to Vancouver last week, it was impossible to miss the increase in unhoused people in the long-tragic Downtown Eastside. Here in Kamloops, we’ve also had more visible poverty, and a dramatic spike in local residents complaining about how “sketchy” things are getting, and all the code words for “safety” ever-louder in the political discourse.

I’m not dismissing the fears. I live downtown, lived a decade in East Van and know how it goes. And I too fear for my safety. Not because the sight of an impoverished person somehow endangers me, but because I am not impervious to whatever put those people’s lives in such a perilous state. I’m also terrified by the attitudes of fellow citizens, which I fear will be sending us down an even more ruinous path in the years ahead.

Kamloops is effectively unaffordable for renters, squeezing even those of us fortunate enough (for now) to have solid middle-class incomes. Numerous people in my circles, including myself, have experienced the intense stress, uncertainty and financial strain of trying to find housing in this market. I cannot imagine what it is like for people with lower and less stable incomes, or who don’t benefit from being a white middle-aged male. Thompson Rivers University has started to put students into temporary modular housing, and it’s nearly impossible to recruit new staff unless they are already settled here.

And of course, the Canadian housing sales market is even more unhinged from reality. With interest rate spikes and an induced recession looming, a lot of people are facing potential ruin. There is a high likelihood of deep cuts and layoffs across all sectors, including education.

So yes, the visibility of poverty and precarity and seeing what it is doing to people everywhere I look undermines my sense of security and safety. Personally, my anger is directed at leaders who allowed the housing bubble to get to this point, because the rise in asset values and associated revenues were masking other problems. Or the blobs of capital that are inflating values and the criminal money laundering that has been indulged. But it seems many BC residents would rather stigmatize, criminalize and harass the most grievously harmed instead.

On the drive to Vancouver last week, news broke of a horrible mass shooting in Langley, one that targeted what the police described as “transient” victims. One of them was Paul Wynn, who features in this 2019 story about the city of Langley banning the homeless from its parks, one of the many such punitive acts employed across the province as housing has become less accessible.

I suppose it makes me “woke” to recall a recent video from the ultra-wealthy podcaster Joe Rogan, who thought it was funny and cool to riff on filthy unhoused people, how ridiculous it was that they had access to minimal sanitation, any possessions or rights at all, and how maybe they should be shot… all while smoking a stogie with a stooge.

(If you need a palate cleanser after that, I might suggest Tim Heidecker’s on-point send-up of Rogan. Don’t be scared off by the runtime.)

Since this post is just an inflated Twitter rant anyway… I listened to this podcast episode from The Bottlemen today, and recommend this short segment that amplifies these themes. Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner is back from a recent tour of the Pacific Northwest, and he chats with co-host Riley Quinn about how the scale of unhoused population has grown and evolved, how the wheels are evidently coming off the machines of capitalism, and how it is all signified in the emergent shantytown infrastructure constructed from the detritus of urban scooter initiatives.

I’m about midway through my first significant non-Christmas vacation in more than two years. Do I know how to have fun or WHAT? But the tenor of this post aside, I’ve been digging the time off with some fantastic and fun friends, sharing life with people that I care about. I’d be enjoying it more if I didn’t feel like we were in the preamble of a dystopian sci fi movie.

More Abject Kristeva