jenny (phire)

@phirephoenix.com

2047 Followers 706 Following

I write code for a living and words for my sins. occasional blog posts at https://phirephoenix.com, weekly newsletter for organizing/activism in Toronto at @showuptoronto.ca.

selfie view of a brown and white cat sitting with her head poking above the top of a desk, with a keyboard in the foreground and a person with tattoos and a blue tshirt providing her perch in the background
a screenshot of a mirvish promo email with a line highlighted that reads “& Juliet is the perfect show to see in July — because the month is named after Juliet herself”
overhead shot of brown and black cat with white paws draped across a rectangular beige gel mat
screenshot of in the weights results for phirephoenix, assessing it as a variety twitch streamer known for cozy content
Polymarket tweet: JUST IN: Meta's CTO says morale is near "the worst it's ever been" — leadership will offer increased snack budgets to lift spirits.
description of luddite activist george mellor from brian merchant’s blood in the machine: Born in 1789, the year the French Revolution caught fire, George had a staunch moral code, a sharp tongue, and charisma to spare. He stood "six feet by the stick, and with shoulders well back, and strong, firm, warm hands that gripped you to make you tingle," as one local historian described him. "His eyes were brown and full of fire, and dark auburn hair curled close upon a rounded head. He had a temper, if you like, but he never bore malice. George's strong, square jaw accentuated his "resolute, determined appearance," as another writer put it. He was righteous, impatient, and blunt, a man of "iron will and reckless daring."
rough illustration of a cat stuck on a ledge underneath a window, a woman dangling out the window reaching down to pick her up, and a man hanging onto the waist of the woman so she doesn’t also fall to her death
selfie of a chinese woman with long hair and glasses with a stop sign clearly visible over her right shoulder and a campari umbrella over her left, and there’s a hastily scrawled “time” underneath the umbrella so that the whole picture reads “stop, campari time”
panel 3 from the floccinaucinihilipilification comic of a mermaid saying with narrowed eyes and disgruntled mien “I will fucking increase the fucking thing”
“I should go back to tumblr” superimposed over the I should buy a boat cat
a cat in a box in a ray of sunlight
a beautiful yet stern long haired persian mix cat lying on a bed with her front paws crossed, sitting beside two stacks of books taller than she is, featuring a mix of culture, racism, leftist theory, and inexplicably a copy of the exorcist
top down view of big fluffy cat lying draped across a stretch of bubble wrap on the floor, clearly passed out
red international workers day poster, with a hammer and gear in the centre and the words "organize sabotage strike" around the gear, "1st of may" written above, and illustrations of various tools of work scattered around, including farming tools but also books, needles, stethoscopes, etc.
Screenshot of Diana Chan McNally’s profile, with a bio indicating she’s running for Parkdale High Park city council
a grey brown persian mix kitty with white paws and big green eyes is perched on the back of a chair, with a woman in glasses and a red tshirt snuggled up to her
Screenshot of Atlantic article Theft Is Now Progressive Chic In some left-wing corners of the commentariat, moral rectitude is out. Flagrant disregard of the social contract is in. By Thomas Chatterton Williams
From Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch (2004), emphasis and notes mine: That this propaganda successfully divided women from men is suggested by the fact that, despite individual attempts by sons, husbands, or fathers to save their female relatives from the stake, with ONE EXCEPTION, we have no record of any male organizations opposing the persecution. The exception is the case of the fishermen of the Basque region where the French Inquisitor Pierre Lancre was conducting mass trials that led to the burning of perhaps as many as six hundred women. Mark Kurlansky reports that the fishermen had been been absent, engaged in the annual cod season. But, [when the men] of the St.-Jean-de-Luz cod fleet, one of the largest [from Basque country] heard rumors of their wives, mothers, and daughters [being] stripped, stabbed, and many already executed, the 1609 cod campaign was ended two months early. The fishermen returned, clubs in hands, and liberated a convoy of witches being taken to the burning place. This one popular resistance was all it took to stop the trials... (Kurlansky 2001: 102) (handwritten note: #notallmen) The intervention of the Basque fishermen against the persecution of their female relatives was a unique event. NO OTHER GROUP OR ORGANIZATION rose up in defense of the witches. We know, instead, that some men made a business of denouncing women...
screenshot of bsky’s notification tab with a “forbidden” error
“vote tanille for ndp” leader orange header over an photo of the legs of ndp leadership candidate tanille johnson showing a fresh tattoo above the back of her left ankle, which is of a layered cake on a stand
a photo of a TTC sign on the upstairs wall facing people going downstairs on a subway station that says “look out, be safe! watch your step when getting on and off the escalator”, with a sleeping pigeon on top of the sign.
brown potcake dog lying on couch with head on paws looking up soulfully
big fluffy cat lying on its side across legs under a duvet, with its face nestled in the dip between legs
a big fluffy cat lying across a legs underneath a duvet posed like the dos equis man
another lastfm bar chart that just has entries from 2006-2010, averaging around 5-10k each with 2009 peaking at 25k scrobbles.
a bar chart timeline of last.fm scrobbles from 2011 to 2026, with values varying from ~5k a year to over 10k a year, a very small value in 2018 (probably less than 1k), nothing at all for 2019-2024, a teeny bar in 2025, and a substantially bigger chunk in 2026
a bright yellow pillar with extremely difficult to read silver text that almost certainly doesn’t pass wcag, full of trite phrases that are meant to evoke futuristic things you should associate with wealthsimple I guess I don’t fucking know. some examples include “artificial intelligence” juxtaposed with “actual intelligence”, geddit. other examples include artificial husbands, bunkers, rice and beans, hyperinflation, hyper affordability, and lots of other largely incomprehensible nonsequiturs.
photo of an aquarium sign about an endangered fish in Ontario called a spotted gar
The thing that makes art interesting is that it was created by people who could have chosen to spend their time doing literally anything else. Do you know how long it takes to write a novel? Isn't it amazing how many people have done it anyway? Every human-authored book in the world, even the ones I think are absolute trash and not worth the paper they're printed on, is the culmination of hundreds or maybe thousands of hours of work by someone who had something they really, really wanted to say. Those are hundreds or maybe thousands of hours they could have chosen to spend hiking or cuddling their pets or socializing with their loved ones or playing Hades, but this thing they had to say was too important to ignore. I just think that's neat.
post from visenyaism: Honestly fuck AI for making me have to go on and on defending the dignity of toil like I’m some kind of protestant
Update - we continue to investigate failures impacting Github Actions hosted-runner jobs. We have identified the root cause and are working with our upstream provider to mitigate.
Tools for reducing conflicts: I am currently suffering damage due to Canada geese. What can I do? What management tools are available? What can municipal governments do to reduce conflicts with Canada geese? Who regulates the use of firearms?
a photo of an answer from the exquisite british tv show only connect where the answer is chatGPT backwards (transformer pre trained generative chat)
If you really hate something I've written, feel free to tell someone else. Life is short and I will die one day.
post from ElleGray@mstdn.social: being afraid to say "guillotines" online now & referring to them instead as "the tall French goodbye"
worst person in tech bracket, FAR-RIGHT CANADIAN POLITICS MEDDLER Tobias Lütke VS SHADOWY FASCIST FINANCIER Peter Thiel
photo of the program for Rogers v. Rogers, a play adapted for stage by Michael Healey based on a book by Alexandra Posadzki, directed by Chris Abraham
callie lying on top of a tree skirt staring up at the camera through the branches of lit christmas tree
a word cloud of most used words in which “toronto” is far and away the most used word, followed by city, fuck, fucking, events, organizing, labour, incredible.
Poster for National Housing Day tenant rally hosted by the York South-Weston Tenant Union. Illustration on the left is half of Ford's grinning/grimacing face rendered in an impressionistic black and white so it looks like an illustration. Poster slogan says "Stop Doug Ford's War on Tenants - Join the tenant Rally". Protest details: Saturday Nov 22. 11am, meet outside FRPO at 67 Yonge St. 11:30 am: March to Queen's Park. 12:30, Rally at Queen's Park. QR code links to https://www.tenantunion.ca/housingday2025
yours truly dressed up as a Newsie showing off a copy of Toronto’s West End Phoenix
headline from 2023: Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths “Unfortunately” Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment
screenshot of john mulaney standup bit about “horse in hospital”, the line is “the creepiest days are when you don’t hear from the horse AT ALL”
a calligraphy rendition of the lyrics to “such great heights” clumsily penned, against a collage of pink hued origami paper in an old sketchbook
two tech workers wearing a “U is for Union” hat
back of Honda CRV with Ontario license plate reading OHNOOO
So many things that should be delightful end up exhausting, simply because they didn't know when to stop. For example Thomas Chatterton Williams would have delighted everyone, however unwittingly, if he had stopped writing before he ever started. We should take a moment to appreciate all the terrible but delightfully unknown writers who spared us their vapid opinions by instead becoming used car dealers or dying young. No such luck vis-à-vis I. Chatty, who is required to exist in public discourse because someone had to crack open the "liberal defender of fascism" niche so that the New York Times could live in it like a malignant hermit crab. The fact that Tom "Big Chats" Willie is the best they could find to do it says all you need to know about the value of the project.
Two lines of green monospace text on black background, both reading "Federation of Metro Tenants Associations", one with the apostrophe in "Tenants" before the S and one after
illustrations of an incredibly adorable black and white cat in various cute dynamic poses. its head is in the shape of a shark head and it has a furry dorsal fin on its back and its tail has split fins
overhead shot of bright yellow stickers with thick slab block text that read “show up toronto.ca” or just “show up”
"The only reason I even moved to Omnivore is because Mozilla has been systematically neglecting and underfunding Pocket for years and the app is increasingly dominated by things I did not save, the literal one job it had"
asian woman lying down on a floral bedspread smirking sideways at the camera, a gigantic fluffy cat sitting on top of her taking up her entire torso and waist, a totoro stuffie visible behind both
a blocky red and white COMRADE pin from Verso’s Kickstarter campaign pinned on a magenta bag underneath a blue and black DOOMSCROLLER pin from Metric’s tour of the same name positioned so that the two together read as the phrase “doomscroller comrade”
screenshot of investment account where all balances are N/A
gadsden flag "don't tread on me" meme except with a beaver instead of a snake
screen shot of Signal app icon on iOS with a dropdown menu with five options, one of which says “require passcode”
a zaftig brown persian mix kitty lying against a pile of blankets being pet on her head with her eyes closed
a sleeping cat with her head pillowed on her crossed paws, on a bookshelf with records in the shelf beneath her