Unravel Two

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.

Continue reading β†’

🎡 Romantic Piano

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.

Continue reading β†’

🎡 New Beginning

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.

Continue reading β†’

Road To Knowhere

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.

Continue reading β†’

Doctrine of the Mean

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.

Continue reading β†’

The Prescience of Seinfeld

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 β€” 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 β€” real life seems to be catching up with β€œSeinfeld.

Continue reading β†’

That's So Meta

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 β€” or in the space below the floating torso β€” of one man.

Continue reading β†’

Tongues of the Future

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 β€œthe way Silicon Valley technocrats think.

Continue reading β†’

Privacy Policy

Last updated 05/14/2023 What Information is Collected and HowCanned Dragons is a personal blog. When you opt-in to join the site, you are asked for your email and name. You can provide your full name or only your first name or an alias. You are asked if would like to also subscribe to the Treasure Hoard newsletter digest email. You will not be asked to create a password for this site.

Continue reading β†’

Issue No. 55

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.

Continue reading β†’

Windsurf

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.

Continue reading β†’

I'm Still Uncomfortable With Amazon

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.

Continue reading β†’

Rise Above

β€œThe 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.

Continue reading β†’

Here's To Shutting Up

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.

Continue reading β†’

Flux Observer

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.

Continue reading β†’

Tumbling Down

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.

Continue reading β†’

The Candy Culture Wars

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.

Continue reading β†’

American Shoegaze

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.

Continue reading β†’

Last Known Good

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.

Continue reading β†’

Home

Canned Dragons is a weblog about faith, noise and technology, written by Robert Rackley. "For the memory can both provoke the dragon and the memory can also subdue him." ~ St. John Chrysostom