Frosted Echoes

In 1995, a young, optimistic technologist found himself frustrated by the dire prognostications of a splenetic Luddite. The technologist, Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired magazine, went to interview the Luddite, Kirkpatrick Sale, at his apartment. The interview was a pretext for Kelly to challenge Sale to a bet about the future of a society influenced by the rapid gains in computing technology. Kelly had a strong belief that society would benefit tremendously from advances in computing.

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I don’t know how long I’m going to want to examine the previous four years, at least as we climb our way out of this mud pit. Maybe when we’ve left the pit far enough behind us, we can talk about it on a walk between the oak trees, breathing air that we aren’t afraid is diseased.

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I love this post, about turning the tables on disgust, from Austin Kleon. In particular the quote below really speaks to me. I’m a person who appreciates much of life but who also has a certain amount of frustration and sometimes revulsion with things that I see going on in the world. Even with these feelings, I want to present the positive more often than the negative. Kleon explains his formula to do just that.

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Approximately annually, around the end of the year, I examine my presence on the web. I mostly focus on blogging. This year, I experimented with the new blogging options on the Medium platform. I like them a lot. The ability to create shorter posts within your timeline is a game changer. The new customization options let your make your blog more personal. Combined with the great support Medium has for embeds through Embedly, the service feels a bit like Tumblr for adults. It's a nice set of tools. Unfortunately, it's still Medium. It thrives on social media staples such as likes (claps) and followers.

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I have to admit, I have been somewhat surprised at people arguing against tech companies being able to enforce their terms of service. Working at a software company, I have been involved with our legal representatives in crafting terms of service, and never have I heard a question come up about our ability to enforce said terms. However, with social media, this seems to be coming up fairly often these days.

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For the past 2 years, I’ve been making a playlist for each month. I put together the playlist, throughout the month, pulling tracks from my New Music list on Apple Music, my favorite music blogs and sometimes even rereleases of classic material. As Jason Morehead wrote of 2019, I always worry that I’m not going to find the same amount of good music as I did in the previous year.

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I am a Protestant, but I can appreciate the purpose of icons that remind us of the great communion of saints. I have a hard time imagining asking for intercessory prayers from a saint, but a Catholic friend once put it to me as being like asking a friend to pray for you. I have to admit that made some sense, though I still don’t know about veneration.

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Beautiful Noise. A simple title to a record label compilation, but a more accurate descriptor could not have been employed. Beautiful Noise from Sunday Records is just that, slices of mostly synthetic instrumental dream pop that are as ethereal and gorgeous as any your imagination could conjure. Almost every song is uniquely transportational, taking the listener to a different liminal space, but the pervading aesthetic fuses the parts together as a magnificent whole. By the time the drums pads hit on the second track, “Million Years” by Mariana In Our Heads, you will likely be someplace else entirely.

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Today I got this shirt from my loving wife as a Christmas present. The Local 506 is where, in 1993, I saw my first rock show. The headlining act was a local math rock band from the Merge Records stable, Polvo. Proceeds from the t-shirt go to help the club reopen when the pandemic is over.

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