Kara’s Blog

Hey hey, it’s Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. I already kind of cheated and started blogging about this last week, but needs must and all. This week, not-so-coincidentally timed to follow Valentine’s Day, is all about reminding the world that not everyone experiences romantic attraction in the same way, or to the same degree. And today I want to do this by picking apart the seams we often imagine between romance and sex.

I…

I still experience a visceral shiver—yes, a shiver in my viscera—when Spock presses his hand up against the transparent barrier separating him from Kirk as he intones, “I have been and always shall be … your friend.”

(Oops, spoiler alert there for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Spock dies at the end.)

There’s a reason that Wrath of Khan is often cited as one of the best, if not the best, of…

I just returned from watching Hidden Figures, and I have some thoughts! Going to try to keep this short (I’m tired), but this is more than 140 characters, and I don’t like threads. That’s what blog posts are for. Also, I already reviewed the book, so read that for more information on the basic premise and why it’s so exciting. I’m going to try to restrict myself to gushing about the movie itself.…

Now that I’ve discussed my favourite books from last year, here’s what is in store for this year, hopefully.

I’m not a super organized reader. I know some people make lists of what they are going to read, keep calendars of upcoming releases they want to buy, etc. I am a messy, spontaneous reader. I pre-order books and then forget about them until they show up at my door. I keep saying, “I’ll get…

Oh hey, it’s a new year.

I usually do a round-up of my best 10 (and worst 10) books of the year and post it as a list. I’m fairly proud of the lists area of my site, but I also have ambitions to do a little overhauling this year, so the lists might be evaporating—hopefully temporarily. I’m going to keep it simple and simply blog about my year of reading.

Also, I’m not going…

I’ve been reading Hidden Figures, in anticipation of the movie coming out next week. It’s a fantastic book, and I already have so much I want to say in the review. This is one topic that would be too much of a digression, so I’ve spun it out into an adequate starting place for my blog posts of 2017.

Throughout the book, Margot Lee Shetterly discusses the attitudes of people towards Black, female computers…

I can’t take it any more. I have to say something, say something more than just tweeting how disappointed I am and retweeting other people. This Kinder Morgan pipeline approval is the final straw.

So what follows is a letter I am sending to my Member of Parliament, the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Status of Women.

Dear Minister Hajdu,

I am writing to express my unequivocal disappointment in the Government of Canada’s decisions to…

Today I showed someone how to long-tail cast on, and I can’t help but feel like I did a good thing for the world.

I was working in the evening at the gallery, and had just taken the vacuum cleaner out. Winter is upon us, which means people track salt de-icer from the walkway onto the carpet. Vacuum every day!

As I came back to the front with the vacuum, I saw a mother…

Last week The Globe and Mail ran an opinion piece calling for coding to become a mandatory subject in Canadian schools. I’m sympathetic to the idea, for I agree that computer literacy and an awareness of how the algorithms and programs that increasingly influence our lives is crucial to being an informed citizen. That being said, I disagree with almost all the points made in that article. More generally, as I continue to think…

I knit entrelac now. Entrelac is cool.

You can read the linked Wikipedia article for all the details, but entrelac is basically a knitting technique that involves working a series of rectangles (and triangles) to create a patchwork effect. Instead of knitting across all the stitches on a row, you knit back and forth across a set number of stitches (e.g., groups of 8) over and over. In the process of doing this, you create…