In a world that’s full of surprises, it turns out that accepting “full responsibility” for massive layoffs might not have the weight it appears to. Art Shaikh, serial entrepreneur and CEO of the tech firm Digital Will more cynically echoes that in the first instance, “claiming responsibility for layoffs might seem like a noble move”, but in reality, “it is advice given by PR professionals”. The language used in these circumstances is so homogeneous and transparent, Mike Lacher from McSweeney’s was able to do a pitch perfect parody.

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I’ve been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a “last known good” configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running. It was like being able to go back in a time machine to before a failure (a power most of us would like to have IRL). It was a chance to correct something and make it right, and then avoid the negative consequences.

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I generally don’t do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year’s, I get a chance to reflect back on what I’ve enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.

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The skate video that first brought jazz into my consciousness in a very real way was Stereo Skateboards A Visual Sound. After seeing the movie, I started wearing brown dickies and buying John Coltrane CDs. Not everyone in the skateboarding community was into the film, with it’s mixture of black and white stills and footage recorded on Super 8. I was smitten with the aesthetic, though. It was an acknowledgement of something that I had always thought — skateboarding was just as much art as sport. To this day I can’t listen to fast, post-bop jazz without wanting to skate.

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I used to have a well-worn VHS cassette of Sonic Youth’s tour video, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It featured a just-experiencing-stardom phase of Nirvana, but that wasn’t the reason I watched it over and over. I was more interested in the Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. performances that were recorded at these giant European music festivals. Until Lollapalooza sprang forth from the mind of Perry Farrell, we didn’t have bands like Sonic Youth playing huge outdoor venues in North America.¹

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I’m always on the hunt for new music. I’m honestly proud of the fact that my musical tastes didn’t freeze in my teenage years. Nayantara Dutta explores how people form and retain their musical tastes for a piece in The Washington Post.

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When the pandemic hit, I wasn’t excited about turning over my computer to my high school student son. I had made a rule that my boys would never have a TV or computer in their room. This is advice I’d heard many times directed at the conscientious parent. However, with virtual schooling being the only option in the spring of 2020, I gave up on the rule and gave in to pragmatism. My son got my iMac, and, for a while, I went without a computer apart from my work laptop and my iPad.

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Recently on Micro.blog, folks have been talking about “slow technology.” This usually means single-use or limited-use devices. The phrase “wise phones” has apparently been coined to refer to flip phones and other simple telephony. Anna Havron, an analogue and simplification enthusiast, recently wrote a post on downgrading her own phone.

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Pure Holiday by Ice Choir Though I deeply value the religious rituals and recognitions of the Christmas season, one of my favorite Christmas songs is totally secular. “It’s Different Now” by Ice Choir is all Hallmark, unoffensive generic “toys and candy canes” sentiment. The song is guaranteed to warm even the hearts of the newest of new atheists. It’s almost as if Clark Griswold’s speech — on the meaning of an agnostic Christmas — at the end of the Vacation movie set during the holiday season was made into a song.

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This fantastic piece by Laura Kolbe for n + 1 magazine takes on current building aesthetics and expands to a cogent and comical critique of contemporary throwaway culture.

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Mastodon was created in 2016, and the site still harkens back to its origins, a time when Gamergate and the atrocious harassment of women in tech on Twitter was still very fresh in our minds. The platform was in a way a reaction to that and the rising toxic atmosphere on social media. At the time, Twitter was also in the throes of dealing with the side effects of a Donald Trump candidacy and subsequent presidency. As such, one of the primary features of Mastodon was to stamp out hate and harassment. It’s a laudable goal, and very much needed in today’s technology landscape. There’s a problem there, though, in that Mastodon seems to define itself, at least in part, as the anti-Twitter.

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In a worship service recently, our pastor explored the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the book of Matthew. It was a thought-provoking homily about family ties. Alastair Roberts writes for Plough magazine about how we fit our own lives into the continuum of people that have come before us.

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I often think about how humans are maladapted to our current environments in some ways. For a knowledge worker, 40 hours+ a week at a desk and more time spent looking at a screen probably isn’t what we were made for or have evolved to do. Cal Newport underscores this in a piece about our anthropology.

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Perhaps the definitive cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep,” from their seminal album, Loveless, is Memoryhouse’s version from their 2010 Yours Truly live session. The song was breathlessly passed around the internet and gained Memoryhouse a fair amount of attention. When I saw Memoryhouse play live, I asked the band’s Even Abeele if they were ever going to record a studio version of the cover. He told me they were setup to do just that, in New York, with James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins, no less. Unfortunately, someone contributing to the session got in a car accident on the way to record. What a missed opportunity.

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