🍿 Her: The emotional ups and downs in this film seemed a bit contrived, but the aesthetic was amazing and the acting top notch.
In issue 31 of his newsletter, Ringo Dreams of Lawn Care, Michael Donaldson takes on people loving to hate new musical genre names. Instead of feeling intimidated, I say embrace the genre and all its fancifully named layers. Genre is an identifier, important in pointing the way and gluing together scenes. There was a time that you could walk into an indie record store, look at the clientele, and guess what genres they listened to by how they looked.
By the level, by the square and by the All-Seeing Eye: Christianna Silva writes for NPR about the decline in the ranks of the Freemasons. The order is making the case that more people should be joining groups like them, that eschew differences and promote fellowship, primarily for its own sake. While social media (particularly Facebook) may present itself in a similar manner, as bringing people together, quite often the actual result is division.
Color me impressed by the portrayal of Ashoka Tano on the Mandolorian. I always felt she was almost too cartoonish a character, even for an animated show, but she was fantastic in live action.
A colleague of mine recently moved to a new apartment after his roommate left and his lease was up. He travels lightly and made short work of the move. I wish I could say I would be able to do the same, but it would take me a while to move all of my stuff.1 I wondered aloud about the difficulty of moving my record collection. Another coworker said “one man’s treasure is another man’s trash,” inverting the old aphorism. I stared at my records filling the bottom four cubes of my IKEA Kallax shelves.
Grateful to be able to watch a YouTube video and replace a $3 fuse in my dead microwave rather than call out appliance repair.
Nighttime lacrosse (a collage).
I love this article, which details a Presbyterian church in Queens that is building an affordable housing complex with 174 units in their parking lot.
My teenage son spends his free time using a gerrymandering simulator to see how many blue districts he can get in Oklahoma and red districts he can get in Maryland without crossing the line into unconstitutionality.
In episode 270 of the Seeing and Believing podcast, hosts Wade Bearden and Kevin McLenithan discuss one of my top five favorite movies of all time, the cinematic adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. The discussion was prompted by the recent death of Sean Connery, who starred in the film alongside Michael Caine. I first saw the movie when my 12th grade English teacher showed it to the class and loved it immediately.
I’m so convinced by the central argument of Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs 📚 that I keep pausing to pick up older books.
M.G. Siegler has a post describing what I thought Twitter’s new Fleets feature would be and goes into why it really doesn’t fit with Twitter in its current state. I agree with the assessment that this functionality just doesn’t make sense on this platform the way it does on Instagram.
I can accept that I’m in the minority when I say that Dave Grohl’s greatest legacy is being the occasional drummer for The Bird and the Bee.
Medium recently changed their mobile reading experience. It’s still in beta, and you have to toggle a preference in settings to turn it on, so you won’t see it by default. They have been signaling its coming for a few months, though. The tag line they’ve been using is that it makes Medium “more relational.”
It has been revealed that a $1 million donation from Dolly Parton helped to fund Moderna’s new COVID vaccine. This woman is one of our greatest national treasures.
In a politically charged year when the circus can’t be completely avoided, this interview with Barack Obama is one of the best things I’ve read.
I want to pose something to others who are writing on the internet. You don’t have to write think pieces to refute bald-faced lies. If someone tells you the sky is green and you can easily determine that it is blue, you do not bear the burden of proving the sky is blue. Particularly if the person saying it is green is known for nothing so much as the outrageous and provably false lies they constantly tell.
Matt Poppe has been reviewing each episode of the Mandalorian for Christ and Pop Culture and he picks up on something that intrigued me in his piece about the second episode.
When Mando tells the X-Wing pilots, “May the Force be with you,” one of them replies, “And also with you.” Is that officially a thing now? I knew we (Star Wars fans) often say, “And also with you,” because it feels right for those of us with a liturgical church background. But I don’t actually remember it being an official Star Wars-y thing. Someone tweet me what you think. A quick Google search makes me think this hasn’t actually been canon until now.
When the phrase “and also with you” was used to respond to “may the force be with you” it sounded to these liturgical ears like something so right and familiar. Yet, I too found myself wondering whether that had ever been used in Star Wars before. I’m pretty sure Poppe is right, this is something new to the Mandalorian.
Someone who knows tell me. When the X Wing pilot responds, "And also with you," to Mando, is that a canonical response to "May the Force be with you"? Or was this the first?https://t.co/MR0CYqCvZo pic.twitter.com/oQQHNcSvgM
— 𝘼 𝙩𝙝𝙧𝙞𝙡𝙡 𝙤𝙛 𝙋𝙤𝙥𝙥𝙚 🌵🎄 (@TheMattPoppe) November 12, 2020
Well, it turns out I couldn’t avoid politics this weekend. I’m so glad that ended up being the case, though. Grateful for this election outcome.
Trying hard to keep politics from being my companion this weekend. I can still use Micro.blog.
This Friday night, those of us in the US are probably election fatigued. Let’s spend some time with a duo from the other side of the world. Egoism hail from Sydney, Australia and stand firmly in a global line of brilliant dream pop. They just dropped the On Our Minds EP today, which they affectionately refer to as their shoegaze release. Most of the tracks have more of an indie pop sound, though, with subtle hints of gauzy textures. However, my favorite track, ‘Never Leave,’ has a little of Depreciation Guild in the last minute, sounding a bit like shoegaze flirting with chiptune.
“In America, in every puddle, there’s a gasoline rainbow.”
~ Doug Martsch, Built to Spill
Just updated my Now Page (anemic holidays edition).
Currently reading: A Passage to India by E. M. Forster 📚. East meets West in Colonial India. Some of the stereotypes are a bit hard to take, but it’s all done to show the ridiculousness of them.
I am an unaffiliated voter. I used to vote based on policies and candidates. In the last few years, the Grand Old Party has made decision making at voting time a lot easier. They helpfully put an R next to the people you shouldn’t vote for on the ballot. The kinds of people this party tends to attract view politics as a game to be won, rather than a way to improve the country.
Made with
in North Carolina.
© 2017 Frosted Echoes