september 19 etc
👋🏽👋🏽👋🏽 My analytics suggest that I have earned or otherwise ensnared a bunch of new readers of late. To those folks: hey, hi, hello, and welcome to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Here's the quick and dirty 411:
- I'm a writer
- I live in Toronto
- I am five years sober
- I am a big basketball fan
- I worked in/around music for ~20 years
- I'm low-key obsessed with Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE
- I made each bullet longer than its predecessor on purpose
- I can't not do things like this bc it is an actual compulsion
This info and other salient d(av)etails are on the home page.
I have written a blog post every weekday since August 11 for reasons including that recent... changes have helped my brain work more than ~25% of the time for the first time in ~35 years and I've grown fond of taking it out on the open road and seeing what it can do.
👉🏽👉🏽 In December, 2024, I started to overhaul my entire approach to being online.
👉🏽👉🏽 In May, 2025 I started blogging here at combatdavey.net, including about said overhaul.
👉🏽👉🏽 Blog posts here mimic the style of my old email newsletter, DMail (which I took to a farm upstate in 2022), which is to say that every post will have a bit of an intro and then a bevy of links to things I think you may want to see, read, buy, try, or otherwise know about.
👆🏽👆🏽 None of those links are affiliate links. I am not making money off my posts and don't have a plan to do so. If that ever changes, I will explicitly tell you.
👉🏽👉🏽 Though I am a Canadian citizen who lives in Toronto, I am very concerned with the installation of what I referred to as authoritarianism.exe yesterday in the United States.
👆🏽👆🏽 That said, this is not a political blog or a soapbox of any kind.
TL;DR someone I once loved very much was fond the line "kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight" from Bruce Cockburn's "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" and made art for that reason.
I don't know if it's art, but, like... this blog is how I kick.
On y va!
🎵🎵 Fun fact: the Barenaked Ladies' first Top 40 hit in Canada was their 1991 cover of "Lovers in a Dangerous Time," which you can and should listen to from time to time because it's great. Also: before they broke in the United States ("yitttt's bin..."), before they wrote and recorded the theme for one of the worst television shows of all time, and before Steven Page got arrested for cocaine possession, BNL were just kids from Scarborough, Ontario (where I'm from!) who went to Scarborough Music Camp (where I went!) whose success in the early 1990s helped me see that I could be a writer and do art things even though I didn't grow up on the Upper West Side (Spotify)
🎵🎵 Spotify spat out this 22-year-old Sam Roberts tune after I played the BNL cover of Cockburn and I am happy to report that it still hits. (Spotify)
🎵🎵 A colleague shared this bonkers track with me the other day and it's my current earworm. Maybe it'll be yours, too. (Spotify)
🫡🫡 Jon Stewart and the Daily Show folks are absolutely, positively committed to complying with the current US administration's new and updated rules re: free speech. ALL HAIL KRULL AND HIS GLORIOUS NEW REGIME!! (YouTube/The Daily Show)
🚨🚨 PSA that archive.ph exists and may be the key to protecting reality. (archive.ph)
🚨🚨 Related: Pastebin also exists. (Pastebin)
💻😎 Want to make a website without using some normie bs like Squarespace? Why not give this whimsical thing a whirl. (straw.page)
✍️✍️ Medium has a new writing app called TK and though I don't know what it is (yet) and am convinced that Medium won't ever be what we thought it could be, I'm on the waitlist. (Medium)
⚾⚾ If you were planning to attend the Yankees vs. Blue Jays games in London, England next year, you might want to plan to do something else. Maybe BNL are touring? (AP)
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself. I'm out until Monday.
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