The Antisocial Socialist

 The news in general is pretty awful so I hope you can enjoy this little story from Toronto. Our transit system, the TTC, has been getting progressively more awful in the almost 30 years I've lived here. Whenever you need to travel by TTC, you have to give yourself an extra 30 minutes to an hour just in case it breaks down. Despite this reduction in service, fares continue to increase well beyond what an ordinary working class person can afford. This in turn forces more people to rely on personal vehicles, fuelling far-right politics.

With this background on mind, what did the TTC do with their paltry budget this year? Improve vehicles so that they don't stop working when they get wet? Fix the signal issues they have multiple times a day? Reduce the fare to match the reduced service?

Nah, this is Toronto. They rebranded the fare inspectors, which shall henceforth be known as...

...drumroll...

Provincial Offences Officers!

I swear I saw like 3 people post about this before I clicked the link and realized it wasn't parody. Anyway. People reacted exactly how you'd expect, and the TTC's response, rather than saying "oopsie!" (or "poopsie!") was to chide its own customer base for being so childish.

Personally I think POO is a lateral move from what most people I know call them, which is "fare pig," and probably that money could have been better spent on almost literally anything else.

 Did you miss these? I've been busy with life and watching Andor.

Okay finally finally Law & Order Toronto is tackling Barry and Honey Sherman, which I have been looking forward to since they announced the show. It also tackled the Ontario Science Centre closure by the Ford government. The former crime is unsolved; the latter is out in the open despite Doug Ford still wandering around a free man somehow.

Anyway, the problem is once again that the actual cases are both more interesting than the plot we get here.

A pharma CEO and his philanthropist wife are murdered in what at first looks like a murder-suicide but isn't. With the company's sale to a larger company pending, there are a lot of potential suspects. She's also posed to look like a painting that she overpaid for at an auction, and that her best friend/interior designer wanted but couldn't afford. The designer, as well as the pharma CEO's brother, both have a decent motive to kill her. On top of that, she was on the board for the Ontario Science Centre, which a developer wanted to close in order to build luxury condos on it.

The killer is the designer's husband, and his motivation was that the developer bribed him to get rid of the philanthropist, who was only one holding out against the sale. Yawn. So really none of the reasons why the Shermans' murder is interesting, and none of the reasons why the closure of the OSC is criminal rather than simply corrupt.

Oh no! This was yet another good episode. If they keep this up I'm going to have to stop hate-watching and watch-watch it.

This one is about a tech CEO getting gunned down in a parking lot, along with a food delivery driver. The cops at the scene conclude that the latter was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but...

( you'll guess it before you click, just like I did. )

As I anxiously hit REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH on CBC's live updates, I am distracting myself with what else? Kind of the perfect episode for our political moment.

There's a hardworking concierge at a luxury building whose son has run afoul of some enforcer types after racking up a massive gambling debt. The son is now minus a few fingers and the dad is desperate to help him pay off his debts. One of the owners is nasty to him for even allowing his son through the front door, but Jack, another owner, comes to his defence. Later, he violently assaults the asshole owner and pleads guilty to aggravated assault. In maximum security prison, he stabs another inmate—an accountant jailed for a relatively minor offence—to death.

I would not have guessed what this one was based on by that introduction and neither will you.

( hint I am OBSESSED with this particular crime )

Shocker of shockers, this one was actually...good? Like not good-good but good for a Law & Order spinoff. It almost reached the level of mid, as the kids say.

It's based on the Harrison family murders, which is a case I know nothing about because it happened in Mississauga. Mississauga, famously, is not Toronto. I guess close enough for TV though. It starts off with the coked-up trophy wife of a rich guy old enough to be her dad. She gets clubbed on the head with an ashtray, then asphyxiated, after a night out with her new business pals and an argument with the rich guy. The opener breaks from the usual format in that we don't get a montage of people who'll be important later saying cryptic things, and we find out who the murderer is right away.

( don't worry there's still spoilers, also discussion of genocide )

This one was clearly ripped off the Ashley Madison hack, with a weird reference to Rohinie Bisesar (the woman who stabbed a stranger to death in the PATH Shoppers Drug Mart). The latter is even name-checked in the show, which I'm kind of surprised is legal.

The plot is needlessly convoluted. A hacker gets the database for Not!Ashley!Madison Dot Com, and appears to be blackmailing either the owner or someone in the database. People in the database include a well-regarded judge and a pastor of a megachurch. She's about to reveal the identity of someone in the database to her married best friend, but will only do it in person. They agree to meet in their usual spot in the PATH, but the hacker, who arrives first, is being followed. She makes her way to a Shoppers, where she's stabbed to death by a masked assailant.

( you know the drill )

 I met up with a former colleague for coffee today (delightful) and she is obsessed with this terrible AI mural that I had to see, and now I am obsessed with this terrible AI mural, and now you have to see it. Here's an article. The photo in the article does not do it justice, nor does the description. I was just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, laugh-wheezing. It's so bad. It's fractal bad. Like you look at the entire thing and your brain tries to spare you, papering over the obvious gaps in reality that this thing has generated, except that it can't, and you succumb to its non-Euclidian geometry and travesties of anatomy and perspective. You look closer and there are details that compound the Uncanny Valley effect, squirming into your brainmeats until you succumb to its madness.

Like the question said former colleague had for me was had she told me nothing about it, or even pretended to like it, would I have noticed. The answer is yes, because there's an immediate unsettling aspect to it. It hadn't occurred to me that AI murals were a thing you could do, but I would have immediately clocked that something was wrong. But then you get closer. There are Dia de los Muertos skeletons, each rendered in a different style, some realist, others highly stylized, one a Coraline knockoff. The perspective of the street scene is wonky. The flowers are all rendered in different styles, with different light sources. Usually skulls have teeth, which is a problem because a lot of these just have gums. Bone gums. Hands are a challenge for most artists, including me, but skeletal hands are even harder, and these are not done successfully. The clothing is nonsensical, in one place appearing to melt away, exposing a gaping wound. There's a guitar, unfortunately, because AI does a very bad job with stringed instruments. 

My favourite is a donkey. The donkey occupies the same space as the one-point perspective street, but exists in a different dimension, because it has a huge head and tiny little forelegs, and I couldn't stop straight-up giggling over how bonkers this donkey looked. It's glorious. Holy shit.

The good news is that this is possibly a sufficient outrage to wake Diego Rivera's corpse from its eternal slumber so maybe we'll get some decent art out of that. And also terrible publicity for the restaurant that will serve as a warning to others. Someone has already painted "hire human artists" on it so the community's opinion has been made clear.

I don't even know what this is.

( episode 9 )

This one has to do with sexual assault so, trigger warning.

( episode 7 )

It's the Crack Mayor one everyone!

( RoFo and Roll! )