Christina Vasilevski
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cvasilevski.bsky.social
Christina Vasilevski
@cvasilevski.bsky.social
820 followers 860 following 860 posts
Content designer. Certified Copy Editor. Mildly scatterbrained cat lady. I like thinking about UX, gardening, cats, books, music, tea, perfume, whatever. She/her.

Fun stuff: booksandtea.ca
Career stuff: christinavasilevski.com
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cvasilevski.bsky.social
My copy of Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings came in at the bookstore today, and holy shamoly, this book cover is even more stunning in person.
The front cover of Honeyeater by Kathleen Jennings. It features a woman in a white shirt with live insects crawling all over it, and vines snaking out of her collar. Her face is obscured by flowers so that only her lips and jawline are visible, and a bird sits among the flowers so that its head is in the same place that her eye would be. The entire image looks like a painting rather than a photograph.
September 12, 2025 at 1:24 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Hey @premeemohamed.com, I saw your book pop up in the wild on Reddit!
A screenshot from r/fantasybooks asking for help finding a lost book. The description of plot and cover reveal it to be The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed A user on the subreddit successfully identifies the book for the original poster.
August 24, 2025 at 12:39 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
It's amazing what a difference 6 days can make.
A magnolia tree in full bloom on May 1. The tree is covered in pink flowers, but the branches are otherwise bare. A magnolia tree in faded bloom on May 6. More than half of the pink flowers are gone, and the base of the tree is surrounded by wilted pink petals. However, the branches are now covered in small green leaves.
May 7, 2025 at 12:45 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
This ad on the Go train is today's affront against grammar and all that is good in the world.

You want me to "moist" my eyes? Wtf? We HAVE a verb for this, and it's"moisten", ffs! "Moist" is a gross word; please don't make it worse than it already is.
A public transportation ad for eye drops. The slogan says to "moist your eyes" with their brand of drops.
April 16, 2025 at 11:47 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Jeez Louise, these dishes are gorgeous. And they sit on top of my David's Tea mugs perfectly!

I don't need to use all eight for tea, so I'll need to figure something else out for the ones that are too pretty for everyday use.
A set of eight small dishes sitting on my stovetop. Each dish is 4.5 inches across, round and shaped roughly like a flower. Each dish is a different colour, from white to pink to celadon, grey, and blue-black. I've placed one of the dishes to rest snugly on top of a mug from David's Tea. The dish is grey, and the mug is dark green with a fox and some trees painted on it. The same grey dish from the second picture is now sitting on the stovetop with a metal tea strainer sitting on top.
March 31, 2025 at 1:15 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Today's decision to #BuyCanadian is really more of a "buy used" deal. These probably *were* originally from Amazon, but I just got this dish set secondhand through Facebook marketplace.

These are going to be perfect for holding tea bags and tea strainers!
A top down viewing of my hand holding a small ceramic dish. The dish is green, brown and white, and shaped like a flower with slightly raised edges. It's one of a set of eight.
March 31, 2025 at 12:19 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Tonight I made Macedonian food, which I rarely do. I texted mama for advice.

This is zelnik (aka: burek, banitsa). The pastry is storebought phyllo; the filling is a mix of leek, green onion, feta, egg, and seasoning.

It's not as good as mama's, but I don't think I brought shame to my ancestors.
A steel skillet on the stove filled with fried leeks and green onions. The zelnik waiting to be baked. Sheets of phyllo pastry are filled with the leek filling and rolled into tubes, then arranged in the pan in a swirling pattern. The baked zelnik, fresh out of the oven. The phyllo pastry is golden brown.
March 24, 2025 at 10:56 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
That is so weird. I'm getting no results, even when I click your link. I'm in Canada, do you think that has anything to do with it?
A screenshot from Netgalley showing no search results.
March 20, 2025 at 2:36 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Hey @sschwinghamer.bsky.social, I found the quotes I was talking about last night re: Kim Campbell's campaign and the fact that the PC party machine set her up to fail.

This is all from "No Second Chances: Women and Political Power in Canada" by Kate Graham.
Part 1 of an excerpt from "No Second Chances" where interviewer Kate Graham asks Kim Campbell about the 1993 federal election. Note: The final sentence is cut off partway through and is finished on the following page. KATE GRAHAM: In the '93 campaign, when do you recall first knowing that you were in trouble? KIM CAMPBELL: We knew we were in trouble. But the Chrétien ads — John Tory, who was campaign chair, called us and said "We're gonna do some ads tomorrow that are a bit negative, and you may hear something from that. But we use a picture that was sort of like the picture used on Macleans' magazine." And doesn't tell me what's in the ads. He suggested I might hear something, people talking about this image of the Chrétien campaign. And I understood it was a picture that was used on the cover of Maclean's magazine. Whatever, whatever. It's not till the end of the day when I talked to people in my own riding and they said "Look, people are tearing up their lawn signs." I said, "You gotta pull the ads." But I didn't see them until the end of the day when somebody got me a VHS. I was in a hotel in Montréal. Remember that we didn't have that ability to communicate really fast, so I couldn't see them until somebody could give me a video of them. And when I saw it, my first reaction was "Whose side are they are on? How could anybody produce that ad and think I that I would approve it?" I inherited a campaign team, and I had no time to pick my own campaign team. And to this day some think I was wrong to pull the ads. We actually had a bounce in our polling with it. It is true that negative ads can work. But the problem is they don't work for women, women get blamed for them. But it just Part 2 of an excerpt from "No Second Chances" where interviewer Kate Graham asks Kim Campbell about the 1993 federal election. Note: This is a continuation of the quote from the previous page. KIM CAMPBELL: was also — it was just so tone deaf and stupid. The interesting thing is that Jean Chrétien knows perfectly well I had nothing to do with those ads. His nephew, Raymond Chrétien, visited me when he was our ambassador in Washington and I was consul general in Los Angeles, and I said "Those ads — I had nothing to do with them." He said, "If you had, you wouldn't be here." Another excerpt from from "No Second Chances". In this one, interviewer Kate Graham asks Kim Campbell about the aftermath of the 1993 federal election, where Campbell led the PCs to defeat. KIM CAMPBELL: In July of 1993... I saw Mulroney after the election, who was now the former prime minister. I went to see him in Montréal as a courtesy call after the election. And he said "Oh, you know, the party didn't serve you well." I thought, "Oh, really?" And he said "And I was at an event, and somebody said to me, when I saw that so-and-so was doing the advertising campaign, I knew we were in trouble." I thought, "Really, you wouldn't tell me this? You know, these are your people that you hand-picked, and I had a little over two months between being anointed as prime minister and having to call the election. And in between that, doing a G7 summit and travelling across the country to the UN to speak at the General Assembly. I had to do all those things in that brief period before the election was called. You know, it really wasn't optimal." When you're campaigning it brings up more of the need to be adversarial and that's harder for a woman to pull off, I think. The adversarial nature of an election campaign is not as congenial to people's expectations of how women should be. It's harder to carry it off.
March 18, 2025 at 10:51 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
The lemon curd tart is complete and setting in the fridge. LOTS of butter in this thing.
A small pot full of freshly made lemon curd. The pot still has a whisk inside it, and other cooking utensils are in the background. The lemon curd has been poured into the shortbread crust I made earlier today. The crust in the pie pan is now almost completely covered by the curd.
March 14, 2025 at 7:17 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Next stage of #PiDay baking: marinating the chicken for tonight's savory pie.
Large chunks of chicken sit in a bowl, covered in a thick marinade paste of garlic, ginger, cumin, coriander, paprika, turmeric, cloves, salt, pepper, olive oil and apple cider vinegar. In the corner of the photo, the recipe is visible: chicken shawarma pie from Falastin.
March 14, 2025 at 4:26 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
A sneak peek at what I'm planning tomorrow for #PiDay
Two cookbooks sitting on my stovetop. The cookbook on the left is "Falastin" by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. The cookbook on the right is "Baker Bertie's Better Baking Book" by Kristin Hoffman.
March 14, 2025 at 2:16 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Tonight I dusted off the griddle for pancake Tuesday. These are cornmeal pancakes - the batter spreads out a lot, but I like that. Nice, toothsome texture.
A green ceramic bowl half-full of pancake batter sits on a cluttered kitchen counter. A portable griddle sits on a stove, and three pancakes, raw side up, are cooking on it. Three golden, flipped-over pancakes sit, cooking on a portable griddle.
March 4, 2025 at 11:12 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Reading the comments of the article about the aesthetics of Slop AI art, and here's a particularly insightful one:
Part 1 of a comment responding to Ted Gioia's post about the aesthetics of AI art (Slop): Part of the problem is that slop retro-actively diminishes the reputation of previous art movements. Van Gogh's a great example. We had pop culture riding him for decades. Even before AI, there were touring IMax's and "interactive experiences," with animated paintings and 360 projections. Then he became THE testbed for style-transfer techniques. He's been reduced to the gradeschool legend of the crazy painter who lopped his ear off and a stylistic meme. It's absolutely arduous to try clearing your mind of the gunk and really appreciating what statement his aesthetics left in their actual context. But it's not just him. What we see of Western Canon's artistic contributions today used to be the parody and homage of cartoonists, and animators, but with AI, the idea that Art Nouveau, or ukiyo-e, or Cubism, are just a "skin" you can put on anything, including your "Avacado couches ridden by cowboys," has really just reduced them all from a visual language, to a kind of noise. Part 2 of a comment responding to Ted Gioia's post about the aesthetics of AI art (Slop): Some years ago, I downloaded a data-set representing "all of Impressionism," there were tens or even hundreds of thousands of paintings. Me and my wife made plans to peruse this virtual gallery on the couch as a sort of date night, since we love Impressionism... But after a while it became a game of "countryside, pretty girl, potato," potato being our term for the homely men. We'd look at a painting, categorize it, and move on. Even to try to appreciate works of art on the scale made possible by modern technology, as we certainly intended to, was to flatten everything into a mass of totally conventional stylistic and subject choices. The conclusion I've come to is that the fleeting specter a universal, international, mass art social consciousness as the 20th Century promised us was impossible. Today, art can only exist on the small scale, within communities that have formed around enough of a shared aesthetic vision to have developed it into meaningful kind of language again, but not one that will generally hold any currency to outsiders. It belongs to the idiom of the specific sub-culture, and it's specific, tastes, values, and ideas - it belongs to the kinds of people who can, at least, still talk to each other, and not just man-machine-interfaces masquerading as a go-between for human users that don't really exist.
February 26, 2025 at 2:43 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Ted Gioia posted a great article about the defining characteristics of AI-generated art, aka: Slop. He's still using Substack, unfortunately, so I won't link the post, but here are screenshots of the satirical manifesto he wrote as part of the article:
A screenshot from Ted Gioia's Substack, in which he has written a satirical manifesto about AI and slop art. Part 1 of 3: A SLOP MANIFESTO Long live Slop! Slop is a creative style that emerged around 2023 with the rise of generative AI. Slop art is flat, awkward, stale, listless, and often ridiculous. Slop works are celebrated for their stupidity and clumsiness—which are often amplified by strange juxtapositions of culture memes. These Slop works are widely mocked by the audience—and even by the people who create and curate them. Yet they are the results of hundreds of billions of dollars in tech investment. Slop is all about wastefulness! A screenshot from Ted Gioia's Substack, in which he has written a satirical manifesto about AI and slop art. Part 2 of 3: Let’s put this in context: In the current moment, there’s no money for serious artists—in filmmaking, fiction, painting, music, whatever. But there’s an endless supply of dollars to create Slop technology. In fact, no artistic movement in human history has soaked up more cash than Slop. This seems like a paradox. Why is so much money devoted to churning out crap? Ah, that’s part of the appeal of Slop. The audience’s gleeful mockery is actually enhanced by the fact that a huge fortune has been wasted in creating pointless and bizarre works. A screenshot from Ted Gioia's Substack, in which he has written a satirical manifesto about AI and slop art. Part 3 of 3: In other words, this mismatch between means and ends is a key part of our aesthetic movement. Hence a certain degree of cynicism is embedded in both the production and consumption of Slop. So it’s stupid. It’s wasteful. It’s tasteless. It’s cynical. And that’s all part of the plan. Long live Slop!
February 26, 2025 at 2:35 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Rob likes buying me necklaces as gifts, and I like wearing them; win-win. Here's what he bought for Valentine's Day!

I don't normally wear golden jewelry because I think it clashes with my skin, but with the right shirt, this pendant really pops.
Today I'm wearing a burgundy v-neck shirt to show off the new necklace that Rob got me for Valentine's Day. It's a gold chain, and the pendant in the center is a gold circle with a lava rock suspended in the middle.
February 14, 2025 at 7:43 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
One subreddit I really like is r/BenignExistence, where people talk about the mundane, pleasant parts of their lives, or post snippets of overhead conversations, like this one. What voices! It's an absolute gem.
A post from the r/BenignExistence subreddit, containing part 1 of a transcribed conversation between two women overheard in a hotel lobby: Blue Suitcase Woman: Bring a book or something for this lecture Friday, the guy’s a total blow hard. Zebra Suitcase Woman: You’ve got to keep an open mind. Blue Suitcase Woman: That’s all fine but you’ve also got to bring a book or something. Trust me. Zebra Suitcase Woman: The lady on the bus turned out to be my best friend because I kept an open mind. She had her bag on the seat and I hate people who put their bag on the seat. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt and it turns out she has a hip problem to where if she’d put it on the floor, she wouldn’t have been able to bend down to lift it up again. Blue Suitcase Woman: And you bonded over that enough to exchange contact information? Zebra Suitcase Woman: No, we wound up to be going to the same place and things blossomed from that. But they wouldn’t have if I’d bitched her out over her bag. A post from the r/BenignExistence subreddit, containing part 2 of a transcribed conversation between two women overheard in a hotel lobby: Blue Suitcase Woman: And you bonded over that enough to exchange contact information? Zebra Suitcase Woman: No, we wound up to be going to the same place and things blossomed from that. But they wouldn’t have if I’d bitched her out over her bag. Blue Suitcase Woman: You won’t become best friends with this guy Friday. Trust me. Zebra Suitcase Woman: I’m not saying I will but I’m open to the possibility it’ll be a good experience. Blue Suitcase Woman: If you’re keeping such an open mind, open your mind to the possibility it’ll be dry and tedious, so bring a book or something.
February 14, 2025 at 2:54 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
2. Rob ordered me something in secret, and it arrived today. It's a teeeeny tiny little bulbasaur carved out of jade.

I shall call him Bulby and he shall be mine, and he shall be my Bulby.

Look at it! It's so little! 🥹

#ThreeGoodThings
A close-up shot of a tiny little bulbasaur carved out of jade, facing head-on towards the camera. The carving is about the size of my thumb. A close up shot of a tiny little bulbasaur carved out of jade. The carving is about the size of my thumb. It's nestled in my hand at a 3/4 angle so you can see both the front and the side, including the bulb on its back.
February 12, 2025 at 2:00 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Today is National Pizza Day, so I made pizza from scratch tonight to celebrate. 🍽️
Two lumps of fresh pizza dough, sitting on a sheet of parchment paper, waiting to be rolled out. An uncooked pizza sitting in a metal pan. The pizza is topped with tomato sauce, red onion, bell pepper, sliced sausage, and Parmesan cheese. Sabrina, a brown tabby cat, sniffs inquisitively at a plate of pizza sitting on my lap.
February 10, 2025 at 12:05 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Oooh!

One other possibility I'd like to recommend is Supernova by Andrea Maack. It's spicy and sweet without being too gourmand.
A screenshot from Fragrantica for the perfume Supernova by Andrea Maack. It has accords that are warm and spicy, woody, aromatic, and leathery. A screenshot from Fragrantica for the perfume Supernova by Andrea Maack. The listed notes are cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, cypress, cedarwood, lavender, oud, leather and vetiver.
February 2, 2025 at 2:54 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
I checked my account today and it looks like the tax rebate cheque already cleared.

So here's proof that I did what I said I'd do: I donated the money via CanadaHelps to my local library. I also requested that they use it to support a queer youth activity or buy books by queer authors.
A screenshot showing proof of donation to the Pickering Public Library's general fund for $200.
January 31, 2025 at 4:50 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Woolf, on the futility and soullessness of fascist art:
A passage from "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf: "At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is 'to develop the Italian novel'. 'Men, famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations' came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope 'that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it'. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life."
January 28, 2025 at 1:48 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Woolf: default masculinity is boring and trans lives matter, damn it.
A passage from "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf: "It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity, and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself 'superior'."
January 28, 2025 at 12:51 PM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
Anu Garg, the creator of the A Word A Day mailing list, continues to hate Trump and I am here for it. Here are screenshots of today's word and quote of the day.
A screenshot from today's A Word A Day mailing list. Today's word is "perfidious", which means "treacherous or deceitful". The quote of the day in today's A Word A Day email is by Francis Bacon: "Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise."
January 22, 2025 at 11:27 AM
cvasilevski.bsky.social
One of the things giving me joy right now is just how much the A Word A Day folks *hate* that orange fuckhead. It was clear in 2016, and it's clear today. Even the little image accompanying today's word - "nefandous" - on point.
A screenshot from A Word A Day (www.wordsmith.org) showing today's word: "nefandous". "Nefandous" is an adjective meaning "so wicked as to defy description; abominable; appalling." Accompanying the definition is a still image taken from one of the Harry Potter movies showing the cover of the Daily Prophet newspaper with the headline "He Who Must Not Be Named Returns".
January 20, 2025 at 6:19 PM