Kerry Mitchell 🍁

I work in marketing, sometimes writing, and sometimes graphic design. An enthusiast for comic books, advertising art, skiing/old skis, drawing and writing instruments, cookbooks, and woodworking tools. CFL/NFL football fan.

Location: Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Description: A golden thread in the world's tapestry

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Last Notes

2026-03-28 14:54:11 UTC

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I’d consider joining for some insights into why Finns are the happiest people in the world, or on the off chance someone else has watched Crime On Your Mind and has some thoughts.
There are people who like to make the trite observation that “people are the same everywhere” but when I watch Finnish TV, I think, “They must be really different over there.”

2026-03-10 23:29:36 UTC

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It's hard to put the brakes on advances, like the Ghost Shirt Society finds out at the end of Vonnegut's Player Piano.
I heard an interview with a professor yesterday who wrote a book on the benefits of keeping cash alive and not relying completely on digital payment systems. He suggested using cash at least once a week. Maybe people will be able to do that with AI - limit their use and rely on their own brains at least some of the time. https://blogs.bu.edu/zagorsky/

2026-01-23 13:46:49 UTC

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I think that deskilling (or replacing) marketing/design is something that is considered to be part of the rationale for the AI companies valuation. Altman said he expected AI to completely displace marketers within 5 years. I don’t like this trend for obvious reasons, but AI is getting a little better at automating this work all the time.

2026-01-23 13:34:51 UTC

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I don’t know… The reasons cited in the article seem pretty bang on. Adobe adopted generative AI pretty early, but it isn’t helping them much because the market is moving to low cost, easy to use tools, and especially AI tools with no learning curve. Adobe software, partly because of its history in professional print work, is complex and skilled users are needed to get the most out of it.

2026-01-19 01:43:07 UTC

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Even very prolific writers of the 19th century would have written with dip pens until reliable fountain pens became more common. Steel nibs were introduced in the early 1800s. Mass-produced fountain pens from Waterman weren't available until 1884.
Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have written the later Sherlock Holmes stories with a Parker Duofold (introduced 1921). #ArthurConanDoyle #FountainPens 3/14
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/919/218/353/665/432/original/a1cb8d988aa946f4.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/919/219/065/742/137/original/a0198bdb1bd57886.jpg

2026-01-19 01:40:02 UTC

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18th Century authors, like Jane Austen for instance, wrote with quill pens. These were typically made of goose feathers. This page explains Austen’s tools and includes an image of one of her letters written with cross-writing to save paper and postage: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/jane-austens-writing-technical-perspective.
If you’re so inclined, you can make your own quill pen from these instructions: https://regia.org/research/church/quill2.htm #JaneAusten #Writing #QuillPens 2/14
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/919/209/979/917/659/original/1221b1796a8f537a.jpg

2026-01-19 01:38:38 UTC

It’s been a miserable couple of days here with howling winds and dropping temperatures, so I’ve been more of an indoor person than usual. When this happens I usually read, and sometimes I read about writers, or in this case, what they wrote with. Here's what I learned... #writing #pens #typewriters 1/14
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/919/198/510/180/466/original/027221ba1c20a6d3.jpg

2025-12-23 20:57:20 UTC

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Carney is not pursuing a conservative policy on energy in the way that Moe, Smith or Ford are. He’s really the first Liberal leader to try putting “abundance liberalism” into practice to compensate for U.S. trade protectionism and to fend off the “Canada is broken” populists. Remains to be seen if it works.

2025-12-06 22:11:07 UTC

A 24-year-old Stanford dropout has wooed top Meta AI researchers to her nascent startup, which is building an AI mathematician. https://www.businessinsider.com/axiom-math-stanford-dropout-meta-ai-researchers-startup-2025-12 #artificialintelligence #math

2025-11-19 21:52:22 UTC

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I’m just one guy, but I dropped my CC subscription this year and the AI stuff and Semrush wouldn’t be enough reason for me to keep it. It makes sense that Semrush goes up after it’s announced they’ll be bought out. Adobe though… I think it’s a bad sign if their strategy shifts to growth by acquisition. If their core product won’t grow, it means investors won’t pay for big multiples. Their P/E will drop, and if they even maintain steady profits, they’ll be paying investors to hold.

2025-05-03 18:34:43 UTC

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People absolutely suffer for authenticity. Some more than others. Using Mastodon at all is suffering - a bit.
What if I created a profile on Instagram where I was tall, handsome and successful? Maybe my digitally created avatar would get some likes, and I’d get a little rush with every one. I’m popular! But, I mean, that ain’t me.

2025-05-03 18:11:33 UTC

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Regarding ideas/creativity… AI can reproduce and remix old ideas - fast and cheap. I’m sure artists will make use of its capabilities in interesting ways, just like they did with other types of reproduction. But the critiques of commodification, that even the biggest admirers of popular art have, should be even more pointed when it comes to the product of AI: https://smarthistory.org/richard-hamilton-just-what-is-it/

2025-05-03 17:39:38 UTC

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Even tone adjustment is a complex issue. I write marketing material, and consistent tone, adjusted to appeal to a persona (a customer profile), was a thing long before we could feed copy into an AI.
There’s a difference between the always on, always selling, writing that copywriters do, and what you can write without commercial constraints. You can, if you wish, be authentic.

2025-05-03 15:25:24 UTC

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I still wouldn’t call that a witch hunt. Many Mastodon users, I’ve noticed, are resistant to the commercialization of the web, and AI is the next step in this commercialization. Its promised value is in efficiently replacing creative work, not just routine tasks, and delivering that value to corporations. You’re right—you can’t tell by a dash, but it’s understandable that people want to preserve an online space for human creativity and interaction.

2025-05-03 04:22:51 UTC

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What witch hunt? There’s heavy investment by corporations and government and modest resistance from artists, mainly in the form of lawsuits around use of their work for training. And productivity ain’t everything when it comes to art. Look at AI generation platforms and you will see an amazing proliferation of a whole new kind of kitsch.

2025-03-25 04:08:04 UTC

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I don't know if it's a source of alienation. The rest of the country has enough of the same sentiment that it probably isn't a factor. Is Thunder Bay, or Winnipeg or Quebec City less racist than Calgary? I'm not sure they are. Where was Poilievre recently being cheered for promising to bring back statues of Macdonald? Sudbury.

2025-03-25 03:06:29 UTC

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Western alienation is largely about energy policy so Wexiters might like Ford if he offered the same heavy subsidies on energy nationally as he does in Ontario.

2025-03-09 14:03:48 UTC

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I could possibly be terrible at searching Mastodon but I see mainly discrete posts rather than discussions on the Eurovision hashtag.

2025-03-09 14:00:06 UTC

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Marketers would surely use Mastodon if they saw relevant social media activity going on. If I go looking for companies/organizations that serve the Linux/open source space, I’ll find them on here because there’s a base of users interested in that stuff: KDE, Framework, Krita, etc.

2025-03-09 13:54:38 UTC

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This discussion about why Eurovision doesn’t post on Mastodon is already longer than any discussion about Eurovision or Eurovision performers or pop musicians generally on Mastodon. Even a topic of significant controversy like the Estonian entry only had a few posts on Mastodon and no significant discussion. There was a 400+ comment discussion on r/Eurovision about it.

2025-02-23 15:29:45 UTC

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It’s getting so we’ll have to boycott a lot of places for a lot of reasons. “Buy Nothing Day” could be stretched to a decade.

2024-12-30 16:39:15 UTC

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There is an element of generational bias in our view of media consumed by the youths. Comics used to be trash, but now reading graphic novels is practically an elitist intellectual activity. Many of us consume “Prestige TV” - a concept alien to our parents. VTuber and Twitch content is ignored/dismissed as pop junk today, but you never know how these things will evolve. Maybe we’re 20 years away from college courses in which this content is analyzed through the usual academic lenses.

2024-12-26 14:42:22 UTC

Starting to see a lot of concern about bird flu from people in virology/public health. “The United States is failing to act decisively against the growing H5N1 threat.” https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/12/getting-ahead-of-h5n1-declare-a-public-health-emergency.html #BirdFlu #H5N1

2024-10-14 13:05:01 UTC

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Here I thought Iceland-Denmark relations were reasonably friendly with Iceland having been independent for some time.

2024-09-04 23:33:01 UTC

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They did not maintain that 1-copy policy when they made the NEL: “The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.” https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-loses-hachette-books-case-appeal/

2024-09-04 23:12:45 UTC

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Copying full books without permission and making them available for free is similar to scraping the internet and using images without permission. In either case, the artist should be compensated and agree to the terms of use. The Internet Archive used the emergency as a pretence to try and undermine the most basic copyright protections on books.