At the recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple previewed their new OS for the Mac, macOS Sonoma. I have to admit, at first, I didn't pay too much attention to the announcements. I used to believe OS updates could be life-changing, but that was before these operating systems reached the level of maturity that they have currently. Now, I have more of a casual level of interest in the evolutionary offerings that a new OS brings.
If all goes as planned, I will be going to see the bands TOPS and Men I Trust at the Ritz in the fall. While I mentally prepare to see those bands live, there is a new track from TOPS spinoff Marci, the "solo" effort of Marta Cikojevic (with plenty of help from David Carriere). The video has a tight focus on Cikojevic as she wanders around an urban landscape lip synching into a microphone.
It has been an eventful week in the news, with the former president and his cadre of criminals coming under indictment. NYT columnist Ross Douthat has taken the opportunity to answer some questions about the expected Republican presidential nominee.
What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Douthat: That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.
We haven't yet made it through the first half of the year, but I think I have a contender for my favorite song of 2023. "Tides Turn" has a sound that blends R&B, dream pop and trip-hop. It is another standout track in a collection of soulful tunes from Patrick Fiore. Fiore is the mastermind behind the Noble Oak moniker and wrote, recorded, produced and mixed the track.
"I found my voice, but it sounds different now than ever before,"
I realize that Wordle probably isn't as popular as it used to be. However, the game is still fun and I'm looking at it as better than social media for a way to stave off that interstitial boredom that creeps up in between real activities. The New York Times is promoting playing Wordle Golf as a way to keep things interesting. How to Amplify Your Wordle GameIntroducing Wordle Golf, a new competitive way to play the daily guessing game.
Bandcamp just featured a primer on indie pop deep cuts in Bandcamp Daily, and I was surprised to find quite a few buried gems, some of which I probably never would have dug up on my own. The piece starts off with Heavenly's Le Jardin De Heavenly album, a touchstone of my early college experience. My girlfriend had the CD, and it went through many spins in her dorm room. "
I started playing Unravel Two on the Xbox at the insistence of my 11-yr.-old. Playing cooperative video games is one of the best ways I've found that we can bond and enjoy our time together. In this game, you each play as an adorable creature called a "yarny" made from, yep, yarn.
It’s a platforming adventure game seen from a unique perspective, or two. Play as a pair of Yarnys – small beings made of yarn and connected by a single thread – in local co-op or as a single player.
Gia Margaret caught my ear a few years ago, after she contracted a vocal illness that forced her to create instrumental music for her second album. I was mesmerized by the ambient track "Body" and the accompanying video.
Margaret just dropped a new album entitled Romantic Piano. It still follows a pattern of going light on the vocals. When it appears, her voice is treated almost like one of the other instruments.
In this retro-futuristic video, the members of Automatic live through the final days on Earth and are transported to locations that look like they came from the original Star Trek TV series. In their new home, they make do with gardening, liquid food and excursions in outer space ensconced in protective bubbles. Meanwhile, they are making time to rock and sing about the traveling far away "in the service of desire.
Road to Knowhere by Tommy GuerreroI bought Tommy Guerrero's album, A Little Bit Of Somethin', when it came out in 2000, based on the strength of the first track, "Blue Masses." The track has a haunting groove, a guitar part with enough negative space to drive a truck through, and a bass line that isn't shy about steering the song. It sets the scene for the rest of the record, a California production that takes on the psyche of the location.
A few months ago, in my Orthodoxy 101 class, we discussed Aristotle's "doctrine of the mean." I immediately felt attached to the framework, as I tend towards moderation. In Aristotle's conception, the golden mean is avoiding the extremes of any given characteristic.
A common example given to explain the doctrine of the mean is the virtue of courage, which is seen as being balanced between the feelings of fear and confidence.
Maya Salam writes for The New York Times (gift article) about how close Seinfeld was to capturing many of the sociocultural aspects of our present age. She particularly hones in on the adults in the show living their lives in a sort of perpetual state of childhood, eschewing typical adult responsibilities like steady jobs, covenantal relationships and children.
Today — as cracks in the facade of hustle culture continue to spread; as a growing library of books and articles promote the value of rest and fun; as more people delay or forgo marriage or children — real life seems to be catching up with “Seinfeld.
John Herrman writes about the failure of the metaverse concept. He's clearly disillusioned with legless avatars and unearned hype. The premise for the piece is that there is no "there" there. The metaverse as a concept is simply lacking a reason for existence. Herrman references Ed Zitron, who in writing his obituary for the meta verse, tends to blame one particular CEO.
He lays a great deal of responsibility for the hype at the feet — or in the space below the floating torso — of one man.
Malcolm Harris writes for Wired magazine about Doug Rushkoff, a techno optimist who had his predictions and assumptions about the future challenged. As a consequence, Rushkoff had to overhaul his outlook on technology. Rushkoff is a prolific author and Harris writes about his various books, including one called Survival of the Fittest.
The bulk of Survival of the Richest isn’t about apocalypse escape routes for the super-wealthy. It’s preoccupied with something Rushkoff calls The Mindset, which roughly translates to “the way Silicon Valley technocrats think.
Last updated 05/14/2023
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The Legend of Zelda Gets An UpdateThe latest The Legend of Zelda installation, Tears of the Kingdom, came out yesterday. Although this piece by Zachary Small in the New York Times gets a little too ambitious with typography and integrating videos into the text, it's still a great read. The article goes into the history of the iconic Zelda games and the direction they are headed in, and underscores the legacy they have left.
I don't typically use fan-made videos for Friday Night Videos, but this one is just so perfect. The found footage of rollerskating archives, most of which looks like it was filmed at California beaches, fits so perfectly with the breezy, upbeat track by The Ice Choir. The lyrics about sun and spray and escaping winter contrast with the name of the band and their tagline, "winter synths abound, all year round.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about Amazon and my discomfort with a number of the practices that the company employed. After writing the post, I was on a kick in which I was shunning Amazon and avoiding being a consumer of their services. That lasted for about a year, and then my convictions started to wear thin. I started watching shows on Prime. I started ordering things like supplements from Amazon when I realized how expensive and inconvenient it was to buy them from multiple vendors.
“The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.”
~ N.T Wright
In this piece (NYT gift article), Tish Harrison Warren interviews New Testament scholar N.T. Wright about Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus. The scholar makes the point, as others have, that the Resurrection was just as unbelievable in Jesus's time as it is in ours. Therefore, for those that knew him closely to carry on his ministry in the way that they did, and in the face of almost certain death, the only explanation is that they saw and they believed.
I recently listened to an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast about the ability to shut up in a world that won't stop talking. The guest on the show was Dan Lyons, who recently wrote the book STFU: The Power Of Keeping Your Mouth Shut In An Endlessly Noisy World. Unfortunately, at least a few people who read Lyons' book thought the author himself had a problem shutting up. Ironically, Lyons couldn't help himself from putting partisan political jabs in a book where they didn't really fit the subject.
Adam Wood hosts a show called Flux Observer that features one of my favorite podcast concepts: Wood reviews a cultural artifact from years ago to determine how his relationship to it has changed over the years. I've always wanted to do something like this, though I never considered doing it via a podcast. For years I've talked about revisiting albums that I enjoyed years ago to write about how well they hold up.
Jonathan Haidt and his colleague, Greg Lukianoff, believe that the enormous increase in mental health issues for young women who are identified as "liberal" has to do with going through a sort of reverse CBT process. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is one of the most effective tools for combating depression and a process that greatly helped Lukianoff recover from his own difficult bout with the dark clouds. CBT, in short, helps an individual to regain their sense of agency over mental processes like catastrophizing or intrusive thoughts.
John Paul Brammer wades into the candy culture wars (which are adjacent to the chicken sandwich culture wars and seem to provoke no less depth of feeling, if not many true casualties) on his Substack.
No one really asked for the M&Ms to be more relatable or for Velma to call out toxic masculinity. These are decisions massive corporations made because we are living in an era where personal morality is almost entirely defined by consumption habits, because consumption habits make up a good chunk of our daily lives.
The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece demanded a desire to dig deep and attention span to match that ambition. I spent some time this week going through the bands.
I've been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a "last known good" configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running.
