This is something for Christians to think about, as we get closer to Election Day. Christians will be persecuted. It still happens today, but not as much since the church became respectable under Constantine. There is a good example of a leader who led the church in the wrong direction and changed the focus. We have never recovered. Some are still looking for another Constantine instead of the return of Jesus.
The days are piling up on one another. Their beginning, middle and end feel strikingly familiar. One bleeds into the next. I’ve heard others describe it as Groundhog Day. At some point during this endless string of days, it became clear to me that I had to do something to get my boys out of the house. We limit even their ability to go with us to stores to reduce their risk of exposure to COVID.
Filmed in Osaka and Kyoto, this short film by Brett Novak follows Japanese skateboarder Isamu Yamamoto as he freestyles his way around ancient structures. Isamu is obviously deeply influenced by Rodney Mullen, and brings back a style of skateboarding that hasn't been seen much since Mullen and Per Welinder ruled the streets in the 80's. Mullen was a spectator, when, at the age of 14, Yamamoto took first place at the World Freestyle Round-Up Skateboarding Championships in BC, Canada.
I find myself in the most unusual position of agreeing with Attorney General William Barr. Barr believes that major tech companies are making serious compromises in order to get access to the Chinese labor and consumer market.
"The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report,” Barr said. “America’s big tech companies have also allowed themselves to become pawns of Chinese influence.”
In the article, one of the tech companies named, Apple, declined to comment. How could they offer any explanation? They are at the mercy of China for the products that are made almost entirely in that country.
The Micro.blog platform has been growing lately, and part of the growth has been through plugins and new apps. Plugins are a welcome additions to the base M.b. hosted blogging experience. They do simple but helpful things, like adding open graph and Twitter cards for rich previews of content on various platforms, site search and footnote popups. Plugins feel like a big step in the maturity of the platform and allow those with the technical savvy to extend the features of the service.
Friday Night Videos: Bad Habit
This is a short one, and I’d rather some new full-length music from the Ice Choir, but the lo-fi beats and animated video make this enjoyable.
Image by Charles Deluvio from Unsplash Andrew Carter writes for the News and Observer on how wearing a mask became a political issue. In the piece, he describes how a group called ReopenNC recently organized a protest against current restrictions put in place by the governor. When a reporter asked a man at the protest to discuss his thoughts on wearing face coverings, he responded with a sarcastic dismissal.
“Mandatum” by Lawrence OP via Flickr Matt Taibbi has a thought-provoking edition of his newsletter where he ponders whether journalism is destroying itself with its changing mission of asking hard questions to one of trying not to offend. He makes some good points, although some of his examples of cancel culture might not be entirely accurate. What struck me, though, was a particular paragraph listing situations where people were trying hard to show their respect for the African American community.
Fun video for an indie rock classic.
Bad Brains at the 9:30 Club in 1983. Image by Malco23 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I’m not normally a huge fan of recorded live music. Very few of my most treasured albums were recorded in a live context. The majority of the time, I find live recordings to be inferior versions of their studio-recorded counterparts. Right now, though, I’m mostly home bound, unable to attend gatherings where music would be played.
I do not want this moment to pass with the changing of the news cycle. I want these fires to remain lit until there is reason to put them out. I don’t mean the literal fires and I don’t mean the looting that is destroying communities and livelihoods that were already in danger from the pandemic. I mean the protests that catch people’s attention and make them take a pause and start thinking about what right looks like and how we get there.
Downtown Raleigh, like some other major metro downtowns, was ablaze last night. A couple of hours of peaceful demonstrations gave way to riotous violence and frustration boiled over into destruction. “Nearly every shop along Fayetteville Street had shattered windows.” Before the violence started, the police presence made Raleigh look like it had been taken over by a military junta. From WRAL.com, police in riot gear in Raleigh Clearly, the city was preparing for the kind of chaos that was to come.
Protesters photo by Lorie Shaull via Flickr “Our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While citizens riot in Minneapolis and people begin to say “enough,” the president of this country can only think that the proper response to a disproportionate use of force is another disproportionate use of force. For using the words of other racist leaders of the past, to call for potentially lethal violence upon US citizens, he has been censured by Twitter.
In this week’s Moore To The Point newsletter, Russell Moore dives into conspiracy theories, with an emphasis on their context in Christian circles. The reason that crazy conspiracy theories get a hearing in Christian circles is not because most Christians believe them. In talking with a pastor with flat-earth, moon-landing denialists in his church, I asked, “How many of your people are convinced by that stuff?” He said, “No one but the one family, but the people who think the earth is not flat don’t wake up in the morning caring about that; these people do.
My 2018 iPad Pro with Magic Trackpad 2 I bought an iPad Pro back in 2018, when I was studying for one of the AWS exams. It was both a reward to myself and a tool for taking notes on the exam topics. I have been using it heavily ever since. When the COVID crisis forced many of us knowledge workers home, I had to rework my home office configuration.
Marius Masalar has some thoughts about blogging and link posts. Masalar sees a lot of value in them and the role they play in the makeup of the IndieWeb. At their best, link posts are a way for independent bloggers to engage with and continue a conversation started by one of their fellows. We use them to boost each other up, offer constructive criticism, point out other views, or amplify a message we believe in.
Lofi beatmaker extraordinare and all around great guy Takahiro Fuchigami put together a compilation (also on Spotify) of his work to commemorate a decade of making music. Here is his recommendation for listening. Please enjoy when you study, cook, clean your place, and as your store BGM. It’s enjoyable at any situation. Please put the music beside of you and make your time peace and calm. This collection would make an excellent soundtrack to playing the game Skate City or to just watching a street scene.
I’ve been trying Wordpress out for a long time. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many innocent AWS EC2 instances died horrible deaths so I could experiment with self-hosted Wordpress installations. It’s almost sadistic. Yet I keep checking out the platform, hoping to find that perfect theme, and that ideal blogging workflow that allows me to write in a good text editor, post through a robust API and like the way it comes out when a reader sees it.
Jeremy D. Larsen, writing for Pitchfork, uses the riotous 1913 Paris debut performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to illustrate the difficulty our brains have in enjoying new music. The performance, to perhaps understate the effect, took its audience outside of their sonic comfort zones. Many members of the audience could not fathom this new music; their brains—figuratively, but to a certain extent, literally—broke. A brawl ensued, vegetables were thrown, and 40 people were ejected from the theater.
In his latest newsletter, Chris Bowler spends a bit of time on the Roam note taking service that is currently in beta. His reference for Roam was Drew Coffman. I love Drew, and he attaches to new ideas with the zeal of an ancient Athenian. Roam bares more resemblance to a wiki than anything else, but its proponents insist it’s a completely new way of thinking about note taking. The service is thick with enthusiastic documentation on how to use it for different purposes, adapting it to GTD, increasing your speed and productivity with a plethora of keyboard shortcuts, etc.
A few months ago, Consequence of Sound reported on Disney passing on the chance to buy Twitter because, in the words of Disney chief Bob Iger, “the nastiness is extraordinary.” Gladiatrix fight photo by Hans Splinter from flickr. Once upon a time, way back in 2017, there was a little website called Twitter that caught the eyes of the monolith Disney. The idea at the time was for Disney to acquire Twitter to help modernize its distribution, The New York Times reports.
Dinosaur Jr. - Green Mind Us old dudes are suckers for reissues of our favorite records. I’ve owned Green Mind by Dinosaur Jr. on cassette, compact disc and vinyl. Still, when I saw another colored vinyl version newly available for sale, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to make a purchase. It’s especially hard to resist that kind of acquisition when you believe that, after the apocalypse, the only currency worth anything will be vinyl records.
Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary, NC
This year, around the holiday season, I’ve had a shift in my thinking about Christmas and the period of waiting that comes before. In the past, I’ve thought of the season of Advent as a joyous preparatory time for the a celebration that is Christmas. The onslaught of cheerful Christmas songs, that starts just as the tryptophan induced coma from Thanksgiving wears off, contributes to that way of framing things. Bing lets you know when it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and he doesn’t seem at all concerned that the holiday is almost a month away.
According to a new Pew Research poll, the number of Republicans who say presidents could operate more effectively if they did not have to worry so much about Congress and the courts has increased 16 percentage points since last year, from 27% to 43%. Among only those classified as conservative Republicans, the number of those in favor of more presidential power has doubled in the past year. The fears that this president has promoted the idea of a totalitarian state to his followers seems to have been well founded.
I saw my first show at a club in 1993, at the venerable Local 506, on Franklin St. in Chapel Hill. The venue is still there, nestled snugly between two Indian restaurants. Now I typically go to see a band there every couple of years or so. At that initial show, I saw Polvo, with the classic lineup of Ash Bowie, Dave Brylawski, Steve Popson and Eddie Watkins. My first rock show was supposed to be seeing Mudhoney the previous year, at the 9:30 Club in DC, where my cousin worked.
Manuel Riess (@hutaffe) recently wrote a bit about returning from Apple Music to Spotify. His dissatisfaction centers around music discovery, hearing new material from artists that the system already should know he likes, and the New Music playlist. I have had some of the same frustrations. The New Music playlist, which is updated every Friday, used to be something to which I looked forward, at the end of the week. Lately, though, it almost seems like artists (or labels) have been paying to have their music featured on the lists of listeners.
Folks, I would really like to checkout The Mandolorian. However, that would require two things: That I setup a Disney+ subscription. This shouldn’t be too hard. That I stop watching the new Tennis video on repeat. That one is going to be tougher. The husband and wife duo that comprise Tennis wrote this song while living on a boat, anchored in a fisherman’s cove, armed only with an acoustic guitar and a drum sequencer.
Next week, Instagram is set to begin hiding like counts on posts in the US, according to this TechCrunch piece. The move is expected to hurt influencers on the platform, as initial tests in other countries showed that likes on posts went down when the counts were not displayed. The influencer economy is supposed to be a big part of what drives the platform. The speculation is that anything that hurts those influencers and their ability to use Instagram to build their businesses too badly will be rolled back.
Two years ago, in 2017, was the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. For those of us in the reformed tradition, it was a pretty big deal. This Sunday, we celebrate our annual “Reformation Sunday” in the Presbyterian Church. Internet Monk recently had a repost from the late Michael Spencer, on the Reformation. Spencer studied the Reformation extensively. Though he remained a proud Protestant, he also came away with some pretty frank observations and critiques of either the Reformation movement itself or the way we have come to view it.
It has never been a better time to quit Facebook, after the company recently revealed a policy that formalized the ability of politicians to lie in ads on the platform. Techcrunch writer Josh Costine called the move a disgorgement of responsibility. The web publication has another piece by Costine, calling on Facebook, and other tech companies, to ban political ads altogether. The ban would hold until they can come up with a coherent policy that doesn’t erode democratic freedoms by inundating the populace with misinformation.
In a break from my normal habit of avoiding hot takes and only sticking to what is room temperature or below, I wanted to write a bit about the uproar of the week. Specifically, the NBA, that proud bastion of social justice rebellion in recent times, ceding their moral high ground for the irresistible attraction of oodles of Chinese yuan. Part of the name of this weblog has to do with my intention of capturing ideas being echoed around the blogosphere and there have been many people weighing in on this subject on their blogs.
It’s good to see early results in some experiments with universal basic income. I’m especially interested in seeing how can the implementation of such programs can break the cycle of poverty. In Stockton, CA, those who qualified for the program were given $500 a month. After talking to researchers and social workers about the program, Paradela felt a little more confident. And when the money finally showed up that first month, “it came just in time,” she said: Her car battery had died, and she needed money to fix it.
In the latest issue of his newsletter, Om Malik writes about consumerism being one of the harder habits to beat. But there is one demon I have not been able to conquer, an addiction that is worse than nicotine: consumerism. For the past four years, every year, I make an effort to get rid of things and buy less. It is not easy to do — the machines of desire work constantly and are powerful.
With the start of the football season, there are many who are questioning whether they should continue to support the sport and the NFL. @mgs had this post on the subject of the upcoming season. I have very mixed feelings about watching football these days. On one hand, it’s without question the best of the major US sports to watch on television. On the other, it’s an absolutely barbaric sport.
In Light Phone 2: the high hopes of the low-tech phone, Michael Zelenko writes about how hope for the minimalist phones like the Light Phone and the Punkt phone should probably be tempered by limited target customers. There may not be a mass market for minimalist phones — they’re expensive, they’re superfluous, they’re extra — but there could be niche markets for the Light Phone: well-to-do campers, weekend warriors, the hyper-wired looking for relief.
This post by @rmcrob bemoans the current state of churches focused more on therapeutic purposes than biblical teaching. A year ago we focused, ostensibly, on the Bible and what God wanted to tell us. Now we are concerned with the financial health and wealth of young families, how to raise children, how to keep a marriage vital, how to be good friends, and stuff like that. Sort of like classes you might take at a community center.
In this post, @ayjay writes about studying politics as opposed to absorbing news. A great many people think they’re interested in politics when they’re only interested in news. I have in recent years grown more and more interested in politics and economics, which is to say, the whole long history of all the ways in which we human beings have tried to live together without killing one another but instead, perhaps, finding some arena of mutual benefit.
With the introduction of the Feedbin client for iOS, which mirrors the new design of the Feedbin web app, I think I may have found my Twitter sweet spot. Feedbin has had top notch integration with Twitter for some time, allowing you to follow users as if they had RSS feeds (which Twitter did have, in the early days). For tweets with links, Feedbin includes the content of the article to which the tweet links.
In a piece entitled Our Moloch, written just after the Sandy Hook shootings, Garry Wills compares the American love for guns to the ancient worship of the god Moloch. The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned.
In the continuing saga of anecdotal evidence that our healthcare system is badly in need of repair, @ayjay offers this story from his son. Yesterday my son, who works in the Chicago Loop, saw a woman on a bicycle get hit by a car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but she was knocked to the ground, dazed. He ran up to her to see if she was okay and pulled out his phone to call 911 — but she quickly, urgently said, “No!
In the piece, Study Asks If War Makes A Person More … Or Less … Religious, Diane Cole writes for NPR about the affect being in intense conflict situations has on personal and communal religiosity. The more profound the impact of war on an individual — such as the death, injury or abduction of a household member — the greater the likelihood grew of that person turning to religion. By contrast, those who had been less affected by the impact of war were also less likely to join a a religious group.
The NY Public Library has just joined Unsplash. NOAA is there as well. This leaves me wondering if Unsplash for Education is essentially building an equivalent of Flickr Commons.
In Why On Earth Are So Many Millennials Becoming Nuns?, Eve Fairbanks examines why millennial women are flocking to religious orders in record numbers. The piece is a fascinating look at how ancient Catholic institutions are faring in contemporary times. Several women are profiled in the article. One, named Rachael, in part seems to be reacting against the ambiguity of moral relativism. It was partly a bitter joke, but partly a sincere thought.
In our worship service on Sunday, we watched the trailer for a documentary, done by the PCUSA, on Central American migration. The documentary, Genesis of Exodus explains the conditions in the countries from which people are fleeing. Ultimately, it’s a call for compassion for those who are leaving their homelands for better lives somewhere else. That means you must also love immigrants because you were immigrants in Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10:19, CEB)
Chaplain Mike writes on Richard Beck’s observations about the relationship of progressive Christians to the Bible. First, he finds many of them fragile when it comes to the Bible. They are fearful and suspicious when approaching scripture. Their first instinct is to find what’s problematic in the Bible. They miss the joy of scripture. They approach it as skeptics first, mistrustful of what they are going to find, already leaning toward a conclusion that the Bible has been used in so many harmful ways over the course of history that one must first deconstruct it before finding anything of value in it.
I seem to be reading a lot about “influencers” lately. When I think of influencers, the typical profile that comes to mind is the Instagram star with oodles of followers trading their share of eyeballs for products that are ripe for placement. @rmcrob recently posted a link to an article about an ice cream truck that charges influencers, who try to get free ice cream, in return for exposure, double the cost for some fresh desert.
In The New Wilderness, Maciej Cegłowski writes about changing views around privacy and how the rules that served us so well in the past didn’t take into account the present landscape. Though there are many, the piece is easily one of the best that I’ve read on the subject. In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure.
🎵 Sebadoh - Sunshine: I’m still deciding how I feel about the majority of the new Sebadoh album, Celebrate The Void. Sebadoh and I have a long history and it has been about 27 years since I heard that the bassist who got kicked out of Dinosaur Jr. had his own band. At the time I nearly flipped my lid. In the fall of 1994, I went to see Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr.
An excerpt from an interview with singer/songwriter Bill Callahan about his new album, which exudes a certain comfort. Do you consider yourself an optimist? Every day, waking up in the morning fills me with optimism. Everything is moving along. The bugs are doing their thing. Traffic is going on. Everyone’s going to work. Everything’s working, going in one direction. Keep in mind, Callahan has been in some pretty dark places, as even a quick examination of his older albums will show.
I wrote recently about how my bullet journal is becoming more of a traditional journal now. It also serves as a common-place book for various bits of information. This post from Public Domain Review goes into detail about how John Locke organized his common-place book and briefly reflects on how the glut of information that was a consequence of the printing press made such books popular. With the rise of printing technologies, common-place books reflected an anxiety with a deluge of new information still present today.
The New Yorker recently featured an article from Cal Newport entitled Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? that generated a lot of interest and responses from the IndieWeb community. The focus of the piece was whether the rise of the IndieWeb and decentralized social media services could help to mitigate some of the problems that have come from the corporate social media networks. Ultimately, Newport concludes that the IndieWeb will never reach the popularity of the current social media spaces.
I started the year 2019 with another respectable bullet journal (bujo), crafted from a Moleskine notebook and made to get things done. Something went awry along the way to filling that notebook, though. The problems begin when I realized, as in other years, I was going to have far less tasks than notebook. Something seemed slightly tragic about having a perfectly good notebook with so much space going to waste. The bullet journal system doesn’t encourage traditional journaling, so much as it does creating action items and systems to develop habits.
I have been following the health status of, and praying for, Rachel Held Evans recently, as she lay in a coma induced to keep her brain from constant seizures. Yesterday, Evans passed away, after a fight to keep her alive following an ordeal that started with a reaction to antibiotics. As word of Evans death spread through the internet, many expressed their shock and grief. A number of those people also wrote about how she inspired them to take bold steps in their lives, to walk in faith.
I never was one to buy a ton of records, but one of the reasons I have slacked off of my vinyl purchasing lately is that not everything I have been excited about has been released on that format. That may be a problem with a resolution, thanks to Bandcamp’s new vinyl service. Today, we’re offering a first glimpse of an initiative from Bandcamp that aims to address these challenges.
This is a piece I wrote almost exactly a year ago. It never made it to this blog but it seems relevant as Christians head into Easter and celebrate the Lord’s Supper. I’ve written favorably of The Faith Angle podcast before, and I continue to be impressed by the content on the show. In the fifth episode, guests Ross Douthat and Father James Martin argue the importance of adhering to traditional Catholic doctrine and when it’s imperative to set aside that doctrine in light of individual conscience and grace.
For those who are creating on the web and even monetizing their creative output, Richard MacManus - @ricmac - has had some appealing content recently. His interview with Jason Kottke dives into the journey Kottke has gone through in his 20+ years of blogging. I probably don’t need to do too much to recommend Kottke’s blog, as it already seems to have such a broad following. I will say I’ve been reading the blog for years and he consistently has a variety of interesting posts.
My little guy had his seventh name day not long ago. He was over the moon to receive what he called, “birthday love” from all the kids in Sunday School, grinning from ear to ear when they sang to him. We don’t do big birthday parties for our boys, so he doesn’t usually have a bunch of kids singing to him. We worried that he would be embarrassed, but that wasn’t at all the case.
Last year, for the first time, I fasted during Lent. I made Friday my fast day and fasted from sunup to sundown. It was an interesting experiment. Some days it wasn’t too hard, other days the hunger was intense, or I would get a bad headache by the end of the day. The point of fasting (especially as part of Lenten devotion) isn’t for it to be easy, though. This past month, I spent 3 weeks sick with the flu and then bronchitis.
Most of the Record Store Day exclusives recently have not been my cup of tea. However, this year, one release in particular caught my eye after the tragic death of Richard Swift. Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard will pay tribute to friend and collaborator Richard Swift with a new 7-inch split single featuring two unreleased tracks recorded by the pair. The A-side is an unreleased demo of “Me and Magdalena” which Gibbard wrote for The Monkees’ 2016 album Good Times!
A lot of people these days are worried about the demise of Tumblr. The product has changed hands a few times, and neither its Yahoo! parents or its Verizon parents seem to have paid much attention to it. M.G. Siegler took his concerns to his Medium blog, 500ish Words. In the post, he evaluates the current alternatives to Tumblr. What is most interesting, to me, is his quick dismissal of Micro.
After pining for the Apple HomePod last year, but feeling like it was just a bit too expensive to justify purchasing at the time, I rejoiced when Apple announced they were bringing their music service to the Amazon Echo. I even wrote a blog post about the move. My enthusiasm may have been a bit premature. I purchased one of the new Echo Plus units, with an Amazon gift card I had received, shortly after Christmas.
I like the idea of an analog manifesto from @rianvdm. The comparison to the Agile Manifesto, with it’s message of preference, not exclusion, seems appropriate. This coming year I’m going to try to manage my home tasks and journaling with a bullet journal and my work tasks with Things. I’ve discovered over this past year that what works in one environment is not always as effective in another. I’m not sure about New Year’s Resolutions, but if I have any, it would be to look at everything through the lens of a new manifesto: analog over digital.
This paragraph from Tim Challies’ recent Merry Christmas post captures the twinge of sadness that comes from watching your kids grow up and lose some of that youthful enthusiasm really well. I know I’m mostly waiting in vain, though, because I know those days have passed. In previous years the Christmas Eve discussion was, “How early can we get up?” This year it was, “How late can we sleep in?
Though I have yet to see any of the ad placements he writes about, this piece from John Voorhees in MacStories about Apple heavily promoting the Apple Music/Amazon Echo integration comes as little surprise. Voorhees believes that the motivation for Apple to strike this partnership with their sometimes rival in services may be to get their hardware back on Amazon’s virtual shelves. While I haven’t read any contradicting information about the deal, I believe there may be another reason entirely.
Surprisingly, a not-insignificant part of the plot of the Bumblebee Transformers movie involves the main character, a teenage girl named Charlie Watson, trying to get Bumblebee to dig the Smiths like she does. What are the chances that a semi-anthropomorphic transformable robot from another planet will dig the heavily British jangle rock of the 80’s alternative band? Apparently, pretty good. This aids my theory that the Beatles were not only not the best rock band, they weren’t even the best British rock band.
Each year at Thanksgiving time, I think about the time I spent working in retail and the family time that had to be given up during the holiday season at the end of the year. I used to have to get up at 3am the morning after Thanksgiving to go to work and prep for the Black Friday stampede. In those early morning hours, I would arrive at work to find a line had already formed to await the opening of the doors.
A few days ago, my mom showed me these books about my great grandfather/grandmother and great great grandfather. I never knew these books existed and was delighted to read about these adventurous, faithful ancestors.
The public was recently treated to a preview of the new Star Wars themed areas at Disneyland/Disney World that was accompanied, most appropriately, by a John Williams soundtrack. The new parks, called “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge,” look as amazing as their $24 billion dollar price tags suggest they would. With openings in summer and fall of next year, respectively, the days of counting down will soon be starting for fans.
Justin Kossyln, who works in product management for Alphabet, argues it may be time to add some friction back to the web. But the internet’s lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a “bad actor” can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.
I was fortunate to see Henry Zhu speak at the All Things Open 2018 conference with honesty about the difficulties of being a full-time contributor to the open source community (as a maintainer). Though he probably won’t be thought of as the most dynamic speaker, Zhu’s humility, work ethic, desire to give back and vulnerability give strength to his message. Zhu has a podcast he co-hosts with Nadia Eghbal called Hope In Source about the parallels between faith and open source software.
The Apple New Music algorithm tries. It really does. At the end of every work week, it conjures up recommendations of recently released material that it thinks I would like. Sometimes, as was the case in early September, it finds a song from a band I’ve never heard of, that instantly becomes a new favorite of mine. Most Friday’s, though, I end up skipping through a lot of tracks that feel like near misses.
At its most effective, group therapy is successful primarily because it destroys the fallacy that we are alone in our sufferings. To discover that another individual has the same feelings that you have but thought were unique to you can be a revelation. We tend to see the face that others put on in order to get through the day and forget that the person we are viewing has many of the same fears and frustrations that we have but are also hiding.
Alexis Madrigal writes about how, despite the ability to switch to the reverse-chronological timeline, you can never go back to the old Twitter. Twitter always had a high-modernist novel’s scope — you peer into the boxes, and see someone having tea, a war you should have known was going on, a parent’s take on a 4-year-old, the latest ProPublica investigation, a screenshot of some idiot, a video of a black person being killed by police, an ad for Quiznos, and then Donald Trump tweeting about the television program he’s watching.
My family just enjoyed a beach trip with many of the amenities that renting a house by the ocean provides. In addition to all of the beach-related luxuries, we had cable television, which has long been absent from our house. It was a bit of a culture shock, going from the work of antenna-sourced television to the cesspool of cable TV, though. It was somewhat like imagining what it would look like if the unfortunate and immoral residents of Sodom and Gomorrah had closed-circuit television broadcasts.
The other day, on Twitter, I stumbled across this thread of people espousing their opinions about the Myers-Briggs personality profiler (or MBTI - Myer’s Briggs Type Indicator). Quite a few of the negative comments seem to be based on the belief that the origins of the type indicator are not scientifically credentialed enough. It is interesting to see a bunch of folks on Twitter who probably have no background in personality study attacking the MBTI for its humble origins in clinical observation done by CG Jung.
It seems the latest distraction thrown at the American public, from the president, is attacking the top Internet companies (Google, Twitter and Facebook) in just another step in the strategy of “feed the press or it eats you.” After all, though, it’s only natural that the constant cries of lugenpresse would eventually extend to the internet giants. Elizabeth Picciuto from Arc Digital argues the benefit for the president of consistently working to delegitimize any source of news that paints him in a bad light.
The Reagan administration was known for its deregulation initiatives. I never thought about one of those initiatives that probably actually had the most impact on my life as a child during the Reagan years, though. For decades, the FCC had rules that limited “excessive advertising.” This affected the amount of commercialism that could creep into children’s shows. Groups like Action for Children’s Television (ACT) ensured compliance with the rules. Consequence of Sound has a piece that speaks to how things were different under Reagan and how that enabled film-length product placement opportunities like Mac and Me.
This week, for the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed following the general news cycle in the US. I’m not going to lie, I have long harbored a belief that electing a white collar criminal to the office of President of the United States was a very bad idea. It’s more than mere gloating that gave me a sense of satisfaction from the events unfolding this week, though.
I’m happy to finally have a name for that phenomenon that I always knew existed but of which I never had a scientific explanation. Back in 1980, psychologist Richard Solomon came up with an idea he called the “ opponent process theory ” (paywall). Broadly, this states that whenever you feel one emotion, you’re slated to feel the opposite next. This would explain why after feeling happiness, we feel slightly gloomy.
I recently had my name day and added 2 years to the 4 decades I’ve been on the earth. I observed my birthday by undertaking a pilgrimage to the closest mecca of low-cost contemporary home furnishings, to buy some shelves for my turntable and records. After spending more than 20 years collecting records, I still did not have an ideal storage solution for them. While I’ve always rejected the argument that people collect vinyl for purely performative reasons, I’ve seen through Instagram’s discover algorithm that there are many people who do enjoy showing off their records.
Last year, I taught a confirmation class of 8th graders about famous Presbyterians. Although few really knew who he was, my favorite among those discussed was Fred Rogers. With the release of the movie Won’t You Be My Neighbor, Mr. Rogers has once again become a topic of conversation. @vasta recounts his emotional experience of the film, which was colored by his lifelong admiration of the beloved children’s show host. One thing that stood out to him is that even Fred Rogers suffered from self-doubt.
Philip Christman captures the kind of frustration I felt when using Tinyletter. Readers, I apologize for the atrocious formatting of last week’s newsletter. I have trouble making the UI of TinyLetter work on my laptop–in particular, it never wants to link. So sometimes I cut-and-paste the thing from elsewhere. That seems to have bitten us all in the ass. When I got my copy of my own newsletter, all the words were cut off on the right.
This article on the Apple data center in rural Maiden, NC sounds like something written about the Hawkins National Laboratory from Stranger Things before the cover was blown on their experiments. One quote particularly stood out amidst descriptions of the secrecy surrounding the site. David Vosburgh, a retired construction worker, says he doesn’t know anyone who has been hired there. He has lived in Maiden about 15 years, and says he unsuccessfully applied for a job at the data center.
The main response I hear to the Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country is disbelief that the events depicted in the show actually took place (in America, no less). Jen Chaney, from Vulture, takes a stab at encapsulating the insanity. It is a story that involves religion, free love, land use disputes, one of the co-founders of Nike, an exalted guru, abuse of power, arson, the wife of one of the producers of The Godfather, attempted murder, mass poisoning, an obsession with Rolls-Royces, the homeless, election battles, and one extremely bizarre anecdote about attempting to contaminate a town’s water supply using blended beaver parts.
On this Independence Day, when we celebrate the birth of our nation and honor what that means to us, there is division in the air and on the ground. I find it a most appropriate time to bring discussion to the state of the union and I’m happy that the church to which I belong, the Presbyterian Church USA, recently clarified some political positions. It is not mandated that all churches within the denomination to affirm the declaration that was made, but it is hoped that it will bring about some fruitful discussion and a careful consideration of where the Spirit is leading us as Christians.
One thing that angers me a great deal is the misappropriation of passages from Holy Scripture. Tyler Huckabee writes in Relevent Magazine on the dangers of dividing the Bible up into bite-size chunks appropriate for bumper sticker sloganeering: An unfortunate consequence of littering the Bible with the little demarcating numbers we call “chapter and verse” is the ease with which it allows the Bible to be split up piecemeal. We study and memorize the Bible in bite-sized chunks, just long enough to fit on a day calendar or scribble on a bathroom mirror.
Even as members and pastors have changed over the years, one complaint I’ve consistently heard about my church is that there are too many cliques. It’s an easy thing for a church culture to fall into. In fact, it may be impossible to avoid. Research into human relationships has given us insight into the number of close personal connections a person can maintain. This limit is referred to as Dunbar’s Number.
Justin Lee at Arc Digital argues that Apple is painting itself into a corner by arguing for a strict interpretation of the constitutional right to free speech in the Masterpiece case. Previously, when the FBI asked Apple to create software to neutralize security features on the iPhone, Apple argued that the order was compelled speech and that source code should be included in free speech protections. In doing so, Apple was advocating for a very broad interpretation of the free speech provision of the first amendment.
From Christ and Pop Culture on how the NFL has handled the player’s protesting by kneeling during the national anthem. By excluding the NFLPA from this decision, the owners are accepting the false narrative that the protests are against America and the military. These dismissive actions demonstrate that owners have shown little concern about the injustices and inequalities the players were attempting to highlight. Instead, their demand to end the protests seems to only come from a concern for their bottom-line profits.
One of the most rage inducing/heartbreaking things I’ve read this past week is that Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, removed her posts from Instagram. The action was most likely due to harassment Tran has been the recipient of for the last few months. Since shortly after the film’s debut, she has faced racist and sexist abuse online. A certain segment of Star Wars devotees proved to be too attached to the series after the prequels failed to live up to expectations.
I was only a few years old when the Star Wars trilogy first came to theaters, and the movies and toys tied to them had a formative role in how I used my imagination. I played Jedi training with my cousin on the playground, my dad and I used plastic baseball bats and pretended they were lightsabers, and different spots in my basement became their own planets as action figures shuttled between them in tiny space ships.
2018-05-26 A nautical journey in Boston. Walden Pond was not at all what I expected. I didn’t envision the beach vibe. 2018-05-27 Union Square donuts and some New England architectural charm. 2018-05-28 This way to Fenway Park.
Sarah Kurchak, writing about her grandfather’s apparent affection for Jar Jar Binks, who he called “Ho Ho Ding Ding” and believed was a talking camel, comes to some conclusions about the power of film. I also came to understand the depth and diversity of roles that a film can play in someone’s life: it could be a mere amusement or a guiding force, your best friend or your nemesis, your muse or your medicine.
After literally working with town officials for years on a new site for a store, IKEA has just cancelled their plans to build a location in Cary NC. Since the town had been planning a lot of changes that hinge on the arrival of the new store, I’m sure those that had worked on the deal and all of the concessions that had to be obtained are seriously frustrated. “When I asked whether there was anything Cary could do to influence IKEA’s decision, I was told that there was nothing; not even an incentive would make a difference,” Stegall said in his statement.
Tedium has the backstory on a movement that took place in the aughts to make Windows machines look like they were running the Mac OS. During that decade, there were plenty of reasons to be running a Windows box instead of a Mac (not the least of which was cost). There was something so sleek and attractive about OS X that just made people wish the user interface on their Windows PC looked a bit more like the Mac.
I’m not a lifestyle guru. You probably won’t see a post with a listicle on 11 ways to hack your sleep on this blog. I do, however, have a practice that I have used and want to share about managing bedtime. Specifically, how you can manage devices when it’s time to go to sleep and how you disconnect. I recently implemented a Disney Circle device, which allows you to manage wifi devices and usage profiles for each individual in your house.
This past week, Alto’s Odyssey, the sequel to the much lauded iOS game Alto’s Adventure, was released to positive reviews. Alto’s Adventure offers a take on the “endless runner” game that gives a snowboarder a vast natural playground for collecting coins and doing simple tricks. Odessey isn’t a brand new experience, but rather builds upon its predecessor in innovative ways. What interests me about the Alto’s franchise is how people use the games in a therapeutic way.
The folks from the writing tool IA Writer (which I love) have an amazing blog post that gets a lot right about the current state of the web. They discuss the problems that are being widely reported and an alternate solution to taking a “digital sabbatical.” Again, taking a break is generally good advice. And yes, there is Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is great. Alphabet sounds like a James Bond Villan and it is not harmless, but Google Search is powerful.
Van Halen’s debut record recently celebrated its fortieth birthday. Consequence of Sound featured an article, by Wren Graves, on the record and the culture that made it possible. I was struck by the observation Graves makes that much of the band’s antics at the time wouldn’t be tolerated today. Late-70’s Van Halen were flamboyant and full of themselves. Some of their higher-profile hijinks are the stuff of legend. In those days, there were a few rock stars that were notorious for trashing hotel rooms.
Photo from the Library and Archives Canada on Flickr Some days, I find myself questioning the value of my Netflix subscription. Though not terribly expensive, the monthly cost of the service has gone up recently (I got my email notification a couple of weeks ago). As Netflix works to develop more and more of their own content, their catalog of video for which they need to pay licensing fees has shrunk.
Smart speakers are becoming ubiquitous. Apple finally released their entry into this increasingly crowded market with the well-reviewed HomePod. Streaming services, most notably Spotify and Apple Music, are in their ascendancy, having each added tens of millions of paying subscribers over the last couple of years. As much as I hate blog posts decrying the death of things, these trends certainly signal the grave digging for music on physical media could soon begin.
Last weekend, my five-year-old and I created a collage together.
For a few years now, I’ve followed a “read the Bible in a year” program. Last year, I used the plan from Bible Class Material, which presents the readings in a more-or-less chronological order that I’ve found extremely helpful for following the Old Testament material. Every year that I have read the Bible, I have gained new insights and different passages have stuck out to me in different ways. It’s been a new experience, each time.
I recently mentioned to my boss that I’m used to metrics being involved in my work. I’m used to decisions being made based on data. I’ve taken it for granted that enterprise organizations like to be able to measure things that may impact profitability. The last few jobs I’ve worked out were pretty rigorous in tracking certain metrics. However, in my personal life, I’m not into self-quantification. Even at the height of their popularity, I never wanted a FitBit.
Austin Kleon writes about his take on copyright law here. Since Kleon published a book titled Steal Like An Artist, he encounters a lot of people who assume he is against copyright. He assures the reader that he is not against copyright protections for intellectual property. He does, however, believe that art builds on prior art. Every artist knows that art comes from art—it’s only the honest ones who admit it.
When I was in Walt Disney World earlier this year, the Hall of Presidents in Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom was being updated to include a new animatronic Donald Trump. The event was closed for the update and I wondered how everything would turn out. Donald Trump rarely says things that inspire us. More often, he is inarticulate and boastful. He routinely says things that divide Americans and sound petty, at best.
At this point, most of us have read about all of the research and effort that has gone into making apps like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. addictive. The concept of variable reward structures was proven decades ago by experiments on rats to be one of the most effective ways to drive repeat behavior. In contemporary times, humans are the subjects of the experiment and the instruments are mobile phones. Let’s face it, we’re all viewed as rats pushing feeder bars now.
When I first saw the headline that Moogfest (which occurs annually right down the street from my house) would be featuring a 2018 lineup led by female, non-binary and transgender artists and would feature a keynote by Chelsea Manning, I was a little surprised. Moogfest has always attempted to be cutting edge, even to the point of hubris, but the new strategy just didn’t make sense. By Judah Gross (Finding love at MOOGFEST) via Wikimedia Commons
Listening to twee pop from South America and feeling nostalgic about the 90’s was not how I planned on spending a sick and tired Monday night. Yet, there I found myself, eyes glued to yet another screen, soaking up sounds from a far away place and digging into information about a scene I never knew existed. It started out when I saw an Instagram post about a rerelease of a record by South American disco pioneer Junior Mendes posted by Bandcamp (that website is an international treasure).
Today was one of those days. Down with a cold and unable to do much, I spent much of the day in bed and moping about the house. Then the mail came, and brought with it two new records from the Sounds Delicious series. I had been eagerly anticipating hearing Frankie Rose cover the Cure and almost immediately put it on the turntable. Sick and feeling crummy today, but at least this LP of Frankie Rose covering the Cure arrived in the mail to cheer me up.