After buying this razor from Henson, I have officially made two purchases after seeing the products on Instagram. I guess ads aren’t all bad?
Headlights Pointed At The Dawn
Friday, January 24, 2025
For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.
Unpublishable.txt
Monday, January 20, 2025
Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file. The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s.
The Return of Googie
Saturday, January 18, 2025
Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia.
Dell Charm
Friday, January 10, 2025
Nick Heer from Pixel Envy points out that Dell hasn’t lost its branding charm. When configuring a laptop on the website, he got an error message, “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding.” He was further informed about the error:
The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 236V/226V and Ultra 7 266V. The 32gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 238V and Ultra 7 268V.
I have often marveled at the challenging model names that PC manufacturers give their products, which starkly contrast to those from Apple. Everyday people can remember the names of their Apple devices. Not so for most of what PC manufacturers come up with.
Analogue Grand Diary
Thursday, December 19, 2024
Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.
The embed function of Micro.blog uses quoteback.js. The results are quite nice when pasted into Obsidian.
Post Dreams
Saturday, December 14, 2024
Not too long ago, I posted about a shoegaze cover of a music charts staple from decades ago and, well, I was sorely tempted to do it again.
I came across a YouTube channel for a service called Musora which bills itself as “the ultimate music lessons experience.” Musora offers a subscription which will help you learn to play an instrument and your favorite songs. For $20/month (with an annual subscription), you gain access to a suite of interactive practice tools and a community of like-minded students.
The Man Who Would Be King
Saturday, December 14, 2024
One of my all-time favorite films is John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King. I was first introduced to the movie adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling short story from 1888 by my English teacher in my senior year of high school. Kipling’s novel encapsulates some of the folly and hubris of the British adventures in Afghanistan in the 19th century by infusing its characters with the attitudes of empire. In the film, Michael Caine and Sean Connery play British ex-military who dream much and doubt their abilities little. They set their sites on bringing the martial prowess learned in their earlier days to a remote area of Afghanistan known as Kafiristan to form their own kingdom.
Like A Virgin
Friday, November 29, 2024
Madonna’s most well-known album, Like A Virgin just celebrated its 40th anniversary.
Like A Virgin was the first record I owned, given to me by my parents for my 9th birthday. The subject might have been a bit mature for me at that age, but it hardly mattered because I promptly broke the stylus on the family turntable. I couldn’t even listen to my gift. Of course, the hit songs from the record were all over commercial radio, anyway, so it wasn’t like Madonna’s tunes were hiding in obscurity.
Roon Audio has a new feature that should delight headphone lovers — OPRA (Open Profiles for Revealing Audio). OPRA is an open-source repository hosted on GitHub that contains precisely crafted headphone curves for different headphone models (and you get an equalizer, and you get an equalizer…).
I love Roon, although I’ve had my share of technical challenges — today I need to bring up two issues on the Roon Community forum. The ability of the platform to continuously innovate ways to give audio enthusiasts a better experience is impressive.
I’m a bit surprised, but pleased, that Target carries Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble’s Memento Mori gift set.
For my money, Garrison Keillor does the gratitude thing about as eloquently as one possibly could.
I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.
I need to get on his level of thankfulness.
Our town’s only movie theater just closed. I wasn’t a regular, but my son was.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 →
Sam Tornow writes about Thurston Moore and The Smell of Vinyl for Discogs. Moore is a famous vinyl aficionado who stuffs his apartment with records.
“I kind of have to draw some limitations with my responsibility toward my own budget. I can’t just be living, building furniture out of records. I [still] have a pretty healthy Wantlist on Discogs, though. I continue to buy records all the time. I’m always interested in going to record stores, and I get my Discogs alerts for records I want. I would say I purchase on Discogs at least two or three times a week.”
This happened to a friend of mine, who was once named by the News & Observer as the biggest record collector in Raleigh. He eventually ran out of space for his collection and moved on to clothing.
I found the position Moore now takes on CDs interesting.
Originally sticking to vinyl and cassettes, CDs have also made their way into his collection. At first he was apprehensive of the medium when it initially exploded in popularity, but now he thinks they aged well.
This sounds a lot like the conclusion I have come to. With the right DAC, CDs can sound fantastic. The most recent CD I was looking at (an upcoming Pains of Being Pure At Heart collection) was also half the price of the record. That’s hard to beat, especially if you’re on a budget.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024 →
Just finished reading Shogun - Part 1 by James Clavell 📚. I don’t want to sound like a snob and say the book was better than the show. Especially because the show was amazing. The novel did have some differences, though, and a bit more of the political machinations.
The only social networking site my brother has ever been on is Miitomo.
David Saavadra writes for El País about the rise and fall of the Stone Roses, a band many had pegged as the saviors of britpop at the end of the 80s.
Why did U.K. music critics place so much hope in them in the late 1980s? “Everything was exaggerated, because it was a time when the media was looking for someone to occupy the throne that the Smiths had left vacant,” notes music critic Carlos Pérez de Ziriza. “They had the merit of fusing, like no other group, the British pop heritage of the 1960s and its most exquisite melodic tradition with the new rhythms emanating from Manchester, favoured by the rise of rave culture, acid house, and that new lysergia that had driven the second summer of love, that of 1988.”
The Stone Roses, perhaps most notably, at this point, were a huge influence on Oasis, in style as well as substance. Of course, my link to the article isn’t anything less than encouragement to read it, but if you want to save a click, the downfall of the band can be mostly attributed to old-fashioned rockstar hubris.
Austin Kleon has a post on Dave “Big Dutch” Nally, whose deceptively amateurish art looks like a cross between something that would have been created by Daniel Johnston and the liner notes of a Pavement record.
I especially love the reference to Ezra Jack Keats' exquisite children’s book The Snowy Day (bottom left).
A little quiet storm feels perfect for this Saturday morning after a busy week.