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UofWinds 447, Week 40, 2026: Housing, Inc., VOID 1680 AM, ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ bear / less computer


Good morning. It has been some weeks since I've been able to enjoy a quiet Saturday morning at home, and I am very much looking forward to being a body at rest this weekend. I have a couple of books that I would like to direct my attention to and a couple of cats that are currently demanding my attention. The first wave midterms and assignments have arrived for my kiddos, so I will be in good company, as we collectively and separately, sit and study.

Housing, Inc.


There is one topic of conversation that I cannot hold for too long, and that it is the matter of housing. When a dinner party's conversation turns to recent housing prices or mortgage rates, I tend to retreat into myself. And yet, even I am highly aware that much of our current malaise lies in the fact that affordable housing is out of reach for most people and that our current elected officials would prefer to house those without homes through incarceration rather than direct any additional public funding to alleviate their situation.

It is difficult to express how absurd the situation is. In Ontario, the government passed the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act in 2022 to build, "more homes faster." The mayor of my city is using these powers to forbid the building of four-plexes. Meanwhile, Mexico is solving its housing crisis.

Two years ago, Mexico elected a new president who has undertaken a stunning reversal in housing policy. After decades of successive developer-centric governments, President Claudia Sheinbaum has committed to using state resources to build 1.8 million homes over six years, 500,000 of which will be purpose-built for low-income families. One hundred thousand of these new builds will be rental units for young people that come with a maximum rent of 30 percent of income and an option to enter into a rent-to-own program. According to Sheinbaum, “The objective is low-cost housing so that Mexican families, and particularly young people, have access to housing.”

Despite my aversion to the housing policy, I did enjoy the 2026 Massey Lectures, Housing Inc. A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home by Leilani Farha. And that's because even though Farha is an expert on said policy (she leads a housing advocacy organization called The Shift), her purpose in her five lectures is to convey something more fundamental: that housing is a human right. These works draw from on her experience as the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing from 2014 to 2020. I think latter lectures in the series are the strongest in the book and you can hear them live if you live in the Vancouver area or near Ottawa.

VOID 1680 AM


As I had mentioned in this newsletter's last issue, I now host a live radio show that broadcasts through the airwaves every Wednesday in the early evening and (as I imagine it) over the heads of most everyone who lives in Windsor Ontario and Metro Detroit.

The show itself is still a work in progress as I figure how to regularly create a playlist that contains 35% or more of Canadian music and at least 3 songs from CJAM recent library of new music releases, and only with songs that are available on bandcamp so I can play a bought copy and not from a streaming music service. These constraints shape the sound of the show in ways that I could not predict. It has been a delight to discover new music by breaking old habits.

I recognize that not everyone finds joy in building a playlist. But if you are one of those people like my daughter (who likes to build playlists with each season) or like myself (who never lost the love of making mix-tapes on cassette and CDs), then I have a game for you: VOID 1680 AM:

Night after night, you sit alone with your thoughts, your music, and a microphone. Whether you come to your radio show with somber attitude or joyful spirit, you use the music that moves you to etch something fleeting and beautiful into the big empty.
There are other voices in the darkness. With a deck of cards, a six-sided die and a stack of music, you will build a playlist, invent and interact with Callers to your show, and evolve their stories over as many broadcasts as you like. No matter their motivations, they simply must be heard. In that way, you are very alike.
VOID 1680 AM includes rules for single-session and ongoing play, instructions to have your show broadcast on the airwaves as an Affiliate, and even a way to add your voice to a library of Callers that other DJs can use in their own games.

I played VOID 1680 on Thursday evening. Unlike campus radio in which the programming is very much intended to be for the community, the prompts of this game encourages you to draw from your own collection of music and indulge in playing songs that match particular personal memories or experiences you have had. I found myself trying to remember specific songs that I loved in high school, and in doing so, realized that some of those memories were almost out of reach.

And after you are done, you can choose to have your show broadcast via AM radio:

Perhaps most intriguing about VOID 1680 AM is that it exists as an honest-to-goodnest, real radio station on the 1680 dial. Lowery has agreed to broadcast any playlists and recordings sent his way directly, both on the radio and a dedicated YouTube channel. Prospective callers can add their voice to the database of lonely hearts questing the AM waves for an existential port in the storm of reality.
"I've worked in radio, I obsess over the Conet Project, and I have my very own AM transmitter and range extender so I can broadcast out of my garage,” Lowery wrote in a press kit. “This game is, simply, a slice of me, presented to the world in hopes of finding like minded souls who resonate with the sentiment even if not the specifics.

bear / less computer


Many of my recent online projects have been hosted on neocities.org. This web hosting platform suits my personal sensibilities because I find it enjoyable to write using HTML. The only thing that I feel is missing from the service is that neocities does not come with an RSS feed to alert that a new item of work has been published to the very small population who still uses an RSS reader (I mean, other than Outlook). But what I feel is a bug is actually as a feature of neocities, as it was built to be a modern port of geocities. As such, neocities will only allows you to have a feed of updates from other neocities sites.

If you asked me what is the simplest and most straight-forward blogging software a person can use in 2026, I would answer that you should try out ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear – with the caveat that I haven't used it myself.

A privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging platform.
No trackers, no javascript, no stylesheets. Just your words.

This is a blogging platform where words matter most.
Shun the bloat of the current web, embrace the bear necessities

As an example of writing on ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear, may I recommend less computer? It is the name of a work in progress by Bianca Wylie.

reduce computer anxiety and make better tech choices by Bianca Wylie
handbook chapters will be published on the blog as they're written

More words, less computer.

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