Canned Dragons

I’ve been experimenting with different blogging tools for the last few months. My favorite blog is my hosted Micro.blog site, because I can throw anything at it. A single picture, a quick link post or a think piece that I’ve labored over. I can post from many different apps, including my favorite text editors. However, Micro.blog is the least reliable service that I use. The premium features like bookmarking and, most importantly for me, newsletters, are not well-supported. There are several high severity bugs in the newsletter service. While I’ve received acknowledgement of the bugs, there has been no visible movement on correcting them.

For now, I remain with Ghost primarily for blogging, but I would also like to try the simple Hey World service from Basecamp. Hey World is a sort of spiritual successor to the blogging service Posterous. Posterous allowed you to post through email and I enjoyed using it until Twitter bought and absorbed the company. Hey World lets you easily do RSS, newsletter and a traditional web log all in one. I was inspired to try it after an email exchange with Andy Nicolaides, who sang the praises of the simplicity of the tool and who, like me, is comparing it to Ghost. Ghost is a fantastic tool, but it’s geared towards monetizing your blog, something that is not even on my radar. Could my new favorite text editor be an email client?

I’ve been trying out the Hey email service, and have been impressed with innovations it brings to email. It makes you want to use email more. The only downside is that you may finding yourself emailing more people, more often, but not receiving many responses. Not everyone, it seems, is having as much fun with email as those using Hey. Hey World comes bundled with the Hey email service, for no additional charge. For those of us who don’t plan on making money from our blogs, it makes a good value proposition.

Consequently, this may be the last weekly digest I send out for a bit while I get my tooling figured out. I plan to keep blogging regularly, though. Thanks for coming on this ride with me, and I hope you’ll stay connected.

Much has been written about the heroism of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. One of my favorite pieces is this one by K.B. Hoyle at Christ and Pop Culture. When searching for a comparable literary hero to Zelensky, Hoyle lands on Faramir, from the Lord of the Rings. She quotes a passage uttered by the character on warfare.

"War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

Hoyle writes:

The stories we tell of heroes like Faramir explain not only why we love a man like Zelensky when he steps reluctantly onto the world stage, but also why he behaves the way he does at a time of great need.

It is heartening to see the way the world has rallied around a real-life hero like Zelensky, who models the humility and courage we long to see when times are dark. It’s also disheartening to think that this is a guy our own president tried to blackmail like a common criminal.

Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite and famous Apple antagonists, have acquired universally well-regarded streaming music service Bandcamp. I have a lot more faith in Bandcamp than Epic, so I’m not sure how to take this news. As a consumer who wants to do what I can for artists, Bandcamp doesn’t leave much to be desired. I’m just hoping Epic doesn’t degrade the service in some way.

In a release, Epic said Bandcamp will help it build out a marketplace for artists and creators. The company has said previously it is aiming to create a virtual ecosystem, dubbed the metaverse, where users can purchase art and other items directly from each other.

Epic is local to me. They are building a large campus on the site of the mall where I used to work for Babbage’s, selling Playstation games and taking pre-orders for limited N64s from zealous Nintendo fans. It will be interesting to see if any Bandcamp jobs come to the site.

NPR has a piece by Neda Ulaby highlighting the speed at which trends are coming and going now. Ulaby refers to fashions and aesthetics coming back into style as “the nostalgia loop” and notes that the loop used to be about 20 years (remember 70’s style singer/songwriters coming back in the 90’s), but that new technology players like Tik Tok have acted as accelerants to that cycle.

But the nostalgia loop has sped up. "So much faster than twenty years," says Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent for Vox who covers internet culture . Jennings points to TikTok videos nostalgic for makeup trends dating all the way back to...2016, when makeup artist Mario Dedivanovic was busy breaking the internet by contouring Kim Kardashian's cheekbones and dramatically boxing her brows. Or look, Jennings says, to last year's much-hyped vogue for wired headsets, a vintage accessory dating all the way back to before the advent of wireless ear buds — around 2015.

Of course, the article couldn’t have been completed without mentioning the “vibe shift,” which is ultimately the same phenomenon Ulaby is discussing in her piece.

Matthew Guay has a post on the Reproof blog about notes apps and what kind of usage we actually get out of them. His view is that the main value of collecting notes, whether in an analog notebook or notes app is to get them off of our brain. Something nags at us that we will come back to the information later, so to clear our minds, we capture the text. Rarely, though, do most of us come back to most of the notes we take. Guay estimates that prolific notetakers (👋) return to about 1% of our captures.

That first step of emptying your brain was what actually mattered, though. Most of our thought and the random things we discover aren’t actually valuable. We’ll write them down then never give them a second thought. You could get the same value by writing them down, then setting fire to the paper and scattering the ashes to the wind.

Almost.

He goes into the tendency of those of us who take copious notes to fiddle with systems, in the hope that we’ll find one that’s just right for our workflow. It his strong conviction that we’re just tilting at windmills. We’ll never find the perfect system that enables us to take advantage of all of the information we bring in. Guay cites the Field Notes motto, “I’m writing it down to remember it now,” when he argues that letting these things go is the biggest benefit to processing information the way that we do.

Dan Primacy writes for Axios about the early failure of Donald Trump’s app and network Truth Social. Despite all of the warnings to keep an eye on the space, Truth Social is on life support within weeks of its launch. The big issue with adoption of the network seems to start with the big liar himself. Trump has never used the network.

Trump hasn't posted a single time since the launch, despite an international crisis that has captivated the country. Instead, he's given his comments to radio and TV hosts — including one this morning with Dominion conspiracy theorist Maria Bartiromo — plus via his CPAC speech.

Hopefully the neglect continues and this thing folds sooner rather than later. The question then becomes: How do you solve a problem like Maria?

From the blog

Imprecatory Prayer

I had never come across the phrase “imprecatory prayer” until recently, even if I knew well what it meant. In fact, I have struggled with the concept. The Got Questions site begins to answer the question of what imprecatory prayer is by defining imprecatory. To imprecate means “to invoke evil

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

I had never come across the phrase "imprecatory prayer" until recently, even if I knew well what it meant. In fact, I have struggled with the concept. The Got Questions site begins to answer the question of what imprecatory prayer is by defining imprecatory.

To imprecate means “to invoke evil upon or curse” one’s enemies.

It goes on to inform the reader that, in the Bible, David is the author of the most imprecatory psalms. These psalms, the site explains, were less about exacting vengeance on enemies than a recognition of the fact that God abhors evil and protects his chosen ones. David compares the enemies pursuing him to lions. It's almost as if the psalmists (David, Asaph and an unknown author) felt that they had to point out evil to God, as if He wouldn't otherwise take notice. They plead their case.

More in number than the hairs of my head
are those who hate me without cause;
mighty are those who would destroy me,
those who attack me with lies.
What I did not steal
must I now restore?
(Psalm 69: 22-23)

Christian Prayer

As Christians, we don't focus a lot on prayers that our enemies come to ruin. It would run counter to the very words of Jesus to "pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44-48). Praying for bad things to happen to bad people feels at odds with the philosophy shared by Jesus. However, what if those prayers serve as protection for those who would otherwise be prey in the jaws of lions? When do you pray for the lion to be crippled, so that the antelope can escape?

These questions came to me as I prayed for the people of Ukraine a few nights ago. I asked myself what would it take to make them secure. The answer is for the aggression against them to cease. Nothing is impossible for God, but the hardened heart of Vladimir Putin seems difficult to penetrate. The salvation of the Ukrainian nation seems to depend on nothing short of the failure of the Russian war machine to accomplish its goals. It seems only natural to then pray for the total defeat of the Russian military forces and their commander-in-chief.

The Escape

In the book of Exodus, as the persecuted Israelites tried to escape the Egyptians, it was God's wrath visited upon the pharaoh and his forces that made their freedom possible. The pharaoh's heart was hardened, the book tells us, and he refused to have mercy on God's people. When Rome became an empire, the title caesar (the cognomen of Julius Caesar) was attached to its emperors, who behaved as the pharaohs did, and were worshipped and revered in the same ways. The title of caesar became czar in Russia when applied to its emperors. Although the reign of the czars technically ended with Nicholas II after he was deposed by the Bolsheviks, what is Vladimir Putin but a modern-day czar, with all of the powers to go with that designation?

When a modern day czar invades another country and kills its people, are we at a point where we start to pray for his downfall? Presbyterian pastor Chris Hutchinson thinks so.

I'm not sure where this leads. My crystal ball is in the shop. I also don't don't know how else to stem the tide. Prayer is what I know how to do right now. Even if that means praying to end the invasion by regime change, however that may happen.

As I mentioned this week, my great-great-grandfather moved his family from the Ukraine to Minnesota in the 1870s to escape Russian persecution. He was part of the first wave of Mennonites to leave. It got worse for the ones who stayed when the Bolsheviks and Anarchists came through with their assaults on a peaceful people who refused to fight back (though some of them finally did—you can only push people so far). I am praying for the people in Ukraine as they bravely stand up to the Russian aggression, which even the people of Russia do not support. I have hope that this will end badly for the dictator in Moscow.

Normally, I don’t like long tweet threads (haven’t these people ever heard of blogging?). However, this one, from Mark Hertling, is worth looking at to understand why the Russians will have a difficult time capturing and holding Ukraine.

I’m currently reading David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell and, spoiler alert, the bigger guy doesn’t always win (for some of the same reasons Hertling mentions in his tweets).

Isaac Saul, writing for the centrist news site Tangle, on Glenn Greenwald and others who insisted on a counter-narrative, despite all the evidence that Russia was going to invade Ukraine.

This whole shtick is a good reminder that being heterodox is in and of itself an ideology, if you become so committed to it that you cannot see what is plainly in front of your face. Many on the left and right — from Tucker Carlson to Saagar Enjeti to Krystal Ball to Aaron Mate — suggested we were being lied to when our intelligence agencies told us what was right there for the world to see. Sometimes, in fact more often than not, the mainstream narrative is the one most rooted in truth. That's why it is mainstream.

It’s been interesting to read bloggers ridicule the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine over the past few weeks. They noted the US government had been warning repeatedly that an attack was imminent and had not happened.  The iconoclastic writers apparently missing an almost 200k troop buildup and every other sign of an attack was in plain sight. One blogger, Paul Robinson, who ran a blog predicated on the premise that worrying over Russia was consistently overblown, made good on a promise to shut down his blog if an invasion took place.

In line with my last post, Irrussianality has ceased operation as of today.

It’s hard to fathom there were those in the US who chose to believe Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who called the talk of an invasion “hysteria,” just last month, over the US intelligence community. They seemed determined to be what were called “useful idiots” by the disinformation apparatus in the USSR. How many times does the Russian government have to lie about, well, just about everything, before at least people in the US will see the truth for what it is?

There is a whole niche of writers and podcasters who get by solely on the notion that they are offering a more real take than you will get from the mainstream press. That becomes their value proposition, so they have to offer alternative views, despite how irrational or untruthful they may be.

Though I’m trying to stay away from yet more articles that bemoan the divided state of America, I found a particular piece from NPR on how political affiliations are driving people to move pretty interesting. Hypothetically, if the trend were to continue, and people go to where they feel their political beliefs are best respected, I could imagine a situation where our nation really does get divided geographically.

What are the implications of people clustering in Sean Hannity's America, or Rachel Maddow's?

Groups of like-minded people tend to become more extreme over time in the way that they're like-minded," says Bill Bishop, a journalist who wrote the influential book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart in 2008.

I wouldn’t want to live in either Sean Hannity’s America or Rachel Maddow’s. However, I do think Hannity’s would quickly turn into a totalitarian banana republic, if the GOP keeps on their current trajectory. The reality would also hit that the blue states are in large part subsidizing red states.

Of course, In reality, none of this will be brought to its logical extreme. Once the Covid menace dies down, people will have less to fight about and less incentive to move either to escape restrictions or to feel safer.

→ Americans are fleeing to places where political views match their own | NPR

Jason Ward is kickstarting a new tabletop RPG using the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. Its theme: the band Faith No More. The game takes its title from the band’s breakthrough LP, which featured the hit song, “Epic” as well as a pretty popular cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs.” I’ve played Dungeon World (which relies on PbtA), so I’m familiar with the gaming mechanics, which are pretty robust and yet rely heavily on the fiction to tell a story through the game. I just never thought that Faith No More would be the subject of the next game to use this engine.

Get ready to roll two six-sided dice to succeed in beating Anthony Kiedis in a rap/rock battle.

→ The Real Thing RPG | Jason Ward — Kickstarter

🔗 Via @toddgrotenhuis

At work, we name our teams after fancy monsters, so I’ve gone back to the venerable old D&D Monster Manual for ideas on titling the new operational kanban team.

I like this piece from Andy Nicolaides on VR. Many have poked fun at the applications people have designed for virtual reality. It can be an easy target when you see people wandering around with the giant headsets guiding their legless avatars. Or when you witness a "rave" in a virtual space where you just see avatars (with legs) standing around while a video plays on a screen. As one Twitter commenter asked while watching one such rave, "if this is the rave, what does the cool down party look like?"

Nicolaides sees the benefit of such spaces, though, because they give access to those who may not have it in the physical world.

As someone who is socially awkward, though not as extreme as many, I can fully appreciate true social anxiety as a form of mental disability, but there are, of course, many people that are also physically disabled. A VR environment could, potentially offer truly life changing experiences to people that without it couldn’t even dream of taking part in many activities available to VR users today, let alone in the future.

This mentality doesn't have to apply only to VR, though. It could also apply to offering streaming video options for events that are typically thought of as being in-person. Thinking this way makes me strongly supportive of churches continuing online services after pandemic protocols have been lifted.

From the blog

Beating Monsters With The Cross

A trip back to church and a new book convinced me to spend more time teaching my son about Christ.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Brothertiger “Torn Open”

Another cover added to the Brothertiger canon compels me to write about them again.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

The day before President’s Day, I went to church for the first time since last summer. I’ve been watching online, well, religiously, since then, but it was a rare treat to go in and see friends and hear music being played live. Vivaldi on violin with our new sound system (which was desperately needed) alone was worth the trip. We had a congregational meeting afterward, so my stomach was starting to get into growling mode by the time I got home. I was making myself lunch while my youngest was playing a game online with his friends. He kept yelling something like, “get him with the crucifix!” From what I could understand, he was using a crucifix to protect his in-game character from hordes of evil spirits.

I had gone to church alone, and my wife and youngest had gone to my in-law’s apartment to do some things for them, as is their routine every Sunday. When I heard my son yelling about the crucifix, it occurred to me that I’d rather have him in church with me. At least there he could be learning about the True Cross, rather than at home playing video games where the cross is merely a weapon to ward off monsters. I recently picked up Skye Jethani’s book, What If Jesus Was Serious, and had started reading it. Jethani describes the book as a devotional for people who hate devotionals. There were several retweets from Jethani’s Twitter account that were posted by people reading the book with their kids. What I had read of the book seemed a little over the level of a nine-year-old, but that can be mitigated by proper explanation of the concepts while reading. For instance, Chapter 2 focused on comparing ourselves to others when using social media. My son is a bit young for social media. However, the chapter presented us with an opportunity to talk about comparing ourselves to others and how God sees value in even those that people overlook.

I tweeted about my resolution and tagged the author in the tweet. He retweeted my post, and it picked up some decent traction, ending up with over 60 likes, including from Michael Wear, former president Obama’s religion advisor. For some time, I kept my tweets protected because of the fighting on Twitter, but I recently changed the setting back to public. I’ve missed being able to respond to the tweets of those who don’t follow me (you wouldn’t believe how many people fit into that category, despite my occasional witticisms). It feels good to be able to tag someone again when I want to voice support for their work.

Now I’ve got a public statement to hold me accountable to my goal. So far, we've been sticking to the routine. I'm hoping we can both get something out of it.

I know, I know, I just wrote about Brothertiger covers of 80s tunes last week in the newsletter. I have to tell you, though, that when I saw Brothertiger had covered brother/sister duo Sophie and Peter Johnston’s “Torn Open,” one of my favorite songs, I was more than pleasantly surprised. While going through my New Music playlist from Apple Music on Friday, like I usually do, I spotted the familiar song title. I literally got goosebumps before I even heard the track.

When I did listen to the song, I marveled out how complete it is. The cover thoroughly captures the sophisti-pop brilliance of the original. Enlisting Yvette Young from the band COVET to cover the vocal parts from Sophie Johnston (which take up the majority of the song) just worked. The verses stop just short of being cloying, and the chorus soars. The vocals from frontman and Brothertiger himself, John Jagos, mainly serve to supplement Young’s. Jagos does a fantastic job mimicking the synth sound from the original track. This cover is a sophisti-pop master work.

Extra credit to those who read this piece examining the brilliant Brothertiger instrumental EP’s that came out during the pandemic.

I did watch some of the Super Bowl, despite my aversion to sports where people regularly get brain injuries. How about those crypto commercials? I had literally just pulled out my phone to click on the QR code bouncing around the screen when that one commercial ended in some crypto plea. It feels like a lot of people own too much crypto and want to sell it to the easily manipulated. FOMO being what it is, they seem to be appealing to a belief that you had better get in or get left behind.

I didn’t spend too much time reading about “vibe shift” this week, although it took some serious effort to dodge the truckloads of articles people were unloading on the subject. Maybe next week I’ll embark on my own vibe shift... Details forthcoming.

The aim of a lot of companies (especially in the tech sector) is to get their customers into a subscription service. The recurring revenue adds predictability that helps immensely when doing budget planning. You see subscriptions everywhere now. Low-end fast food chain Taco Bell even started a subscription service. Streaming services are facing a problem with their subscribers, though. They’ve become mercenaries. Subscribers are picking up a service just to watch a single show and then dropping it.

Perhaps Netflix is trying to establish itself as something like a utility: a given, a default, the must-have that comes before all the wants. Other services have other propositions—HBO Max as prestige TV destination, Disney+ for parents—which they hope will hook consumers who sample the latest buzzy hit. But they’re all dealing with the new reality of mercenary streamers who have to be won over not just once, but again and again. We’re looking forward to the next awesome and unique entertainment spectacle that any given service has bankrolled—and to quitting as soon as we’ve watched it.

I only recently became such a mercenary, dropping Netflix probably until Shadow & Bone comes out with Season 2 and I can return to the Grishaverse. Netflix has been hounding me ever since, sending me emails to get back in at $9.99.

→ Netflix and Disney's growing challenge: streaming mercenaries

Tish Harrison Warren wrote a piece for the New York Times about how churches need to open up to in-person worship again AND get rid of online streaming worship options. Perhaps not surprisingly, the piece received a lot of criticism, particularly within the disabled community. I can understand the pushback. Last spring, when my ME/CFS was at its most severe, I couldn't even watch my church's worship service online when it was streamed in real-time. I felt so badly in the mornings that I would have to wait until later in the day to stream the recorded version of the service. That had nothing to do with COVID and everything to do with a disabling post-viral illness.

Warren does take disability into account, offering that in-home visits can be provided to those who are house bound. As advocates for the disabled have rightly pointed out, though, that's hardly a substitute for being able virtually worship along with the rest of a congregation. Warren's piece is not without its merits, though.

About four years ago, my family had a group of people from our church in their early 20s over to our house. We shared a meal and we asked them what hopes and challenges our church offered to their generation. Their answers surprised me. Over and over, they said, one of the hardest and best things about church was that they had to sit with people of different ages, classes and political beliefs. It was a practice they found inconvenient, yes, but truly grounding, nourishing and good.

I have been saying for years that I think one major benefit of my children attending church is the experience they get of being with people of all ages. In our increasingly siloed society, there are fewer and fewer places where that intergenerational divide is bridged.

→ Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services

My wife notifies me when she sees something on Twitter that outrages her (the other morning, at breakfast, she was pounding on the table and yelling at me), so I first heard about the “banning” of Maus from her. I had some questions as to the credibility of the report but that just turned argumentative. Roger Wm. Bennett has an interesting take on the controversy.

To the best of my knowledge, Maus hasn’t been banned anywhere. I believe it was removed from the curriculum (not from the library even) of just one school district in Tennessee, for dubious or petty reasons (although there were pretty good ones, such as "graphic novels are comic books puttin’ on airs"). The "controversy" is mostly the prestige press and progressive trolls who just can’t get enough of mocking people in flyover country, with an assist from the author hinting that folks in McMinn County probably are Nazis ("I moved past total bafflement to try to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis, maybe ….")

I checked my memory with a DuckDuckGo search "What really happened in Tennessee with Maus?" and found that CNN (the top hit, actually) accurately reported the curricular nexus even in its headline while every other top hit save one (a pro-Trump "there go the libs hatin’ on normal folks again" gloat) falsely referred to "ban" in the headlines.

I don’t know about the whole “progressive trolls” thing. That’s definitely not how I characterize my wife (honey, if you are reading this, I love you ❤️), but this whole situation really felt like making a mountain out of a molehill. The author hinting the people in Tennessee may be Nazis is a prime example of what’s wrong with discourse in this country. It still amazes me to see what blows up these days. Perhaps you could say that school curricula has always been a contentious subject, but it still feels to me like there’s a shift happening here when removing a graphic novel from a middle school course becomes “Nazis are banning books in Tennessee.”

→ Cantakerousness (and more) | Tipsy Teetotaler ن

I follow the blog of DHH from Basecamp, but I pretty frequently find myself disagreeing with his perspectives. He tends to reliably come from a pretty right-of-center perspective. When I do concur, though, his arguments strongly resonate with me. This usually happens on the subject of social media. He has recently argued that friction is necessary in online interactions. The absence of some kind of friction has given license for people to quickly spout off on social media without first really thinking about how they are interacting with others or what they are saying.

From his latest essay, DHH relates that, after leaving social media, and making blogging and email his main forms of communicating online, he has noticed debate becoming a lot more civil. He’s even been posting hot takes on such contentious topics as Canadian truckers and getting reasoned, but differing perspectives.

But what's interesting is how I can envision all of these interesting, courteous, and illuminating email debates rerendered in the realm of Twitter to predictably nasty, bitter outcomes. BY THE SAME PEOPLE!

It's not that there's a new subspecies of homo sapiens inhabiting Twitter, and then another living on email. It's the same people. But the change in environment prompts them to flip from that resentful, incriminating stance in the one area to the curious, good-faith stance in the other. That's both fascinating and heart warming.

It's evidence that humanity hasn't been terminally broken. Even in places like America where it might so often seem like it. We are currently trapped in some bad platforms producing bad outcomes, but the people participating often just need a change of venue for the dark clouds to clear.

I have reduced my reliance on social media in the last few years to where I think I’m in a healthy place. I have noticed that interactions via email tend to be much more rewarding and complete.

→ This just wouldn't happen on Twitter

From the blog

Pop Psychology and the Decline of Marriage

Shaky psychological theories have taken on an outsized role in the culture and may be detrimental to our relationships.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

It turns out that not everything I learned in college en route to getting my psychology degree has held up under the weight of time and scrutiny. Take, for instance, Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs," which was featured prominently in my education and still holds a large percentage of mind share among the general population in the US. Alex R. Wendel, writing for Mere Orthodoxy, reveals that Maslow's pyramid focuses too heavily on physiological needs. Emotional needs can be just as important for flourishing. For instance, we know that infants who receive total physical care but not affection will experience failure to thrive. The biggest influence that Maslow's hierarchy has had upon popular culture, however, is shaping the perception of self-actualization as an end goal.

People are still drawn into Maslow’s concept of self-actualization not because they find it intellectually valid but because it offers a compelling vision of humanity that allows people to place themselves before all others and shed all sense of altruism or self-sacrifice. People are drawn into the idea of pursuing humanity beyond their current constraints because it tells a story that people do not need to be stuck where they are; rather, they can become something more, something that surpasses everyone else–become Nietczhe’s Übermensch–if they think the right thoughts or do the right things.

The belief in self-actualization has led to a society focused on individuals achieving their "best life," sometimes at the expense of others. For example, I’m seeing a disturbingly increasing number of posts about women leaving their husbands or just slamming their marriages. Articles about how marriage just isn’t satisfying seems to be on the way to becoming a cottage industry now. What’s most distressing about many of these essays is that the women actually like or love their husbands, they are just seeking something more. So, they leave their marriage for “radical self-love,” or some other shameless euphemism for what human beings used to call selfishness.

Author Glennon Doyle, in an interview with NPR, likens being married to a good man to “gaslighting.” She doesn’t seem to understand that gaslighting is being married to a horrible person who hates you and actively does things to make you try to question your sanity. Can we just stop people from using the word gaslighting now, since most people using it don’t seem to understand what it means? In Doyle’s case, she just didn’t feel like she could bring her “whole self” to the table when she was a part of her marriage. It was just ambiguously “unsatisfying.”

Other women just trade in the stock of “familiarity breeds contempt,” and pen screeds about how they hate their husbands in the New York Times. Still others, like Doyle, admit that their husbands are great, but are ultimately impediments to experiencing some kind of other life out there.

Honor Jones writes about this in the Atlantic.

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.

Feeling stifled, Jones wondered what life would be like separated from her husband.

Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women.

Marriage can be difficult, there’s no doubt about it. I’m not here to comment on those who take an exit out of a tough marriage. I’ve experienced too much grace in my marriage and in my life to judge. For those who want to leave their spouse, so they can embrace promiscuity or experiment with drugs and resent that the commitment that they made is keeping them from that, I can’t be understanding. Nor do I understand the “I had to get out because I felt a vague sense of malaise” rationales.

Spin magazine posted some rants from musicians and industry insiders who think we need to talk about Spotify. One of the most striking essays came from Kay Hanley, Letters to Cleo songwriter and co-executive director of Songwriters Of North America. She has some bones to pick with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

When recording artists complained about the absurdity of having to get millions of streams just to make minimum wage, Daniel Ek told us to work harder and release more music. Spotify executives have said in public that music creators are “entitled” for wanting our fair share while base pay for a software engineer is just south of $200K.

And where are we now? Ek uses the billions he’s made off our work to do very not music business stuff like invest in AI defense tech, and endow a global chit chat platform to a fascist-curious jock. It’s the type of shit that would have put a terrestrial music distributor out of business at any time in music history previous to this one. Spotify sucks. Let’s take our awesome product and go where we’re wanted.

I understood that Spotify was underpaying musicians and I remember the flippant comment that Ek made about artists needing to release more music. It wasn't until recently that I realized just how bad things are, though. Perhaps it's the fact that they are paying Joe Rogan many magnitudes more than the musicians upon whose backs they built the service. Or it could be that they promised musicians better compensation when revenue started to materialize and then instead took them to court to be able to pay them less. All these things combined mean I never want to have anything to do with Spotify.

→ We Need To Talk About Spotify | Spin

Fr. James Martin on how a Christian should respond when someone who was not vaccinated dies of Covid.

The problem is that even a mild case of schadenfreude is the opposite of a ‘Christian value.’ Jesus asked us to pray for our enemies, not celebrate their misfortunes. He wanted us to care for the sick, not laugh at them. When Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, he says to one of them, according to Luke’s Gospel, not ‘That’s what you get,’ but ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ Schadenfreude is not a Christian value. It’s not even a loosely moral value. …

Totally agree. Schadenfreude is not a Christian value. However, to point of the previous piece that I linked to: is it okay to have that attitude towards companies like Spotify and Facebook when they lose a ton of market value? The Supreme Court may say that companies are individuals but I for one still can’t get on that train.

→ How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid? | NY Times

🔗 via Joyce Garcia Buxton

Michael Hobbes has a video essay making the rounds that examines whether “cancel culture” is really a threat to America. The problem with the articles, and in this case, videos, that seek to convince us that cancel culture isn’t real is that there is always a pretty good example of cancel culture in the recent past. In this case, you could cite Whoopi Goldberg as a decent representation of someone who was at least temporarily canceled unjustly for being ignorant on a subject of race. Or a guy who works at West Elm. You won’t have to go far back, at any given time, to find someone being punished for a misstep. It could be a professor who is has been reproached and is penitent for something like showing Othello, and for whom apologies and sackcloth and ashes are not enough to satisfy angry and traumatized students. You many even be reminded of cancel culture every day, if you use Firefox as your web browser. Former CEO, Brendan Eich (who created javascript and went on to found the Brave browser), was removed from Mozilla for monetarily supporting Proposition 8 in California. The Brave browser literally wouldn’t exist without cancel culture. Regardless of what you think about the marriage law (which was overturned), in this country, political speech in the form of donations to a cause is protected. Not only was Eich fired, but he was harassed by activists for years afterwards because of his politics.

Tucker Carlson and other Fox News talking heads hyperventilating aside, we may reasonably disagree as to the extent to which our new orthodoxies threaten the republic. To pretend like cancel culture, by whatever name you want to refer to it, is not real, though, is to say, “who are you going to believe, my think piece or your own lying eyes?”

As more companies like Meta and Microsoft start showing off VR tech, there seems to be something commonly missing from the avatars… legs. Since this is a phenomenon across multiple implementations of virtual space, Ivan Mehta wondered why. It turns out that it’s unusual to have VR sensors that take our legs into account.

A lot of that has to do with sensors. Currently, metaverse experiences are largely restricted to VR headsets; some are compatible with handheld controllers, like the Oculus touch controllers. However, there are hardly any commercially available sensors and controllers for our legs. That means your leg movement can’t be accurately detected and depicted in virtual environments.

What would be the consequences of having legs that moved in the virtual universe without us moving them in real life?

He also pointed out that in real life when you look down, you’re used to seeing your legs are at a specific distance away from your face, which you’re used to. But in the virtual world, if that situation is not replicated, it could cause you to feel nauseous. So until there are better sensors to avoid this on headsets, companies might avoid creating legs.

Yikes, I don’t imagine the disorienting feeling that would cause nausea would make VR very pleasant. So for now, the legs will have to be conspicuously absent.

→ I found out why metaverse avatars don’t have legs | The Next Web

Brothertiger is one of my favorite bands, and I was pretty stoked when I came across their cover of the full Tears for Fears album Songs From The Big Chair on Apple Music. I was able to listen to it a couple of times, then, poof, it was gone. I guessed that it was the result of some kind of cease-and-desist order from the legal arm of Tears for Fears. It looks like I was right because what is probably about 2 years after the album showed up and disappeared, it showed back up like a dream deferred. Only now, it's got an extra goofy title to obscure the fact that it's a Tears for Fears cover album. The album is cheekily now called Brothertiger Plays: Covers From That One Really Good 80's Band.

Fans of 80's mainstream synth pop or chillwave need to give this one a listen. It's just faithful enough to the originals to retain their impact, but also has enough of the Brothertiger glo-fi to modernize the classic tunes.

Favorite track: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” obvs.

→ Brothertiger Plays: Covers From That One Really Good 80's Band | Apple Music

From the blog

Worth the Wait

Julia Kwamya invites you to Feel Good About Feeling Bad with an incredibly smooth mixture of dream pop and disco.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Elevator Pitch Beliefs

Steven Colbert does an amazing job summarizing the foundations of his belief in two minutes, but that doesn’t satisfy everyone.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

The clip of Stephen Colbert expressing some basics about his faith is making the rounds (especially on Twitter). Tim Keller is an evangelical pastor who saw in the clip a potent witness on a popular talk show.

This is a brilliant example of how to be a Christian in the public square. Notice the witness, but in a form the culture can handle. We should desire to have more Christians in these spaces and give them grace as they operate. https://t.co/0QaXuwzYSa

— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc) February 4, 2022

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about the negative comments the clip has received, in addition to the praise of popular religious figures, but it’s still disappointing to see them. What Colbert said was obviously not meant to be a full-fledged statement of faith, but rather a snapshot into how faith is integrated into his life. Still, people are commenting about what it left out. They say he didn’t use the opportunity to share the gospel, for example. Commenting on what was left out is like playing gotcha with a tweet, though. You can always find things about a complex religion like Christianity that are left out of a 280 character tweet or a 2-minute sound bit from a talk show. Colbert hosts a mainstream, secular show, not a catechism. It is a beautiful thing that he shared his faith in a way that may actually make people who aren’t Christians curious. His witness being contextualized in a way that secular people can understand doesn’t mean it’s watered down or compromised. It means he is speaking to, and understands, his audience. Kaitlyn Schiess commented on the Holy Post podcast that the kind of fundamentalist thought pattern that opposes contextualization shows, “the poverty of the way we think about evangelism.” She recounted how, when she was a kid, she thought she had to annoy people with her faith to be witnessing properly.

The reason Colbert’s guest, Dua Lipa, asked him about his faith was because people notice that Colbert is open about his beliefs. He isn’t hiding his light under a bushel, as it were. He’s open to talking about the weight of eternity on a late-night show on a major network. How often do you see that?

I met Julia Kwamya at a Radio Dept. show a few years ago. At the time, she went by the band name Germans. She had only released a few songs. I was already a fan because I had heard about her through Kurt Feldman, who produced some of her tracks. However, I had no idea she would be the opening act that night. When I arrived at the Cat’s Cradle, there were only a couple of songs left in her set. I quickly realized my mistake in not getting there earlier and was bummed that I wasn’t able to see her whole performance.

After the set, I was able to speak with Kwamya about her plans for upcoming releases. She had some new tracks she was going to lay down, but Feldman wasn’t going to produce, this time. It sounded as if it was planned and scheduled. Then, years went by, and no new music appeared. It wasn’t until 2021 that she finally came out with her first official EP, under her own name, Feel Good About Feeling Bad. The EP contained some of the same tracks, “Cruel” and “Wonderhow,” that she played that night and which had been circulating for years. The entire collection of songs is a welcome addition to her catalog, though, and the EP has a cohesive sound that would easily convince you all the songs were recorded together. With strong, disco and funk inspired bass lines (the bassist she played with at the Cat’s Cradle was really dynamic), the songs put the listener into a slow groove. Kwamya’s dreamy delivery has a richness that sets her apart from a lot of indie pop vocalists.

Since the release of this EP, Kwamya has put out another single, Little Red, which I hope means that more music is on the way. Dream pop that makes you want to dance hits a sweet spot for me, and it doesn’t get much better than this.