If you look back at the music I’ve shared on this blog, you wouldn’t doubt my devotion to nostalgic 80s retro-inspired sounds. Bring on the sports cars, sunglasses, synthesizers, and neon signs. Lately, though, I’ve been wishing for a 90s resurgence. Let’s have some flannel and baby doll dresses. In that spirit, I wanted to share this dead-on, straight cover of “Cannonball” by the Breeders performed by Courtney Barnett. Barnett has been on my radar for a while, but now I have a reason to check out her stuff. She and her band nail this track. It’s hard to believe that it is just the three of them because the sound feels so full.

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Jack Baty — @jack — writes about the MoFi scandal from an unusual perspective. Instead of gloating about the customers being ripped off because they couldn’t tell the difference in sound coming from an analog or digital source — he argues that origins are still meaningful.

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I was reading my friend Adam’s newsletter, Tendrils, and I came upon some quick thoughts about the movie mid90s in a collection of mini-reviews of A24 movies. While Adam enjoyed the movie because it brought back some skateboarding nostalgia, I hated it for much the same reason. It seems like every recent movie or documentary dealing with skateboarding, from mid90s to Minding the Gap, makes it seem like skateboarders are a bunch of lawless teenage punks who have trouble with school or work. I was big into skateboarding in the early 90s, and I didn’t find the stereotype to be true. Some of my friends from that era became software development managers, architects, and worked at major record labels. I would rather not make it sound like a career is the only measurement of success, but these guys clearly didn’t meet the stereotype you see of skateboarders in the media.

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John Donne was an interesting guy. He was an inveterate womanizer and poet turned pious preacher. James Parker profiles Donne for The Atlantic and brings in a metal comparison.

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Paul Ford writes for Wired Magazine as the co-founder of a software company that is tired of the ubiquitous pursuit of disruption within the tech industry. He argues that disruption serves the bored and that boredom is a luxury we no longer have, even in the U.S. — particularly after January 6, 2021.

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I was texting with an old friend the other day, and he was documenting his progress in getting three monitors set up. Since he has an M1 Mac Mini, like I do, he could only easily support two monitors. He turned to Universal Control with a MacBook Air to get three displays going. He was trying monitor stacking and side by side setups. I told him I just preferred a simple iMac and no external monitors, which is why I only have one monitor that my work MacBook Pro and Mac Mini share.

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Last week, I published a micro post about my thoughts after reading Matt Birchler admonish his readers against switching blogging platforms. Birchler’s main point was that switching platforms made it harder on readers and, therefore, more difficult to retain consistent readership. It’s a solid point and one that really resonated with me. I have a tendency to tinker with different tools, some of which are blogging engines. That means I sometimes use different services to publish my posts.

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LEGO has an initiative to help with environmental sustainability in the form of reuse of their bricks. Their Replay program encourages you to donate the no-longer-used bricks to children in need.

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One of the co-creators of the latest official D&D adventure, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, Ajit George, compares the setting of the book to solarpunk. I wrote about solarpunk in issue no. 8 of the newsletter. Wikipedia defines it this way:

Solarpunk is a genre and art movement that envisions how the future might look if humanity succeeded in solving major contemporary challenges with an emphasis on sustainability, climate change and pollution.

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I wrote in a recent newsletter about an article that Ezra Klein published, in which he discusses how often he hears from people who don’t think it’s a good idea to have kids due to climate change. He writes that he hears questions about this topic more than anything else.

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The biggest irony of the last couple of weeks has to be Rep. Peter Meijer’s loss in the Western Michigan Republican primary. As recently as the beginning of this year, The Atlantic did an in-depth profile on Meijer and how he was at odds with his own party of the impeachment of Donald Trump and other issues related to the former president.

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Noah Millman writes about how little reality there is in film and TV these days.

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