honorificabilitudinitatibus

Saturday, 6 June 2026

POV: You Meet the Coolest Girl in Toronto 😍#TorontoGirl #THECANE #江戸門戸, is performing exceptionally well

The experiment was simple.

A short video titled "POV: You Meet the Coolest Girl in Toronto" entered the wilds of YouTube Shorts. At first glance, it appeared no different from countless others competing for attention. Yet almost immediately, something unusual happened.

The audience stopped.

While most videos on the channel typically settled somewhere between 60 and 230 views during this stage of their life, this one surged past 667 views. More importantly, viewers weren't merely passing through. They lingered.

The first clue lay in the "Stayed to Watch" metric. Nearly 28% of viewers chose to remain, roughly double what the channel normally experiences. The combination of the POV framing and the Toronto-specific hook acted like a magnet, creating immediate curiosity. Viewers wanted to know more.

Then came the second clue.

Audience retention opened at an astonishing 175%, revealing that many viewers were not only watching but replaying the opening moments. For the first ten seconds, retention remained above 100%, a powerful signal that the algorithm tends to reward. Something in those opening frames compelled people to look again.

But every mystery contains a turning point.

At approximately four seconds, the graph revealed a noticeable shift. Retention began to decline, falling from roughly 171% to 130% over the next two seconds. The timing coincided with the phrase "a virgin" in the audio track. Whether due to the sudden change in tone, narrative direction, or audience expectation, a portion of viewers chose that moment to leave.

Even so, the overall performance remained remarkable.

The Toronto angle appeared to strike a chord with the audience, producing substantially greater reach than the channel's previous ten uploads. The formula had exposed something valuable: local identity, when paired with curiosity, could dramatically expand attention.

Yet another puzzle emerged.

Views climbed rapidly, but engagement lagged behind. Four likes. No comments. No shares. The audience was watching, but not yet participating. In the language of digital platforms, attention had been earned, but conversation had not.

The next move seems clear.

If Toronto is the hook, there may be an opportunity to build a series around it. Different neighborhoods. Different personalities. Different encounters. Each becoming another chapter in the same ongoing story.

The retention dip also deserves investigation. A smoother transition, stronger visual reinforcement, or additional on-screen text around the four-second mark could help maintain momentum through the narrative shift.

Finally, the audience should be invited into the story. A simple question—"Which part of Toronto should I visit next?"—may be enough to transform passive viewers into active participants.

The verdict?

Among recent uploads, this video is not merely performing well. It is behaving differently. And when a piece of content behaves differently, it is often worth paying close attention to why.

2024 tweets

Calling all #AnimeNorth2024 attendees! Looking for that unique art piece to commemorate the convention? Check out the amazing #EdScholzGallery at the artist alley! #Scholz [アニマンορス (Anime North in Japanese)]

In the grand tradition of epic lore, photographer's artistry sings of Anime North's community, where contraptions, reminiscent of the infernal abyss, doth take on strange forms, woven into a heroic tapestry of the eternal struggle between Heaven and Hell. #EdScholzGallery #Scholx #Edmundo #AnimeNorth For #AnimeNorth2024 A #animenorth2017 history

As Paradise Lost recounts the cosmic struggle 'twixt Heaven's host and Hell's legions, so too doth #Kimbashi's lens capture Anime North's triumphs and peculiar wonders, such as contraptions of infernal design, amidst a kaleidoscope of good and evil. #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #AnimeNorth #AnimeNorth2024 #history of #animenorth2017

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Toronto’s streets transform into a celestial stage as #AnimeNorth's cosplayers bring characters to life with unparalleled creativity and flair. Their artistry is a testament to boundless imagination. Reflecting on the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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In the vibrant heart of #AnimeNorth, cosplayers shine like ethereal beings, their intricate costumes and performances turning Toronto into a paradise of fantasy and art. Echoes of the history of #AnimeNorth2017 linger. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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#AnimeNorth's cosplayers doth weave a tapestry of wonder and imagination, each costume a masterpiece, each performance a dance of creativity and passion. Toronto's streets are their canvas. Inspired by the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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With unmatched dedication and skill, #AnimeNorth’s cosplayers transform Toronto into a living gallery of heroes and legends. Their artistry captures the spirit of creativity and community, a tribute to the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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At #AnimeNorth, cosplayers breathe life into beloved characters, their vibrant costumes and performances making Toronto a beacon of fantasy and artistic expression. Remembering the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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In a grand celebration of creativity, #AnimeNorth's cosplayers grace Toronto’s streets, their elaborate costumes and passionate portrayals echoing with artistic brilliance. A legacy of the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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#AnimeNorth’s cosplayers, with their exquisite costumes and performances, turn Toronto into a dreamscape where imagination knows no bounds. A true celebration of artistic excellence inspired by the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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Toronto’s streets resonate with the vibrant energy of #AnimeNorth's cosplayers, whose dedication and artistry create a magical realm of fantasy and inspiration. Reflecting on the history of #AnimeNorth2017. #AnimeNorth2024 #Cosplay #StreetPhotography #Scholx #EdScholzGallery #GreatguyTV #Toronto

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Appendix on JOurnal

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Sunday, 31 May 2026

Greatest Irony Capitalism Made Marxism Profitable

by E Scholz

RESPONSE TO

The curious thing about Marxist literary criticism is that it may itself be one of the finest products capitalism ever produced.

The standard story runs in the opposite direction. Capitalism creates oppression; oppression creates Marxism; Marxism arrives as the intellectual cavalry to rescue the downtrodden. Yet the history of the university suggests something rather different. Marxist literary criticism did not emerge despite the incentives of the academic marketplace. It flourished because of them.

For centuries, literary study was an exclusive club. Few attended university. Fewer still entered literature. A tiny minority could reasonably expect to become writers, teachers, critics, or professors. The field was small, the competition limited, and the supply of commentary comfortably matched the demand for it.

Then prosperity arrived.

The capitalist machine, that tireless engine of abundance, expanded higher education beyond anything previous generations could have imagined. Universities multiplied. Degrees multiplied. Departments multiplied. Most importantly, aspiring intellectuals multiplied. Suddenly there were not dozens of minds examining literature but thousands, then tens of thousands, then armies of graduate students marching through libraries armed with highlighters and caffeine.

A problem emerged.

After two centuries of increasingly professional literary criticism, most of the obvious things had already been said. Shakespeare was brilliant. Milton was ambitious. Dickens was socially observant. Austen was subtle. One could rearrange the furniture, but the house itself remained stubbornly familiar.

How does a young academic distinguish himself in such a crowded field?

Novelty becomes necessity.

The incentive structure was clear. If everyone else was building additions onto the same old cathedral of literary interpretation, the easiest way to attract attention was not to add another brick. It was to announce that the cathedral itself was a prison.

Enter Marxism.

Here was an intellectual frontier of astonishing scope. Literature could now be read not merely as literature but as evidence. Every poem became an economic document. Every novel became a class struggle. Every hero concealed an oppressor. Every institution masked a hierarchy. The possibilities were endless because the framework was infinitely expandable.

More importantly, it offered something every ambitious profession rewards: differentiation.

In commerce, one develops a brand. In academia, one develops a theory. Marxist criticism supplied a ready-made intellectual trademark. It allowed scholars to present themselves not as custodians of an old tradition but as revolutionaries exposing hidden structures of power.

And there was an additional advantage.

Traditional literary criticism generally assumed a shared enterprise. Critics disagreed, certainly. They fought duels over interpretation, emphasis, and meaning. Yet they were usually attempting to illuminate the same work. Their disagreements resembled arguments among architects discussing how best to preserve a building.

The new critical movements often found greater rewards in demolition than preservation.

Why argue over the placement of a window when one can declare the entire structure fundamentally corrupt?

Suddenly, one's predecessors were not merely mistaken. They were complicit. The old canon was not merely incomplete. It was oppressive. Previous generations of scholars were not simply wrong. They were participants in systems of exclusion, domination, colonialism, patriarchy, or class privilege.

This had an obvious professional advantage. If your predecessors are respected authorities, you must compete with them. If your predecessors are morally compromised relics, you can replace them.

The academic marketplace had discovered a remarkable business model: criticism that simultaneously generated scholarship and eliminated competitors.

The irony, of course, is exquisite. A movement dedicated to exposing the hidden operations of power became exceptionally successful at navigating the power structures of modern institutions. A theory devoted to criticizing capitalism became one of the most effective career strategies within an intensely competitive intellectual marketplace.

Like many revolutionary movements, it eventually developed a taste for its own members. The habits of perpetual critique do not stop at departmental boundaries. Once every hierarchy is suspect, every authority illegitimate, and every orthodoxy a target, today's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. The guillotine, having exhausted its enemies, begins searching for fresh necks.

Thus the spectacle continues.

A theory born from the critique of competition became increasingly competitive. A philosophy intended to dismantle status hierarchies generated new status hierarchies. And an intellectual movement that promised liberation from economic incentives became remarkably adept at exploiting them.

The final joke may be that Marxist literary criticism was never capitalism's gravedigger at all.

It was one of capitalism's most ingenious creations.

Wednesday, 27 May 2026

Explore the vibrant world of 江戸門戸, where traditional meets modern and creativity knows no bounds. Dive into a universe of captivating visuals, bold statements, and art that speaks to the soul. #江戸門戸 #Artist #CreativeVision"
#CitizenCanada #scholx #scholzandfriends
「伝統と現代が交わり、創造性が無限に広がる江戸門戸の鮮やかな世界へようこそ。心を揺さぶるビジュアル、大胆なメッセージ、そして魂に語りかけるアートの宇宙へ飛び込もう。
#江戸門戸 #アーティスト #クリエイティブビジョン

#CitizenCanada #scholx #scholzandfriends
「伝統と現代が交わり、創造性が無限に広がる江戸門戸の鮮やかな世界へようこそ。心を揺さぶるビジュアル、大胆なメッセージ、そして魂に語りかけるアートの宇宙へ飛び込もう。
#江戸門戸 #アーティスト #クリエイティブビジョン

Tuesday, 26 May 2026

ON PHONES

There was a dinner once, years ago now, that struck me with the force of prophecy. A gathering of friends, intelligent people, funny people, people with whom conversation had once stretched deep into the night, where arguments, jokes, gossip, philosophy, and trivial nonsense all mixed together in that ancient human ritual of communal eating. Yet on this occasion something had changed, though at first it was almost imperceptible. The table remained. The food arrived. Drinks were poured. Bodies occupied the chairs. But the animating principle of the gathering had vanished.

Everyone was staring downward.

For nearly two hours the room existed in a state of suspended social animation. Fingers twitched across glowing surfaces. Faces periodically illuminated by tiny artificial flashes of information. Someone would laugh faintly at something occurring elsewhere, in another invisible dimension entirely, while the actual human beings seated inches away drifted further into irrelevance. Conversation no longer flowed; it sputtered. Presence itself became fragmented. It was as though I had watched a species quietly surrender one of its defining characteristics without even realizing it was happening.

One hears endless rhetoric about connectivity, community, democratization, technological liberation, but sitting there I experienced the opposite sensation entirely. The smartphone did not appear as a communication device. It appeared as an extraction device. An apparatus that harvested attention from immediate reality and redirected it into an endless system of managed distraction. The machine had not merely entered social life; it had colonized the pauses, the silences, the ambiguities, the moments from which genuine conversation and reflection once emerged.

The disturbing thing was not the technology itself. Humans have always invented tools. The disturbing thing was the passivity. Nobody at the table appeared consciously to choose the device over the people beside them. The movement had become automatic, almost liturgical. Reach. Check. Scroll. React. Repeat. A kind of low-grade behavioral possession masquerading as convenience.

And this, perhaps, is the real revolution of the smartphone age: not that human beings communicate more, but that uninterrupted human presence has become intolerable. The modern citizen increasingly experiences silence as anxiety, boredom as pathology, unmediated thought as discomfort. Every empty second must be filled, every lull exterminated. The old capacities — observation, patience, sustained listening, private reflection — begin to atrophy from disuse.

There is an old warning from totalitarian literature that tyranny does not always arrive marching in boots. Sometimes it arrives smiling, offering efficiency, entertainment, personalization, convenience. The most effective systems of control are those voluntarily carried in the pocket, lovingly polished, endlessly refreshed, defended by the very people most subordinated by them. What previous empires achieved through censorship and force, the modern attention economy often achieves through seduction.

I left that dinner with an unsettling realization: if this trajectory continued, entire modes of human experience might quietly disappear. Not through dramatic prohibition, but through neglect. The art of conversation. The capacity for solitude. The strange creative fertility of boredom. The accidental encounter. The undirected walk. The unrecorded memory. The ability to sit across from another person and remain fully there.

So I began withdrawing from the device, slowly at first, then almost entirely. Not because I imagined myself purer than anyone else, nor because technological primitivism holds much appeal, but because I suspected something essential was being eroded beneath the rhetoric of progress. And once one has seen the transformation clearly, it becomes difficult to unsee. The smartphone was sold as an instrument of freedom. Yet increasingly it resembled a portable system of behavioral management, carried voluntarily into every intimate corner of human existence.

The deepest irony is that people now fear disconnection more than domination. Silence terrifies them more than surveillance. To be unreachable for an afternoon appears almost socially deviant. But perhaps the truly radical act in the twenty-first century is simply this: to reclaim one’s own attention from the machinery perpetually designed to fragment it.

Disagree with the video

Discussions of notes

@gopfertami 7 months ago Anarchism is far right. Liberalism is also right wing. On the other side conservatism is right wing but fascist is not. So it was not truly left vs right. But it was labelled as such and we remember it that way. Nowadays left and right is no longer used in its original meaning but rather to address emotions.

@gopfertami 1 month ago (edited) @davidcox9234 anarchism is purely right wing ideology. You won't be able to give a single point from the anarchist ideology which could be considered as left wing.

Reply greatguyaaa @gopfertami This is pure nonsense, Professor Green of Oxford University has a whole book devoted to left wing anarchism. Cancel

The argument always begins the same way: with a young man in black insisting that anarchism means freedom, and another young man—also in black, naturally—replying that freedom for whom is precisely the question. One imagines the scene repeating itself endlessly across centuries: in a Paris café thick with smoke in 1848, in a Spanish union hall before the guns began firing, in an American college dormitory beside a shelf of Austrian economics and survival food. The anarchist enters history declaring war on kings; he leaves it arguing about landlords.

The first anarchists emerged from the furnace of nineteenth-century Europe, where factories rose like iron cathedrals and workers were fed into them with the efficiency of coal. Men like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin did not see capitalism as the antidote to tyranny but as one of its newest disguises. To them, the state and the factory owner were cousins—one ruled with soldiers, the other with hunger. Their dream was not the liberation of the market but liberation from domination itself: no kings, no czars, no monopolists, no bureaucratic priesthoods. The anarchist of the nineteenth century was therefore unmistakably a creature of the left, born in strikes, barricades, and revolutionary congresses.

Then history performed one of its usual tricks and shifted the scenery. The twentieth century witnessed socialism hardening into bureaucracy and, in places, outright terror. Out of that wreckage emerged another anti-statist tradition, especially in the United States, where distrust of government mingled with frontier individualism and market mythology. Thinkers like Murray Rothbard arrived waving not the black-and-red banner of workers’ revolt but the pure black flag of radical property rights. They regarded taxation as theft, government as organized coercion, and the free market as the nearest thing to voluntary human order ever devised. To the older anarchists this sounded absurd: abolishing the state only to enthrone corporations appeared rather like overthrowing the monarchy so that feudal barons could govern directly.

And so the quarrel continues. One faction insists that capitalism is merely private government with better advertising; the other argues that markets are what remain when coercive states disappear. Both call themselves anarchists because both despise centralized authority. Yet they are separated by a philosophical canyon. One dreams of communes and federations of workers; the other of contracts and voluntary exchange. The dispute is therefore not over whether freedom matters, but over what power actually looks like when it puts on civilian clothes.