Majd al-Shihabi 🏴 مجد الشهابي

@Gaolaitch@cupoftea.social I like this question :) So far, I've been able to align the stars in my life in order to be able feel fulfilled and satisfied by my work most of the time. That said, not a lot of things give me a feeling of job. But when I do feel joy, it's usually around live music. Attending a live music concert, dancing to a really good beat, sensing the journey that the musician is taking us on, sensing it in my spinal chord, not in my brain. That's when I feel joy.

Any Canadian urban planning nerds know why perimeter blocks are non-existent in Canada? I assume they're against zoning bylaws across the country, but has there been any experiments in building them? They solve so many problems, I don't understand why they are not the default form here. #urbanism #urbanplanning #TOpoli #ONpoli #CApoli

Nothing makes you feel at home in a city like randomly bumping into people you know on the streets.

I arrived in Milano yesterday. I took the train from the airport to the city centre to pick up the house keys from my partner, then took the metro to his place. On the metro, I bumped into a friend who I haven't seen in years.

What a small world

I'm so impressed with the latest @zotero@fosstodon.org updates. I love seeing useful features added to software in a way that is responsive to users' needs.

I would have liked to see more explanation of the privacy implications of using third party text-to-speech services though.

The Dig podcast just launched their website for their Thawra series on Arab radicalism in the 20th century.

I learned SO MUCH about radical history in the region through this podcast, and I consider myself to be relatively well-informed.

Very highly recommended listen:

https://thawraproject.com/

#TheDig #Palestine #Syria #Lebanon #Thawra

Thoughts percolating from yesterday's wonderful conversation with @nasser@merveilles.town in Brooklyn, who pointed me to the writings of Zoe Baker on radical theory and history.

Us leftie technologists have been talking about decentralization for a very long time. But it's obvious from a lot of experiments in decentralization that decentralization requires coordination, otherwise it turns into a nightmare of libertarian sovereign citizen.

See Lebanon's waste management problem across its 1000+ municipalities, for a glowing example of how decentralization without coordination fails miserably.

Of course, countless thinkers from Abdullah Öcalan to Murray Bookchin to Stafford Beer talked about levels of coordination among decentralized actors, giving it various names.

But could we make sure that every time we talk about decentralization, we always include coordination?

Could coordinated decentralization become our new term for decentralization?

#Ocalan #Bookchin #cybernetics #SocialEcology

@liaizon@social.wake.st My solace is that everyone is finally feeling the heartbreak that we in the region have been saying for a century. The heartbreak the background hum of our lives, just as persistent as the hum of the terror drones flying over Beirut, whose sound I hear in every voice recording that they send me. But you know what is more persistent? Our will to live. We live through, around, and despite the heartbreak, with tenderness and love. I'm reminded of a poem by Rafeef Ziadah, she wrote it more than 14 years ago, during another Israeli invasion of Gaza. "We teach life, sir" I hope that we manage to persist in our tenderness after this nightmare is over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM

There is a slightly funny and surreal #Beirut moment from that Israeli terror strike video. Adjacent to the struck building, there's a gorgeous heritage building with an unobstructed view to the Mediterranean, looking over the Ayn elMrayseh old mosque. Perfect location. Since the early 2010s, there has been an ongoing epic battle between the urbanists and heritage activists vs the owner of the building. He wants to demolish to build a massive high rise in its place. He managed to evict the old tenants, drill a massive hole in the floor of two of the floors to render it uninhabitable. But the activists got a court injunction to stop the demolition, and the developer was forced to build external scaffolding to prevent additional structural damage. Well, after today's strike, the videos show that the building is still standing perfectly. I'm sure that the owner would have loved for the strike to demolish it too, but alas, that's not how fate works. #urbanism

Beirut was my home for almost 4 years when I was studying urban planning at the American University of Beirut, and I have a lot of loved ones in the city.

Following today's Israeli terror strikes, I spent the morning checking on people... Of course, everyone is shaken, but they feel compelled to reassure us that they're ok.

Everyone I checked with was grateful for my messages, to know that they are not forgotten.

A friend sent me a video of a building that was struck by an Israeli missile. It was less than 100m away from my apartment on the waterfront, and maybe 200m from the AUB campus. Two friends lived in the building adjacent to that building that now is mostly rubble. I couldn't get to them, but I heard through other friends that they're ok.

The rubble from the terror strike is piled on the street, burying cars under it, blocking the street that I walked every day to get to campus.

Israel is a terrorist state.

#Beirut #Lebanon #Palestine #Iran

@pandoc@fosstodon.org incredible work! I'll definitely be using this extensively :)

May I report a bug? It seems like files with names in Arabic (or other Unicode non-ASCII characters) gives this error: ERROR: Unexpected end-of-input while parsing string literal

Changing the file name to ASCII characters fixes the problem.

Thanks again for your work 🙏

@gekitsu@toot.cat Yes! It's even more surreal if you think of it as a massive rock that's flying above us and moving so quickly.

@SeismoAllegra@mastodon.social that's the new One Bloor West that's under construction. One Bloor East 9s the shorter skyscraper behind it. I had a partner who lived in that skyscraper and it was *awful*. It felt like living in a hotel, bad construction quality, and we were being gaslit that it was "luxury". These buildings are money launderin machines.

Last night's full moon, shot on an iPhone with 8x zoom. It's shocking how quickly the moon moves in the sky. It was only there for a few moments, then it hid behind the tall building.

The tallest building to the right is at Yonge and Bloor, the shorter buildings closer to me are Honest Ed's at Bathurst and Bloor. The pigeons are the permanent residents of my street corner.

#Tkaronto #Toronto #photography #fullmoon #sunset #بدر #تصوير #غروب

@gbargoud this is both delightful and horrifying at the same time 😳