Canned Dragons

I've been fascinated by the idea that the opposite of addiction is connection since I first heard about it. It seems to be a transformative paradigm shift in terms of how we think about addiction and treatment. This piece by Robert Weiss details some of the research that has gone into formulating this conclusion.

Given the above, one wonders what is really going on with addiction. Obviously, there is more to the equation than just the dopamine pleasure response. Certainly, the experience of pleasure does play some role because it opens the doorway to addiction. But it is clear, since most people do not become addicts, that over time a person’s initial experience of pleasure is not what causes that individual to return to an addictive substance again and again, compulsively and to his or her detriment.

In an experiment, rats were given heroin and, in the absence of external stimulation and a community of other rats, became hopelessly addicted to it. In an environment with more to interact with and plenty of other rats, they ended up ignoring the heroin. The lesson transformed the thinking about addiction and helped to factor in community support as a factor in combating the problem.

Similar findings have been discovered in the area of mental health treatment in Finland.

In recent years, the Finnish model of care, known as ‘open dialogue’, has been seen as an alternative. Based on a network of family, friends and mental health practitioners, there are reports of significant long-term benefits, including fewer prescriptions, less time spent in hospital, and more people returning to education and work.

The more they are neglected, the more real-world connections show their necessity. The "loneliness epidemic" poses real and abiding risks for quality of life measures. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy recognizes the fact that online connections don't have the depth and protective effects that in-person connections do. "Cultivating a culture of connection," is not easy, though, particularly with the forces of modernity, technology and individualism, pushing against it.

I can't help but think about those that have put themselves in the right positions to nurture relationships, though, and have not seen success. This could be someone who has trouble with interpersonal relationships. It could be someone who felt excluded at a church, synagogue, mosque, temple or even at the local bowling league. I have heard so many stories from people that fit into these categories. I think we have a responsibility to ensure that those folks do not fall through the cracks. Particularly, as we see more and more data underscore the importance of social relationships and support systems, we need to keep a close eye out for those who may not be successfully finding opportunities to be nurtured in this way.

It was getting dangerously close to the end of the year, and I still hadn't picked out a favorite track from 2023, if only for my own contemplation, even if not for publication. This week, though, I finally listened to Daydreamer by Molly Burch, which came out in September. It sat in my album collection in Roon for a few weeks before I even took the time to actually put the virtual needle on the record. It was a mistake to sleep on this one.

The sixth song, "Unconditional" is far and away my favorite song this year. While things start out slow, the chorus, which begins when you are least expecting it, is a blatant nod to the more disco-influenced side of Japanese city pop. The song features hook-laden string arrangements combined with bass lines that have incredible buoyancy. Burch's pouty vocals transition beautifully between the aching verses and the upbeat chorus. As the city pop takes over, you realize just how bittersweet the lyrics to even the chorus are ("I'm barely hanging on") and it starts to dawn on you that she's talking herself into moving on from sadness (and an ex). The musical dynamic matches perfectly with the emotional movement in the song.

When I found out that Daydreamer was produced by Jack Tatum, who also self-produced my other favorite record this year — Wild Nothing's Hold — it didn't surprise me. Tatum has collaborated with Burch, who is his labelmate, in the past. His production shines here, as it does on the Wild Nothing record. Synths softly accent, guitars both chug along with new wave verve and solo with tasteful restraint. Tatum knows just when to juice things up for the most impact, and it comes across not only in "Unconditional," but in most of the other songs on the album as well.

For bonus points, checkout the video for "Unconditional," which has a roller skating segment that I can't stop watching.

The first band you think of when you think of Christmas music is probably not Ladytron. Then again, they have the icy synths, vocals that are enveloped by frosted echoes and wintertime themes. So maybe, while they are most definitely not Christmas music, their sound is appropriate this time of year. "All Over By Xmas" is really more for completionists, but the chorus did get stuck in my head after a single listen, so it's a pretty catchy tune.

Technically, this is not really a video so much as it's a visualizer. A little grace is warranted during the holiday season, though. Enjoy.

Via Space Echo

Cartwheel, the new album by Hotline TNT on Jack White's Third Man Records, has the distinction of being one of Pitchfork Media's picks for best new music. While I'm not always in sync with the writers of that particular publication on what's fresh, I have to back up their decision in this case.

Though Cartwheel occasionally relents in tempo and density, it’s extremely loud at all volumes, a force multiplier for the saddest secrets of its source material—power-pop love songs in love with the concept of love as learned from other power-pop songs about the same thing.

I hear the power pop reference in the material. I also hear a sort of Midwest emo meets shoegaze blend that is surprisingly (to these ears, at least) effective. The album kicks off with "Protocol," which is as good a showcase as any for the powers of this band. Noisy, melodic and dynamic, the song revels in the strengths that Hotline TNT brings to the table.

My only possible complaint with this album would be that it does rarely relent. The intensity that carries the songs hardly allows you to catch your breath. Be forewarned, there is enough fuzz here to potentially damage those bluetooth speakers you bought at Walmart.

Hotline TNT played at Hospscotch this year, but I had no awareness of them and missed the show. My brother went, and I'm a bit resentful that he didn't tell me about them then.

All of this has me wondering about Elon Musk and his X platform. I ask the same question I used to ask of Trump supporters: What would it take for him to lose your support? The latest test is his reinstatement of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to the platform. Not only his reinstatement, but his boosting of Jones by interviewing him and ignoring the misery that Jones has caused to families of children killed by gun violence. For those who are still on Twitter, including members of my family, this seems to be the latest outrage that no longer phases them. Like the Trump supporters, they just brush it aside.

Some — particularly on the political left — are prone to call out, perhaps even exaggerate, instances of potential stochastic terrorism.

Wikipedia defines stochastic terrorism this way:

Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group in such a way that it inspires supporters of the figures to commit a violent act against the target of the speech.

"Real-world harm" is a phrase that gets thrown around fairly loosely these days. For instance, it was included as part of the Duke University libraries decision not to renew their contract for the team collaboration software Basecamp, after CTO David Heinemeier Hansson wrote a post about the death of DEI in corporate spaces. The post was a bit of wishful thinking on the part of DHH, as he has had a grudge against the principles of DEI. His end zone dance after he thought he had scored a touchdown against his longtime nemesis was embarrassing. I don't think DEI has died in corporate spaces, nor do I think that would be a cause for such ebullience. I fully support the position of Duke to drop Basecamp because their interests are strikingly divergent from the founders of the company that makes the software. The post makes a compelling and well-reasoned case for why they are making the move.

However, one area where I am not so sure if I agree with Duke is on the accusation that the statements from DHH represent "the harms that we see perpetuated by the leadership of Basecamp’s parent company, 37signals." I think it would be very difficult to quantify the actual harms that have been caused by the opinions of those at the top of 37signals. Not that their statements aren't problematic and wrong-headed, but that they have actually caused harm. On the other side, statements from Alex Jones have verifiably caused real-world harm. That harm has been enumerated in a court of law, with copious evidence to back up the claims of it. Evidence that has led to punitive damage awards in the millions of dollars.

So why would someone wish to platform a man that, verifiably, has used his platform to cause egregious harm to others? If you are still using the service formerly known as Twitter, how can you feel comfortable with this? What would it take before you decided enough was enough and that the X platform was no longer something you could support? Where is the threshold?

I'm genuinely interested in the answers to these questions. If you want to engage in a conversation about it, feel free to get in touch.

Ted Gioia writes about the battle between macroculture and microculture.

ChatGPT makes the distinction between the two cultures:

In essence, macroculture represents the dominant cultural framework of a society, while microcultures are the distinct subgroups with their own customs and values existing within that broader framework.

Gioia believes microculture is taking over after the 20th century was dominated by macroculture, and welcomes the shift. Gioia was always more into microculture and the conceptually adjacent counterculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back—because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

I mostly followed the same pattern. I preferred what was called "alternative music." Occasionally, the question "alternative to what?" was asked. However, it was always implied that this was the alternative to the mainstream. This is why 120 Minutes, the MTV show that played alternative music videos, had a CD compilation called Never Mind The Mainstream. To have a vibrant counterculture, though, you have to have a culture to which it runs counter. As the macroculture dissolves, and no one watches the same TV shows or listens to the same records but instead live fragmented existences, the very excitement of an alternative is lost.

At the beginning of this year, I went through a bit of a thought experiment. I imagined that I had the power to call forth a new album from any band of my choice. What band would I choose? The two names that came foremost to mind were Wild Nothing and Ice Choir, both essentially pseudonyms for single musicians who make immaculate sophistipop (Jack Tatum and Kurt Feldman, respectively).

I've learned that although Kurt Feldman is working on some new music, his love for complex and time-consuming video games means that any kind of release may be long in coming. However, Tatum hadn't been heard from since the Laughing Gas EP dropped just on the eve of the Covid pandemic and its forced isolation. Since Wild Nothing typically released something every few years, it was about time for a fresh batch of tunes in some form. I was beyond excited a few months ago to hear that indeed, a new album was on its way in October of this year.

As is the fashion nowadays, singles from Hold slowly dropped ahead of the release of the full album. The second such single, Suburban Solutions, caught my attention — quite literally — for its catchy hooks and oversized ambitions. One line has Tatum singing "take a big bite" with a multitracked pitch-shifted echo effect, sounding a lot like a snippet from one of the more stylized Peter Gabriel (one of Tatum's heroes) songs. It's a bit of a gamble and one that may turn off some purists, but it has its own unexpected charm once you get over the shock.

The song and accompanying video comes off like an ad for a fictional do-it-all service called "Suburban Solutions" that aims to solve your problems — provided those problems are the result of living among similar houses with well-manicured lawns on uniform tracts of land. The video production is made to look like a relic from the Reagan era, a suitable vehicle for an eightiesphile like Tatum. It's purposefully kitschy, more than a little tongue-in-cheek, and a lot of fun. The line about taking a big bite is paired with footage that looks like it came from a nostalgia-producing Burger King ad. The effect of it all is distinctly Wild Nothing, which is certainly a compliment.

For bonus points, check out the third single from Hold, "Dial Tone." It's been reviewed as having a bit of the Cure in it, but I noticed that it sounds startlingly like "Fixed" by Stars. So, if you are into either of those bands, it's worth taking a listen.

I have benefitted from the use of AI recently. When I wanted to buy a complementary DAC and speaker combination, I consulted the "Schiit Talker," Schiit Audio's chatbot. It helpfully steered me away from some speakers that were less compatible with the DAC (but cheaper) I was looking at and towards the Kanto Yu4 set. I've been extremely happy with the DAC + speaker combo since I acted on the advice and purchased the equipment. The experience helped me warm up a bit to the idea of using AI for advice where it would be unusual to get human help.

While I've enjoyed using DALL-E for images (dig the one for this post), I can see the point of artists who are opposed to their works being used to train imaging AI. To that end, I was interested to see a kind of "poison pill" technology that warps an image when AI tries to use it for training. Kiona N. Smith reports on the new technique for protecting images for Ars Technica.

The open source "poison pill" tool (as the University of Chicago's press department calls it) alters images in ways invisible to the human eye that can corrupt an AI model's training process. Many image synthesis models, with notable exceptions of those from Adobe and Getty Images, largely use data sets of images scraped from the web without artist permission, which includes copyrighted material. (OpenAI licenses some of its DALL-E training images from Shutterstock.)

It seems like an effective way of fighting back against unauthorized usage of what could be protected material. I guess you beat tech with better tech.

As someone who in college majored in psychology and family and child counseling, I’m a proponent of therapy as an intervention in the case emotional difficulties. However, I am starting to question the potential overuse of therapy. Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic about a study in which Australian teens with no history of mental health challenges were given therapy and actually saw negative outcomes as a result.

“Maybe everybody thinking about how anxious or hurt they are might not be the best idea,” says Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generations. “We might be taking people who are doing just fine and trying to teach them these techniques, which may actually call attention to their distress.”

As use of therapy continues to increase, so do the problems it is meant to treat. In other words, the numbers of people reporting anxiety and depression are going up — just as therapy becomes more accessible. Jamie Ducharme covers this paradox for Time Magazine.

Trends are going in the wrong direction, even as more people seek care. “That’s not true for cancer, it’s not true for heart disease, it’s not true for diabetes, or almost any other area of medicine,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the psychiatrist who ran the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002 to 2015 and author of Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. “How do you explain that disconnect?”

Having spoken with some people who found themselves better off after discontinuing therapy, I wonder if it’s time we reexamine our therapeutic modalities. Those who were in this group simply found that they were happier not focusing on their problems.

I finally reached the breaking point with Apple Music. I’ve been a loyal Apple Music subscriber ever since the demise of the beloved Rdio streaming music service. I just can’t deal with the bugs across the application and service anymore.

Recently, I set my downloads to lossless quality, but I had trouble simply downloading music. I would try to download an album, and the progress indicator would just spin around and around. Some albums just couldn’t be saved to my machine. Classic albums like The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue just refused to store their files on my Mac. So, I had to listen in lossy quality or change the settings to stream in lossless, which would be somewhat of a strain on my network bandwidth. Since I just bought a DAC explicitly so I could listen to lossless and hi-res music, the whole situation wasn’t making sense.

The inability to save files for offline play was just one of the many bugs. The search didn’t work quite often. I could only type one character at a time and have to click somewhere else and then refocus on the search box. Tracks downloaded as lossless didn’t show the indicator that they were in that format most of the time. So I wasn’t sure if I still needed to try and grab the lossless files.

Ever since my wife upgraded her iPad to iPadOS 17, she can’t play more than 2 tracks of Music in a row without it crashing. It feels like no one at Apple is testing the app. This is surprising because I understand that Apple is trying to focus more of its growth strategy on services.

In addition to the difficulty with Apple Music, with Bandcamp showing signs that it may be in trouble, I needed another option for downloading music. Enter Qobuz, a hi-res music streaming and download service. I think I originally discovered the service because Audioengine was giving away free trials with purchases of their speakers. I didn’t get the trial, because I bought my Audioengine A5+ speakers on Amazon, but I kept the idea to check out the service at the back of my mind. When my A5+ speakers started having serious static issues right before my return period ran out, I hastily sent them back and exchanged them for a pair of Kanto YU4s. This time, instead of hooking up my speakers to my turntable and CD player, though, I attached them to my Mac with the new DAC. When Apple Music was having the aforementioned problems with playing higher-quality music, I decided to give Qobuz a spin.

So far, my impression of the upstart music service is very positive. In the language of net promotor scoring, I would “recommend the service to a friend" in a heartbeat. Even though the Qobuz Mac app is not native, it works with far fewer problems than the official Apple Music app, which seems like it was carved off iTunes and never sutured properly. Qobuz feels a bit like it has some of the UI DNA from Rdio, along with decent editorial content and lossless/hi-res as a first-class citizen. It markets itself as the go-to platform for hardcore music fans or audiophiles. Thankfully, in my experience, it lives up to its image, with an editorial sensibility that matches, high-fidelity music and an algorithm that pairs tracks you’ve played with similar music eerily well.

Another benefit to Qobuz is that, unlike Apple Music or Spotify, it works with Roon, a favorite tool of music enthusiasts. Roon has a good remote app, which is something I’m looking for since I want to play to music from my main Mac while I have my work laptop hooked up to my monitor. I tried the iTunes Remote app, but it only found part of my playlists (on a 58-song playlist, it found 6 songs). It also hasn’t been updated in years.

Coming from a consumer perspective, I get the sense that Apple is just coasting off name recognition and familiarity with respect to their music service. As a music fan, this isn’t enough for me. I would much rather give my streaming and purchase money to a company that is invested in the whole musical ecosystem and the experience. I’m dropping my Apple Music family plan to sign up for the Qobuz family plan.