One aspect of privilege is being in row 2, column 1 ¹ — that is, being able to avoid the consequences of your actions… often by deflecting them onto people you don’t especially care about. ²

There are entire regulatory regimes and tax systems dedicated to slotting people and corporations into one or the other of those boxes. It’s what the billionaires building those massive escape-the-collapse compounds are planning for. And it’s what people whining about “woke” are helping to prop up.

If you’re rich and/or connected enough, you probably figure you can stay safely in row 2, column 1, using your resources to avoid the worst of the fallout as, say, our climate deteriorates and our civil society starts to crumble. So maybe you aren’t as concerned as you might otherwise be about reducing carbon emissions, protecting civil rights and investing in public services and community infrastructure.

And if you’re especially cold-blooded, you may have decided those finding-out-anyway people will be a lot readier to settle for a shitty deal after a few years of living in growing desperation.

Just remember: history has many examples of the row 2, column 1 people moving up a row very abruptly at the hands of the row 2, column 2 people.

1. Symbolically, FA ∩ !FO — I think I have that right. It’s been a while.
2. See row 2, column 2: !FA ∩ FO.

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Those U.S. GOP state legislators who’ve been complaining about Canadian wildfire smoke affecting air quality south of the border have a point. I can’t believe nobody here has turned off the wildfire switch, or at least turned our giant fan so it blows somewhere else. (Usually that’s Randy’s job, but he’s been off on vacation at the cabin for the last month and a half.)

Meanwhile, those ambulance-chasing ghouls esteemed lawmakers may want to tune into a Canadian weather forecast for some perspective. Here, I’ll paste the latest alerts from Environment Canada:

“A mass of unstable political air and polarizing rhetoric is drifting up from the U.S., bringing with it attacks on women, immigrants, racialized and Indigenous people and queer and transgender communities. A tariff front will sweep in, and trade winds are likely to shift from north-south to east-west.

“The sunny outlook we’d been forecasting has been downgraded as authoritarian politics make their way north of the border, with Alberta the most affected but other provinces in the path as well. A disinformation alert is in effect throughout the country, with heavy flooding of bullshit likely in most communities. No relief is expected until at least November 2026.”

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WOW, that

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I’ve known for quite a while that the main reason my book backlog is growing (other than “I keep buying books”) is the same device I draw my cartoons on.

The iPad’s always ready to offer me a quick distracting endorphin hit: check my feeds! watch a BSG video! play one more of the billion Wordle clones out there!

It’s especially bad when I’m reading an e-book on it, what with notifications popping up — few of them worthy of my attention, but all of them stealing it.

Still, I have a few in my queue that I’m really excited about. I just finished Mick Napier’s Improvise. Scene from the inside out, and started Tom Blank’s The Principles of Comedy Improv. Next up in fiction is Lake of Souls, a collection of Ann Leckie’s short stories, and then Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (which I think will be my first time reading a Booker Prize-winner — don’t judge me).

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A very happy 2025 to all of us.

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Rule 34 suggests that somewhere out there, couples are getting it on while identifying which of these squares contains a bicycle. (“That one… that one… and that one!” “I think that last one’s a moped.” “Welp, that killed the mood. What’s hot about a moped?“)

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Things you may be marking yourself safe from

• The dog farting in the corner
• The zeitgeist
• Any interest in watching that Matt Rife special
• The imminent collapse of democra—… oops, spoke too soon
• Seeing that once-in-a-lifetime celestial event, because you live in Vancouver and it clouded over of course
• Excessive climate stability
• Any obligation to be on Twitter any more
• As of July, crows divebombing you during nesting season
• Just (waves at everything)
• Your nemesis… although defeating them took far more than you had ever bargained for, costing all you truly valued and taking you past every moral and ethical line that defined you, turning you into this dark, shattered hull of a person; and only now do you see it was just a silly misunderstanding you could have cleared up by picking up the phone. Oh, well, live and learn.

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At any given time, every social platform seems to have some kind of big online drama going on. (Maybe not Pinterest. Or maybe I’ve just been really lucky and managed to miss it every time.)

And I won’t speak for you, but I find online drama has a powerful gravitational force: The temptation to weigh in is almost irresistible. Sometimes that’s with good reason, when there’s something important at stake and I feel like I’ll be doing some good by contributing.

But often, it’s just my reptilian hindbrain seeing a conflict and wanting to engage. (Why, oh why, is it fight and not flight that kicks in on these things?) That impulse is even stronger when people I know and/or respect are part of the fracas.

(Side note: Apparently the whole “reptilian hindbrain” is more useful metaphor than rigorous science. Nerts.)

The thing is, that pull is almost as strong when I know nothing about the subject of the disagreement. That’s when the allure of the rabbit hole is at its strongest. And if I’m not careful I start researching the damn thing to try to form an opinion, or (ahem) buttress the first knee-jerk reaction I had, or failing that at least identify a sympathetic protagonist, and…

…for what?

Feeding a toxic algorithm that privileges assholery? Giving oxygen to some troll who’s just doing this for the lullz? Making the world a marginally less pleasant place?

Over the past several years, I’ve worked on pulling myself back from the Online Drama Event Horizon. Not using Twitter has helped a lot… although I still have to check it from time to time for work. And when I do, there’s invariably some hashtag-driven fracas going on, and it takes a conscious effort to remind myself I don’t post here any more.

That discipline is starting to pay off. More and more, I not only don’t join the fray, I resist the urge to gawk at it. Dragging myself out of that morass has been hasn’t been easy. But damn, it’s worthwhile. I’m not perseverating over the digital equivalent of arguments between drunk strangers in bars; the shitty behaviour of others no longer occupies nearly the square footage between my ears that it once did. (This gives my own shitty behaviour a chance to stretch its legs; honestly, it was getting a little cramped in there.)

There are times when bystander intervention is important, even morally necessary. And other times there are perfectly legitimate disagreements where I may or may not have the knowledge to form a useful opinion.

But the overwhelming majority of the online conflicts I see aren’t that. Between the outrage bait, the yahoos spoiling for a fight — any fight — and the divisions being ginned up by bad actors, nobody wins except the assholes.

And I’m done handing them victories.

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I’m always wary of carbon-reduction strategies that stress individual over collective action. Give me strong, progressive government policy, a well-organized civil society pressing for change, and corporate leadership that sees the upside of a liveable planet any day.

The whole idea of an individual’s carbon footprint, for example, was popularized by petroleum giant BP through a campaign by their ad firm, Ogilvy.

And once burned (itself a carbon-intensive activity), twice shy: I’m still smarting from years of dutifully washing my plastics and placing them lovingly into blue bins, only to discover that not much of that waste is actually recycled.

But even if promoting the idea of a personal carbon footprint was a cynical attempt to divert attention from Big Oil’s massive contributions to climate change, the carbon impact of my personal choices still weighs on me.

Which is why I’m happy about some of the decisions we’ve made as a household over the past few years, including the new heat pump that’s keeping me cozy as I write this, and the electric bike that’ll supplant a lot of car rides. Our home is far from being a passive house, but y’know — baby steps.

Yes, I’m tossing pebbles onto one side of the scale while boulders are dropping on the other. It’s a little discouraging to know the impact of my choices can be erased a gazillion times over by a single decision in some boardroom somewhere.

But small as they are, I know what side of the scale I want my pebbles to be on.*

* And let’s support the kind of policies, incentives, social movements and initiatives that can coordinate those pebbles, and turn them into a… um… landslide of… (scratches head) You know what, I’m going to go back and work on this metaphor for a bit.

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I can’t help but feel sympathy for A.I. image generators. Failing to draw a half-decent hand is the most human thing about them.

Generative AI may be coming to take our jobs. Its adoption and technological advancement are outstripping our capacity to understand let alone harness these new technologies for social good. But damned if it doesn’t have some of the same struggles the rest of us do.

Like trying to satisfy employers who are infuriated that vague instructions don’t get the precise work product they had in mind. Or giving in to the urge to embellish and fill in the blanks when we don’t have the complete answer to a question.

That said, the latest generation of AI tech is much readier with a cheery “Beats me!” when it doesn’t have the answer to a question. (Google actually now builds in a search button to let you second-guess responses from Genesis, the rebranded version of Bard.) And my little too-many-fingers joke in this cartoon probably has a shelf life of a few months.

For now, generative AI is often a little better at turning out melty-faced nightmare fuel than it is human hands. But not for long. And as it improves, it will shed some of the quirks that make it both frustrating and just a tad endearing.

I find the hallucinations and distortions generative AI creates today oddly reassuring; they say that whatever unknown future this stuff is taking us to, we aren’t there yet. Maybe let’s hold onto that seven-fingered hand for a little longer, and get our bearings while we still can.

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