@robcottingham.ca
Leadership communications for great causes and big ideas. 🌹BCFED Communications Director 🗣️Speechwriter and speaking coach 🎤Voice actor repped by Connekt Creative 😂Standup comic ✒️Noise to Signal cartoonist 🖖Star Trek nerd
My inner Grammarly on re-reading that:
- This sentence is very long for most readers. Consider splitting it.
- Place terminal punctuation for sentences ending in parenthetical phrases after the closing parenthesis.
- Your grandmother would be disappointed at you for saying "pissed off."
We are so unprepared for the explosion of fake that's coming our way. What we've seen so far has just been the tentative opening shots in an all-out assault on truth.
In "Don't put words in my mouth; it's unsanitary" news, Grammarly is backing down on offering AI-driven editing suggestions "inspired by" real writers — many of whom were pissed off at having their names taken in vain (sometimes with really bad suggestions.) www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...
"Hey, guys — what if our problem isn't too MANY bots on Facebook, Threads and Insta, but..." edition.cnn.com/2026/03/10/t...
If your blood pressure's too low right now, can I recommend reading @offhandremarks.bsky.social's liveposting on the shit the US is trying to pull in real time?
For SURE.
This seems like kind of a Big Goddamn Deal.
Captain Jellico stans know this pain
(phone rings)
(I mistakenly pick up the homophone)
Hear more of @mysdick.bsky.social’s insight at this IATSE 891’s Apple Box Talks podcast ep podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/i...
Dr. Dick in front of a photo of a 19th-century factory floor
Dr. Dick in front of a collage of text and images
@mysdick.bsky.social is doing the good work of ruining my Charles Babbage fandom at @iatsecanada.bsky.social 891’s #AI Learning and Engagement Symposium. #BCLab
Major gaps in Canada's #digital #sovereignty affect everyone. @spaikin.bsky.social talks to @canadianshieldinstitute.ca @vassb.bsky.social ThinkOn's Craig McLellan & @mozilla.org's Mark Surman: youtu.be/KLxJf1QbBQQ?...
Sure, if I'd been directing it, I'd have asked for a little more. But maybe they did, and discovered there was nothing on his dial between "restrained enjoyment" and "orgasmically overacted," so they went with the first take.
I do NOT want to defend the CEO of McDonald's, of all people... but I finally saw the video, and he just... looked a not-especially-expressive guy eating a burger.
From all the blowback it got, I was honestly expecting him to visibly be swallowing back barf.
Is there an actual #accessibility reason for @bsky.app and other social platforms NOT to let us embed alt text in image file metadata, so we don't have to re-enter it everywhere and every time we use that image? #a11y
After a productive meeting with (and generous contribution from) 3M's lobbyists, the initiative will now be known as the Scotchgard™ of the Americas.
ladies and gentlemen, i am so pleased to introduce the next secretary of homeland security
Apple has brought back the iBook and I’m delighted.
"Join Our Research Team! @SMLabTO is Hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow" socialmedialab.ca/2026/03/04/p...
If nothing else, I admire the work ethic.
“We have leaders who are anxious
We have captains not courageous
Captains tumbling into madness”
— Midnight Oil in 1990, apparently foreseeing 36 years into the future
Not sure which will come first, that or warp drive.
Next is format-agnostic phone numbers, but I know that won't happen in any of our lifetimes.
I hope one day to see AI and quantum computing solve the most intractable, complex problem in digital technology, one that has clearly defeated our most powerful programming minds:
making web forms that don't care whether you put a space in the postal code.
This is a helpful reminder of the need for caution about jumping on stories that seem to perfectly confirm our own narratives. The people who are making bank on others' confirmation biases aren't confined to the right.
Congratulations!!
This is a full-on four-alarm fire. This kind of grift slop *will* crowd out real news very quickly if we let it.
Cartoon by Vancouver, Canada's Greg Perry
I regret to inform you this immediately popped into my brain fully formed:
why were all the birds afraid of rosie
because rosie ate spoonbill
"Viscount Corncrake, may I present Lady Spoonbill."