Frosted Echoes

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. This Friday, the list didn’t include the new single from Hammock, one of my all time most listened to bands, but instead served up an interview with the Pixies. That was slightly baffling. The mix is usually a bit off, though. Some weeks, I’m given more sloppy, tossed off indie rock than is completely warranted. Others weeks, the mix is heavy on Eurotrash-inspired electronic. I do realize that coming up with brand new music that will fit my tastes every Friday is a tough job. Until I’m willing to give up my DNA to get a better playlist , which I don’t see happening anytime soon, this is probably as good as it gets. So I listen patiently and hope for that one gem to really catch my ear.

Music aside, Apple is putting me in a tough place this year. You see, I bought an iPad Pro earlier in the year. It was a good purchase, as it helped me to study for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate exam. However, if the rumors prove to be true, a new iPad Pro may be announced in a couple of weeks. It is being speculated that the new iPad would have an edge-to-edge screen and external display support. While the larger built-in screen size would be a nice to have, the support for an external display would be something of a game changer. This feature would put the dream of using an iPad as a main machine much closer. Now, if you could only do things like download songs from Bandcamp and add them to your music library from iOS…

Comic book selfie.

Micro Monday recommendation: @grindwell. Expanded thoughts from yesterday.

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. We look at the frozen smiles in Instagram posts and believe the stories that they tell us, which may not look like our own.

Meditation can be difficult and sometimes it doesn’t feel as rewarding as we are led to believe. In his daily blog, Grind Well, Jon Mitchell takes his readers through a life informed by a meditation habit. Mitchell doesn’t shy away from the difficulty of the practice, or even of the skepticism that pops up about the importance of having a meditation habit. His posts make you feel like you are not the only one who struggles with meditation.

The subject of the daily (except on Shabbat, as Mitchell is an observant Jew) posts vary, but always center around the practice of meditation and mindfulness. In a post entitled Mindfulness Politics, Mitchell writes about politics from a perspective colored by the calm and detachment that can come with regular meditation.

This is what’s frustrating about this era’s political, religious, and otherwise tribal upheavals. There is some threshold of scale at which human beings — from their default perspectives enmeshed in worldly concerns — will consider a problem important enough to fight about, and that scale is not nearly big enough.

His point in the post is that a meditation habit can be part of taking care of ourselves in a way that helps to alleviate suffering, increases compassion for others and put distance between our impulses to anger and our sense of positive awareness. These are certainly things the world needs more of right now and an honest look at how meditation can help is most welcome.

Playing this urban D&D adventure/campaign tonight with some first time adventurers. More political intrigue and less hack n’ slash should make for an interesting game.

That feeling when your 12-yr-old dissects the false claims made about sanctuary cities in a political ad.

Made this paper Minecraft sword for my little guy. He called it “flashy.”

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. The stack of information was contextless, traumatizing, and bizarre, but also energizing, the way a city makes you walk faster. It did that, but for your mind.

His comparison of the frenetic energy of Twitter to a bustling city makes me want to move out to the country. I’ve become entirely too weary of the constant context-shifting that the timeline (whether chronological or not) forces you into. Since my tweets are almost entirely syndicated from my blog, I mainly engage with Twitter these days via the Notifications tab to see the top tweets from my feed and responses to my tweets.

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🎵 Softer Still - Turtle Bay: Softer Still may be my new favorite band. Their debut record, Nuances, is set to drop on 11/2, but the first single + video is here already. With the video, we don’t get any cheap surrealism that pervades so many music videos these days. Instead, it’s just tastefully lit shots of the band playing their irresistible jangle-pop.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so eager for a debut full-length.

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🎵 Yumi Zouma - EP III: It may seem strange, but Yumi Zouma sounds different on the shorter EP format than they do on their full lengths. It seems strange, that is, until you discover that the New Zealand based, but geographically spread out band, colocates when recording albums and collaborates remotely on the EP’s. The process of virtual collaboration gives the EP’s a certain breezy detachment that has its own charm.

I wasn’t learning about guys like this until college. Certainly not in seventh grade, like my oldest son.

📚 City of Brass - S.A. Chakraborty: This book presents a nice respite from the Eurocentric fantasy worlds most of us are familiar with by incorporating Middle Eastern traditions of spirituality and magic. Jason Opus has a compelling review here that sucked me into reading City of Brass. After thoroughly enjoying The Golem and the Jinni, I was primed for some of this Eastern mythology.

My six-year-old, on playing video games at church: “I couldn’t get any kills in Bongo Loves the Bible.”

Even tying your shoes can be difficult with a kitten around.

This has been a tough weekend for the NC Coast. I shudder to think what the fence in this picture from 2 weeks ago looks like today.

Thanks to hurricane Florence, we now have a bathtub on our deck.

Encouraged by the divestiture from Pinterest, I’ve switched back from Pocket to Instapaper. It’s interesting to see that Medium stories don’t break the Instapaper parser like they do the one from Pocket.

With my lady friend at Old Brunswick ghost town.

Prepping for Hurricane Florence in NC. Gas lines are long and people are quick to steal your spot at the pump. When the survival instincts kick in, the less admirable human tendencies come out.

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. Or, maybe to be more charitable, it was like a teenager crafted the programming schedule and advertising sales for a network.

As my six-year-old and twelve-year-old watched, I heard things in the background which I did not want to hear. I’m even excluding the Kavanaugh hearings (which were full of their own inappropriateness). Commercials for fighting matches and sex pills abounded. The lyrics to one commercial went “It’s a big sexy world of sex out there/People having intercourse everywhere.”

I mentioned recently that I’m glad that my youngest son basically only watches public television and this trip only reinforced that view. Not only is he not exposed to the constant commercialism that pervades a lot of children’s programming, but he doesn’t have to deal with exposure to the excessive evidence of adult vices.

I haven’t burned a CD in a long time, but this C86 covers comp makes a good soundtrack to cruising around town in the fading summer heat.

Gratifying to see the local paper do a piece on the great career of Nile Rodgers.

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. Since I personally know multiple mental health professionals who swear by the MBTI, particularly in its application to relationship counseling, it strikes me as almost laughable to read these arm-chair tweets from people who consider themselves experts after say, reading a Vox article on the subject. While the indicator may or may not be ideal for determining vocational direction, that is not its only application. It works well as a framework for navigating interpersonal dynamics.

I’m not even sure the origins of the framework matter that much. Ultimately, is the way the test was developed the measure of its usefulness in practice? Blood thinners started out as rat poison, but practicing physicians would endorse their use for preventing clots. Validity and reliability may be considered low for Myers-Briggs within the psychometric community, but material real-work outcomes are observable in a clinical environment. If the test was truly as useless as its critics claim, wouldn’t those using it in practice toss it aside?

If you don’t consume dairy, does the Dairy Queen still have dominion over you?

My wife was puzzling until her puzzler was sore.