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Stung Eye

The eye of the bee holder.

Manitoba Gold 2024

Alright, music lovers, it’s time for the third and final installment of my Manitoba music roundup for 2024. This one is pure gold.

Back in December, I listened to over 300 tracks released in 2024 by Manitoba artists and curated three playlists. The first two focused on party tracks and hip hop bangers.

With this playlist I’ll slow down the pace to present fifteen standout songs from Manitoban musicians, spanning genres, styles, and moods. Whether you’re into jazz, folk, indie rock, country, or pop, there’s something here worth sinking into.

Listen here or in the embedded players below:

The majority of the artists and bands on this playlist were completely new to me. In fact, only FIINN, Jocelyn Gould, and Begonia were previously on my radar. Many of these tracks gave me full-on chills down my neck when I first heard them. I hope you love them too.

This wraps up my 2024 Manitoba music deep dive. Keep your ears open, watch the Manitoba Music website for upcoming local concerts, and support local musicians!

Previous MB Music Playlist

I didn't put together a playlist last year, but you might enjoy my MB music recaps from 2022 and 2021:

Manitoba Hip Hop 2024

Today’s drop is a hip hop mixtape of my fav 15 releases from Manitoban rappers and beat makers last year.

I’ve been readying Gritty City: An Oral History of Winnipeg Hip-Hop Music: 1980-2005 by Nigel Webber—a deep-dive into local hip-hop history. That’s right, Manitoba has been head-bobbing to beats and rhymes for over 40 years. I found the scene 25 years ago and have been a fan ever since. The talent here? Always mind-blowing.

Back in December I listened to 300 tracks released in 2024 by Manitoba artists and curated three playlists. The first playlist was 17 slices of Manitoba Party Music.

🚨 Explicit lyrics. Listen here or in the embedded players below:

The playlist features Manitoba hip hop OGs, The Gumshoe Strut, Charlie Fettah, and The Lytics. I first heard Strut on the Milch & Allegra tape in 2000, and both The Lytics (Big City Soundgirl!) and Fetts (as part of Winnipeg’s Most) in 2010.

You’ll find familiar names like Anthony OKS and Super Duty Tough Work (with Cadence Weapon!), a wave of up-and-comers pushing the sound forward, fire tracks from Northern Manitoba, and Indigenous talent making moves.

One more MB 2024 playlist to come. That one? Completely eclectic.

Catch you on the flip side, grinners.

Manitoba (Party) Music 2024

Hey music lovers! Ready for some amazing Manitoba-made music?

Over the holidays in December I listened to over 300 tracks released in 2024 by Manitoba artists and curated three playlists of the hottest local tunes.

Big shoutout to Manitoba Music, our non-profit industry champions who keep a running playlist of recent local releases. I dove deep into their selections and emerged with fifty-three absolute bangers.

First up: Seventeen stand-out party rockers. Fifty minutes of pure fire featuring hip hop, rock, country, jazz, pop, electronic, and even some punk-flavoured Ukrainian folk music.

Listen here or in the embedded players below:

I’ll post my other two playlists soon!

Reading in 2024

I read 15 books last year. Eight on my Kobo e-reader and the rest were deadtree format. Nine of them were fiction. Six were non-fiction.

There were many great books this year, making it difficult to select just a top three. As such, I’ve included a selection of runners-up.

Fiction in 2024

  • A Line to Kill - Anthony Horowitz - “I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.”
  • The Midnight Library - Matt Haig - “The only way to learn is to live.”
  • This is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - “Listen to me. I am your echo. I would rather break the world than lose you.”
  • Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky - “Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe.”
  • The Penderwicks on Gardam Street - Jeanne Birdsall - “Tra-la the joy of tulips blooming, Ha-ha the thrill of bumblebees zooming. I’m alive and I dance, I’m alive though death is always looming.”
  • The Secret History - Donna Tartt - “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
  • Children of Memory - Adrian Tchaikovsky - “She’s learning that getting a proper education doesn’t answer questions, it just teaches you to ask them.”
  • When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro - “She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.”
  • A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin - “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”

Non-Fiction in 2024

  • The Art of Learning - Josh Waitzkin - “Musicians, actors, athletes, philosophers, scientists, writers understand that brilliant creations are often born of small errors.”
  • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI - Ethan Mollick - “The cost of getting to know AI—really getting to know AI—is at least three sleepless nights.”
  • The Playful Game Design Process - Richard Lemarchand - “Where idealism meets experience, wisdom is born.”
  • Teach Like a Pirate - Dave Burgess - “Light yourself on fire with enthusiasm and people will come from miles around just to watch you burn!”
  • We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society - David Camfield - “If people could collectively take control of the productive forces that capitalism has developed and use them to meet their needs, they could build a cooperative commonwealth.”
  • True Love - Thich Nhat Hanh - “Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply. I think, therefore I am really not there.”

Top Three Books of 2024

This is How You Lose The Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

You ask if I’ve been lonely. I hardly know how to answer. I have observed friendship as one observes high holy days: breathtakingly short, whirlwinds of intimate endeavour, frenzied carousing, the sharing of food, of wine, of honey. Compressed, always, and gone as soon as they come. It is often my duty to fall in love convincingly, and certainly I’ve received no complaints. But that is work, and there are better things of which to write.

Burn before reading. A co-written epistolary novella that blends espionage, time travel, poetry, and romance. Lent to me by a student. It left me wanting more, but any longer and the letter writing conceit may have worn thin.

The Playful Game Design Process - Richard Lemarchand

Imagination and design are closely connected. The dreams we dream at night and by day can lead to the greatest accomplishments in art and literature, science and technology, industry and entertainment. But until we make decisions and act upon them, we are not designing, only speculating.

A non-technical handbook on producing video games with a focus on curiosity, flexibility, generosity, humility, and respect. It has already had a profound impact on how I run the Game Studio courses in the Red River College Polytech Game Development program.

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI - Ethan Mollick

You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring legal or ethical barriers. As you experiment, you may find that AI help can be satisfying, or frustrating, or useless, or unnerving. But you aren’t just doing this for help alone; familiarizing yourself with AI’s capabilities allows you to better understand how it can assist you — or threaten you and your job.

Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management at U-Penn’s Wharton School, encourages us to experiment widely with Ai to explore the limitations and possibilities of this evolving technology.

Ai can mean many things. This book focuses on Ai chat systems built on Large Language Machine-Learning Models, which generate text by re-purposing patterns found in their vast training data. These models have been trained on an enormous volume of text — drawn from books, articles, and the public internet — shaping the model’s ability to mimic human responses.

If you haven’t spent time playing around with generative Ai, I’d recommend Claude for text-based chats and Pi for voice conversations.

Runners-Up

  • Birdsall’s Penderwicks series continues to captivate the girls. Read these to your kids!
  • Tchaikovsky entire Children of Time series is a must-read for sci-fi lovers.
  • Le Guin’s masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea might seem full of fantasy tropes, until you realize she create those tropes with this book.
  • All teacher’s (regardless of grade level) should read Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning and Burgess’ Teach Like a Pirate.
  • Camfield’s We Can Do Better is an accessible introduction to Marxist reconstructed historical materialism. From the Sara Farris quote on the cover: “For anyone who wants to understand the complex forces that shape our society and change them.”

Reading by Number

Number of books read each year from 2011 to 2024. I’ve been averaging 18 books per year for the past 14 years.

Past yearly overviews: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011.

Strength & Movement in 2024

Here’s a snapshot of my exercise achievements in 2024:

I covered 2,100km last year, splitting my cardio between running and cycling. Running accounted for 900 km, mostly along the Harte Trail and throughout Assiniboine Forest. I run outdoors throughout the summer and the winter. Most of my runs ranged from 5 to 10km, with two standout runs hitting half-marathon distance (21 km). Cycling made up the remaining 1,200km, largely from my fair-weather bike commutes to work. It’s a 14km journey each way to the Red River College downtown campus.

Winter running in Winnipeg requires some special care. After fracturing my wrist in 2017 from slipping on ice in Assiniboine Park, I started adding Kold Kutter motorsport ice-racing screws to my running shoes for better winter traction. They are incredibly effective — I’ve had zero slips since then.

I also kept up a strength training routine in 2024, working out 2 to 3 times per week throughout the year, even while managing a minor injury (more on that below). These home workout sessions include a mix of dumbbells, a Total Gym 1000, and body-weight exercises.

My strength training routines were developed with ChatGPT back in 2023 — yes, I’m even a nerd when it comes to exercise. I fed in all my available equipment and asked for “a full-body, time-efficient and highly effective strength training plan.” Since starting this program in July 2023, I’ve completed over 180 sessions. They consist of three focused workouts: chest and shoulders, back and biceps, and legs and shoulders.

In an effort to preserve the strength and mobility of my knees, I’ve also incorporated the Knees Over Toes Zero protocol into my weekly routine. So far so good! It’s especially fun to see the surprise on people’s faces when I’m running backwards on the Harte Trail.

In early 2024, I noticed discomfort in my lower left bicep during workouts. Over time, the discomfort progressed to pain, which I later identified as distal bicep tendonitis. My initial approach — stopping bicep exercises and waiting for it to heal — proved ineffective even after three months of rest.

To address this, I began a re-strengthening protocol using light weights, beginning with just 3-pound dumbbells and gradually working up to 20 pounds over four months. The recovery program included short bicep curl sessions twice daily, exercises with a Theraband Flexbar (a specialized tool for tendon rehabilitation), and voodoo flossing, which helps improve blood/nutrient flow and mobility.

Most exercises are now pain-free, but there’s still some minor discomfort on bicep days. I still haven’t returned to pull-ups or chin-ups, preferring to stick with assisted versions of these exercises on the Total Gym while continuing my recovery.

My goal for 2025 is to hit 2,000km again for running and cycling, and to continue the full-body workouts and knee protocol. Shout out to Shan, my exercise inspiration. She doesn’t track all her exercise like I do, but probably tripled or quadrupled my stats or more! :)