I have a Kobo Libra 2 ereader, and it’s one of my favorite devices. Of course, it is used for reading books, but I spend just as much time reading articles saved from the internet. I find I have a much greater capacity for reading long materials passed from the internet on an e-ink device. I’m using Pocket as my read-it-later service, and it syncs well with the Kobo. It’s a 2-way sync, so you can favorite and archive articles from the device.

Other read-it-later services, such as Instapaper and Matter, have a 1-way push to the Kindle, but anything you do on the Kindle does not sync back to the service. While a 2-way sync is intrinsically superior to a 1-way sync, how the sync fits within your workflow determines how much more useful it is. In my case, I mainly use the 2-way Pocket sync on my Kobo to sync favorites back to the service, so I can go back to them on an iOS device and make highlights from there — something you cannot do on the Kobo. Readwise (I’m on a free trial of that service) syncs the highlighted passages and other metadata from Pocket to Obsidian. I pull article information from Obsidian into Ulysses to write about it. I’m doing that part manually. I don’t yet have it automated, like Matt Bircher.

Highlights

Although my workflow is okay, it’s a bit more manual than I would like. It would be much easier, for example, if I could highlight article passages on my Kobo and have them automatically sync to Obsidian, as I can do with books. Since I have to go back to my iOS devices to create highlights, the 2-way sync is of somewhat limited usefulness, in my case. It is hardly superior to the 1-way push from Instapaper or Matter to the Kindle, where I have to go back to my iOS device for article management, anyway.

Where Instapaper and Matter end up being superior to Pocket is in the management of highlights. Through a third party service like Readwise — that has a non-trivial monthly subscription fee — Pocket has decent highlights management. On its own, extracting highlights from the service is difficult. From the web interface, you can only copy a link to the article from the highlight. Inexplicably, there is no way to pull out highlights without going through a standard copy and paste, which makes the usefulness of highlights themselves low. On iOS, you can extract the highlights through the share button, but not many programs can accept the output and most only show a link to the article. Ulysses, for instance, only occasionally captures the quote. I would love to see the folks behind Pocket come up with better options for highlight export. Perhaps even an image you can share on your blog or social media, like many other services, such as Glasp or Matter, would be nice.

Unfortunately, I have low confidence in the ongoing development of Pocket. The “what’s new” section of their web app has not been updated for almost a year. Their parent company, Moz://a, is consistently in financial trouble. Theoretically, Pocket as a revenue stream should help, but their pay tier offerings have very little value add. I’m at a loss for what $5 a month gets you over the free tier, except more than 3 highlights per article, additional fonts and tag suggestions. I find 3 highlights per article to be plenty for most pieces, I’m fine with the Graphik font, and I can create my own tag taxonomy. One of the tags I use is an @[name] tag to remember where I found the link, so I can provide proper attribution if I write about the piece on my blog. I doubt Pocket is going to suggest tags that would fit in such a custom system.

Matter

In contrast to the slow pace of Pocket development, Matter has been aggressively improving their app. They just launched version 2.0, in what, I believe, is less than a year after the original 1.0 release. Version numbers don’t necessarily convey the pace of change, but in this case, the application was redesigned for the second release. The first version of the app was frequently criticized for being too cluttered. Matter 2.0 removed the social experience, which is better left up to dedicated social media platforms, and received a largely positive response from users.

Matter is based on the premise that the modern reading economy is being  constructed by individual writers rather than aggregates of writers brought together by publications. So, it builds in what is essentially an RSS reader for blogs and newsletters, based around writers. The creators are betting that the kind of app will become increasingly necessary in a fragmented reading environment.

Still, we can predict a few things with confidence: The supply of great content will continue to rise (and nichify), attention will always be scarce, and the returns to making good decisions about what to read will remain high — and indeed, increase — over time.

The paradigm seems to work fairly well, with the writers you would expect being recognized by the system and made easy to follow and more writers being added all the time.

Ereaders

Coming back to the reading experience on an ereader, Matter lets you push articles individually to Kindle. The feature assumes that you don’t want to automatically sync all of your saved articles to your ereader. It also assumes that you don’t necessarily want to send all the articles in your inbox to your ereader (like Instapaper does). While the Pocket/Kobo integration is smart enough not to send things like videos or articles that can’t be parsed to the Kobo, you still get everything else, which can be a plus or minus, depending on your workflow.

I might be ready to dive further into the Matter ecosystem as a forward-looking alternative to Pocket, but am I prepared to get back into the world of Amazon reading with the Kindle? Despite my strong feelings toward Amazon, I’m considering it. I’m glad I’ve got an old Kindle to try a new process on, so I don’t have to jump in without seeing what this looks like.

I’ve always wanted to experience a tiny house, which, to be clear, is different than wanting to live in a tiny house. I read somewhere recently that over half of the people who bought tiny homes a few years ago when their popularity peaked had converted them to Airbnb rentals. So, I took advantage of the trend and booked a tiny home in the mountains of NC for a long weekend for myself and the wife.

To summarize, the tiny home was just about perfect for a short stay, but I had my instinct that I wouldn't want to live in one confirmed. That understanding was probably one of the best things I could take away from the experience. For the vaction, living lightly was ideal for allowing us to getaway to destinations like Boone and Blowing Rock, where we enjoyed the hiking and downtowns, but allow us to come back to a space that felt comfortable to us and didn't require a lot of upkeep.

We were also able to catch up on some movies we had been meaning to check out, which is actually a pretty rare treat for us. I paid only minimal attention to the news, which was centered around the crisis in the Middle East, the new Speaker of the House, and the death of Matthew Perry — depressing topics, all.

I got a few pictures on the trip, as did my wife. When I reviewed the pictures, a selfie that my wife took of the two of us reminded me of my resemblance to my grandfather on my mother's side.

Of course, we got some shots of the amazing fall colors.

We attended Divine Liturgy at Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Church. It was a beautiful little parish and I'm glad we were able to experience a service there. The homily helped my wife understand the veneration of icons, which was a mystery to her previously.

A Return to Normal Life

With vacation behind us, I'm turning my attention towards more studying and training. I'm going to be preparing for the MS Azure AZ-900 exam. The subject material is pretty basic as far as understanding the platform goes, so I'm going to probably have some trouble keeping my attention on the subject, but I need to get through it so I can move on to more complex material.

Current Reading

Thinking Orthodox by Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou

Stray Fossa is a band that Apple Music kept pushing on me until I realized that I really liked them. Combining hushed tones and gentle atmospherics with chillwave sensibilities, they appeal perfectly to mid-life me. At this period in my existence, I'm looking backward and forward in equal measure. Music that contains a sense of restrained nostalgia with a nod to retro-futurism speaks to where my mind finds itself. I can imagine walking through an urban landscape with ear buds in, going from classic architecture to the most modern of skyscrapers and beholding all with a fascination brought about by realizing harmony in contradiction.

Stray Fossa picks up the baton from Small Black in making rhythms with diminutive keyboards and baselines that comfortably bounce the songs along. Breathy vocals bring to mind Cigarettes After Sex. The band guides the listener through understated verses and choruses that could serve as anthems for the contentedly indifferent.

Stray Fossa's new album Closer Than We'll Ever Know is out  6/3 on Born Losers records.

A lot of times, when I watch movies that pit good vs. evil in easily distinguishable sides, I wonder about someone actually choosing a path that is clearly evil. Take Star Wars, for example. Why would someone choose to be on the dark side, with all the available evidence that it's just evil? There are moments when I have trouble suspending my disbelief. George Lucas tried hard to make Anakin's descent into the evil persona of Darth Vader believable, but it was still rough around the edges. The depiction of evil in movies can be so exaggerated as to be cartoonish.

Most people don't just set out one day and decide that they are going to be bad. So, in the movies, when some kind of transformation happens, it's hard not to give it a little extra scrutiny as a plot device. Good films usually show some slow decent into evil. We say, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions,” and it’s usually one little thing that leads to another. A kind of breadcrumb trail that a person follows until they find themselves out in the middle of the dark forest, lost and confused, and they think that wrong is right.

Then, it turns out, some people are okay with embracing evil. Madison Cawthorn, who just lost his reelection campaign to the House of Representatives, is calling on the power of Dark MAGA to avenge him. Dark MAGA refers to a group whose main political platform is revenge. The reason the third (oh okay, call it the sixth) Star Wars movie was retitled The Return of the Jedi from The Revenge of the Jedi was that revenge is not a virtuous pursuit. The realization was that truly good people, as represented in the films by the Jedi, do not seek revenge.

The Dark MAGA adherents are consumed with the destruction of their perceived enemies. They are, in the mode of high fantasy like Star Wars, choosing the dark side, the side of the Sith. It’s all as ridiculous as it sounds. It would be laughable, except when you think of the reality that Cawthorn was elected once, and not trounced in his reelection bid. Now it’s a little too close to be humorous.

The 1980s was a decade that started with an album called The Age of Plastic. The band that released the album, the Buggles, captured the spirit of the age by announcing “Video Killed The Radio Star” in a nod to the rise of MTV (Music Television). They had their fingers on the pulse of the American music scene that was springing up in the wake of disco and the long tail of the rise of punk. Plastic was an appropriate metaphor for an embrace of everything synthetic. Synthesizers captured the popular imagination and even stole some thunder from the guitar.

The Covers EP from Mint Julep features mostly reworkings of 80s tunes. There’s a startling principle at work here, though — that these tunes from the age of plastic simply didn’t have enough synths. Even the cover of aughts-era band Headphones track “I Never Wanted You” layers more warbly synths than the original, and that band was created specifically as a synthesizer-based side project!

Though these were recorded a decade ago, the songs on the EP tread familiar territory with Angel Olsen’s covers from her Aisles EP. Many of the tracks have slower tempos than that originals and walls of synths that are so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Whether a song is from Depeche Mode or When in Rome, Mint Julep bends the track to sound like it’s theirs, making this EP a cohesive listening experience.

A couple of weeks ago, the NY Daily News, after yet another mass shooting in the US, posted a provocative cover blasting politicians for offering prayers instead of concrete action.

The cover featured tweets from Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, offering their prayers for the victims and families affected by the shooting that occurred in San Bernadino, CA. The text accompanying the story excoriated those politicians for offering kind words but no solutions.

As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes

Incendiary, to be sure, but then people are being killed at an alarming rate. There has been, to date, almost no movement, on the part of many politicians, to curb the violence. As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words” and the silence on this subject has been deafening.

I believe strongly in the power of intercessory prayer. I make it a daily practice and believe it is one of the most important things that I can do. Being able to move the heart of God is a blessing and a truly beautiful aspect of our human condition. Having expressed that, I can understand the frustration being conveyed in this cover story. Without calls to take measures to prevent gun violence that mars the national landscape on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, the invocation of prayer rings hollow and disingenuous. Let us not forget that even Jesus himself criticized those who offered public prayers in order to be seen by others as pious.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:5–8)

There are also biblical references to those who profess to faith but do not back their faith up with deeds. The book of James speaks fairly extensively about this issue.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:14–17)

In other countries, when faced with similar problems related to easy access to guns, leaders have reacted, with responses appropriate to the scale of such tragedies. In contrast, the current crop of US lawmakers appears to be nothing short of completely indolent. David Branes relates how in 1996, when a lone gunman in Dunblane, Scotland killed 16 five-year-old children and their teacher in a classroom, then took his own life, most handguns were subsequently banned in the UK. Though guns are used in crimes there, he states, they do not have the same threat of mass shootings. The same pattern played out in Australia after a shooting at Port Arthur in 1996. Gun laws were strengthened and there have been only 3 shooting sprees in Australia since, with only one that was seemingly random. My assumption of the politicians in those countries is that, if they offered prayers, they also offered of themselves, to carry out the will of a God who desires peace among people. Within Christianity, we refer to this desire to bring the Kingdom of Heaven closer as participatory eschatology. In this theology, we as believers are called to action, in order to further God’s will and make the world a better place.

The difference in political reactions between the US and the UK and Australia seems to be at least partially attributable to a powerful and well-funded gun lobby in the US. Shannon Coulter recently wrote an informational piece on the 46 US Senators who voted against universal background checks on gun purchases in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The piece contains the amount of campaign contributions 43 of those senators took from the gun industry. It is worth acquainting yourself with this list. I would like to believe that those with power and responsibility who trade our safety and security for campaign funds will find themselves facing increasing opposition from peace-loving people of all faiths. Especially as Christians, though, we need to call out those whose response to tragedy is “thoughts and prayers, but keep the checks coming.”

A new book entitled Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia examines how more conservative and even far-right Christians are flocking to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The phenomenon is detailed by Odette Yousef in the NPR piece Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts.

Those who have followed the influx of extremists into American Orthodoxy agree that those individuals are fringe within the church and are mostly concentrated in newly founded ROCOR parishes. But they also warn that it would be foolish to ignore them. Of particular concern are the ways in which these individuals are networking with outside extremist groups and broadcasting their ideologies in the name of Orthodoxy.

I have to wonder to what extent Christians are leaving mainline or evangelical churches for Orthodox Christianity overall. The traditional American churches have changed in substantial ways to align with contemporary American cultural values. The piece on the book points out what a small minority the extremists represent within the Orthodox Church several times. However, it doesn't get at the number of people who are making the conversion to Orthodoxy, but who couldn't be painted with that brush. I suppose that wouldn't help with the narrative that is being woven here.

After the last service I attended at a Greek Orthodox Church, I asked a member of the clergy if he could tell me one thing that has changed in the last fifty years. At first, he struggled and couldn't come up with an answer. Then, you could see the light bulb flicker on in his head. Some lines in one of the hymns in their hymnal had changed in the recent past, he told me, beaming with pride. That was all he could come up with, and he was clearly satisfied. There's a path of continuity in the Orthodox tradition. Even Catholicism, that ancient faith which traces the first Bishop of Rome back to Peter, the rock on which Jesus said He would build his church, doesn’t match the allegiance to tradition that is present in Orthodox Christianity.

It makes some sense then, as we watch other churches argue about traditional versus contemporary services, or whether worship should be changed to incorporate more gender-neutral language, that a certain segment of Christians would be attracted to the stability of Orthodoxy. The Reformers once accused the Catholics of innovation, but it’s now mostly protestant churches that change elements of belief and worship. From the perspective of this believer, the changes are sometimes helpful and sometimes not. “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed, always reforming),” is the rallying cry, but when do the reforms go too far? It can seem like, each time a substantial change is made, a schism — seen or unseen — takes place in its wake and a new church is born. It reminds me of dubbing cassette tapes as a kid. Whenever a copy of a copy was made, there was a palpable loss of fidelity. A little more noise to go with the signal.

The Orthodox Church is not without its critics among its own ranks, particularly for its reticence to speak out on atrocities unfolding in Ukraine as vociferously as it condemns issues like abortion. It seems as if the faith leaders could take a page out of Pope Francis’ book when speaking with a more comprehensive moral clarity. Whether former Protestants are moving to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, though, it’s interesting to see the shift to high-church alternatives that are more historically consistent in how their traditions are expressed.

As I witness this happening, I'm reminded of a story that has haunted me since I read it. The Green-Eyed Christ by Adam Roberts is a cautionary metaphorical tale of church splits and new doctrines. The story takes place in the fourteenth century (pre-reformation) and follows a painter, Mijnheer Jacco Heuschrecke. Heuschrecke unknowingly gains a power by which anything he paints will be created in Heaven. As is the custom of the time, he paints mainly religious works and soon there are 12 new Christs in Heaven, all trying to decide who is the real deal. When the painter runs out of blue paint, he paints a Green-Eyed Christ, who, being the 13th and by virtue of his difference from the others, claims to be the true Christ. He comes to visit the confused painter to tell him only to sketch fourteen representations of God — that an angel has told Heuschrecke to fully paint — and give them colored eyes. Heuschrecke is troubled by sketching more beings in Heaven to add to the confusion.

‘They are already in Heaven,’ said the Green-Eyed Christ. ‘But weakly: like spectres, potentless, wandering here and there. A dab of paint will give them more substantiality in the eternal realm, but not so much as to be able to reassert the old, stifling order. And from this point the grace of God will pour down upon the world in a new way — in ten thousand variants, in new religions and new sciences, in a great flourescence of culture and life and possibility.’

‘Will it be so?’ Heuschrecke asked. His initial shock, at having an intimate conversation with the saviour of all humanity, had settled, and now he found himself uncertain as to the merits of what this Green-Eyed Christ was saying. ‘Must it be so?’

‘It is a new dawn, my friend,’ said the Green-Eyed Christ.

‘But what of Holy Mother Church?’

‘She will persist.’

‘But broken — fractured?

‘Oh yes. Broken as white light is broken into the rainbow.’

‘Heresies will prosper, like rank weeds in a beautiful flowerbed? No, Lord, surely not! Rival churches will challenge the oneness of faith?’

The painter flees, vowing to finish the paintings of God and, therefore, bring balance back to Heaven. It is hinted that Heuschrecke never finishes his paintings, but we already know how the story ends.

I love how Hollie Cook is able to blend reggae and dream pop vibes on her new single, “Full Moon Baby.” I enjoyed Cook's first album, Vessel of Love when it came out in 2018, but there's something unique about this track.

This is how you do crossover. It feels like the way forward when even pioneering genres are beginning to retread the same ground over and over again. Almost no stone has been left unturned in even some of my favorite musical styles. I'll always enjoy the familiar, but I'm eager to hear new ways to blend styles and create something that speaks of novelty.

I've never been a huge fan of reggae, but I've never disliked it, either. Even if it was a crutch for some of the early music by The Police.

Sting: The other nice thing about playing a reggae groove in the verses was that you could leave holes in the music. I needed those holes because, initially, I had a hard time singing and playing at the same time. So if we had a signature in the band it was…

Andy Summers: Big holes?

Not too long before my grandfather died, he offered me his collection of reggae cassettes. I declined the offer (cassettes were not the coveted items they've now become, at the time). What if I had accepted the offer? Would my music tastes be totally different now?

Hollie Cook's new album, Happy Hour, will be out 6/24 on Merge Records.

I have decided I need to introduce some changes to how I post online. I typically write a lot of link posts because I read quite a bit online and want to share things that I think are interesting. This comes from a desire to add my thoughts to what is put out there by others, and — let’s face it — comment sections are a pretty bad way to do it. Lately, though, a lot of what I see online has to do with the outrage of the week. “Outrage of the week” sounds like some cute embellishment, but it has become literally accurate. Every week, the people on the internet collectively lose their minds about a particular subject. Then, everyone gives a hot take on that subject. When the next week hits, there’s a new subject to write about. It has become an all-too-familiar standard pattern.

I’m not saying that these subjects aren’t truly outrageous (the war in Ukraine being a particularly potent example). With so many people writing about the same thing, though, adding another voice to the chorus doesn’t always feel appropriate or effective. Former religion advisor to President Obama, Micheal Wear, recently tweeted about this.

I want to continue to read about these issues, I’m just not sure that I wish to write about them. Even in the vastness of the World Wide Web, escaping “the outrage” and reading and writing about something different can be difficult. So, I’m going to slow down on link posting in the way that I have been doing it. I’ll still be blogging. I just don’t want to commit to a weekly email, in case, on any given week, I just can’t find enough that I want to write about. At least not enough to write about without getting sucked into the outrage.

Luke Harrington writes about how the outrage of the week drove him off social media. He understood that there were good people on either side of the issue.

I knew, though, that social media would not show me evidence of this. I knew the moment I opened Facebook or Twitter, I would be assaulted by a bottomless column of self-righteous gloating from one side and self-righteous screeching from the other. That I’d be forced to re-read the exact same shouting matches I’d seen rehearsed ad nauseam for decades. That panicky, breathless misinformation would spread like chlamydia, and the most ignorant, unthinking voices would be amplified to deafening levels.

A news story, told by a mob of idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It's hard to write about what's going on in the world when social media is bringing us down to the lowest common denominator. Even long-time blogger Jason Kottke is taking a sabbatical from his general purpose blog.

Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy? What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I need time away to gain perspective.

It will be interesting to see if Jason comes back, or if he decides that having to follow what is going on around the internet is too mentally taxing and not worth the effort and the return.

Similarly, I won't be doing "Week on the Web" digests for the foreseeable future. I would rather not have to be tethered too tightly to what is going on in the web version of purgatory. I'm not some alchemist who can turn the lead of internet sentiment into the gold of something edifying. When I was using HEY World, I was writing longer posts and sending them out through email, RSS and the open web. That process didn’t require that I follow current events so closely.

HEY World

Using HEY World by 37signals worked pretty well for general purpose ad hoc blogging, but it is a very limited tool. That's mostly a feature, not a bug, but in some cases, it can be frustrating. For example, when HEY added scheduling for emails, they left it half-baked into their implementation of HEY World. You get an error, though, when you try to use it. I messaged their support folks about it, and it sounds like they have no plans to fix the bug. I find that strange, since the whole point of HEY World is that it makes blogging as easy as sending email. You would think they would want to keep the email features, like scheduling — that make sense for blogging — intact for HEY World.

There are other, more important ways, that HEY World feels like an experiment that 37signals is not pursuing further. For instance, when you export your data out of HEY, you only get your standard emails, and not the ones that have been sent to the web. This means that any blog posts you write in HEY are stuck there and disappear when you leave the service. If you spend time on your writing, and attach some value to it, that should be a deal-breaker. It certainly is for me. So, I won't be using HEY World for blogging anymore, unless I can find a good way to back up my work. Given my picky nature about blogging and the fact that HEY is lacking in customization or the ability to use your own domain, it was always a long shot that it would stick, anyway.

Newsletters

Something that HEY World gets absolutely right is the ability to post across delivery mechanisms and have it look virtually the same on every client. However, I don't need HEY to do that. Both Micro.blog and Ghost do something similar, just a bit differently. For the purposes of this post, I will stick with describing Micro.blog, since that is currently my blogging platform of choice.

Micro.blog gives you three options for how to implement newsletters, and I think they are all well-designed for different use cases.

1. Send email for each long blog post with a title
2. Collect all short microblog posts and long posts into a weekly email
3. Collect posts from a category into a monthly email

I have been using the second option to produce an email digest each week, for folks who may not be following my blog via RSS. I'm going to switch to sending out long posts via email, like I was doing with HEY World. This means I can take the time to write longer posts with greater thought put into them. I won't feel as if I need to fill the week with link posts while dodging the outrage.

Moving forward

I love writing out my feelings. It's cathartic, therapeutic and most of all, fun. I want to continue to do so, but I need to focus more on less. This was the idea I had when I briefly shifted to HEY World, but there's no reason I can't do it on Micro.blog. That platform allows me to post whatever I want and distribute that content in the ways that make the most sense.

Lois M. Collins has a profile of Elizabeth Bruenig, whom I’ve long admired, for Deseret News. The basis for the piece is Bruenig’s unusual (for these days, anyway) blend of faith and politics. She doesn’t fit neatly into the proscribed categories that we have packaged up for easy consumption and advocacy. She’s strongly left on economics but somewhat to the right socially. As a staunch Catholic, she's pro-life and has done quite a bit of investigative journalism on the death penalty.

Elizabeth Bruenig makes no apologies. Not for her progressive politics, not for her Catholic faith and certainly not for having children at an age some of the left intelligentsia find unfashionable.

Though Bruenig’s blend of progressive economic politics, socially conservative politics and Catholicism seems out-of-place in the modern zeitgeist, I personally don’t find it inconsistent at all. After all, progressive politics tends to be much more supportive of serving the poor and disenfranchised, which was one of Jesus’ major concerns. He taught us to serve the poor in particularly urgent language in parables such as the one commonly referred to as The Sheep and the Goats. While some Christian sects like to talk about people going to hell if they don’t accept Christ as their savior, Jesus himself indicated that you would be headed that way if you don’t help your fellow human beings who are struggling in this particular parable.

Jesus was pretty conservative on social issues like marriage. He believed that, for instance, divorce was to be avoided in all but the most extreme situations. Historically, this has been the position of the church and the governments that came from majority Judeo-Christian backgrounds. It wasn’t until California instituted the no-fault divorce just decades ago that it became easy to get a divorce in the United States.

She likes to quote Lena Dunham (in some ways, her political opposite), who said, “I’m not for everyone.”

In fact, Bruenig’s alignment with the values of the early Christian church shows how disordered our modern political divisions of left and right really are when compared against a background of religious faith. To paraphrase a recent statement by blogger Robbie Sapunarich, I’m not sure we should take our terminology from the French Revolution. The modern political binaries are arbitrary or sometimes practical, like drawing boundaries for a state or town. They are only there because we have erected them for the purposes of lowering cognitive load and making it easier to digest complex issues. Why think individual issues out – with all of their nuances and different applications to different people – when you can just get a whole package of beliefs handed to you?

I read posts from a lot of people who are either cleanly on the one side or the other. You can guess what their opinion will be on any given political issue, based on the package they have accepted. While I like these people (or I wouldn’t be following them in the first place), I have to take what they are writing with a lower expectation that they’ve actually thought the issue through. Maybe they have, but it’s more likely they’re just regurgitating what their favorite political team’s talking points. It’s going to be somewhat less interesting to me at best (frustrating, at worst) if someone doesn’t have their own, unique take on things.

As Bruenig has discovered, mostly through her presence on social media, a lot of people don’t like independent thinkers. Peter Wason didn’t pull the theory of confirmation bias from nowhere. Most people have a reactionary view on hot button issues, and like to read whatever confirms their initial view. They don’t like challenges to that view, which put them in a defensive posture. Online, this defensiveness can come out as rage.

It’s good that Bruenig doesn’t put too much stock in the social media outrage machine, because she wouldn’t have lasted this long in the online world if she did. She likes to quote Lena Dunham (in some ways, her political opposite), who said, “I’m not for everyone.”

Captured Tracks recording artist Scout Gillett covers the standout Broadcast track "Come On Let's Go" on her newest covers EP, One To Ten. I liked the original version of this song, despite the fact that I am always feeling like I'm going to get Broadcast mixed up with Stereolab (it's the same sixties space age bachelor pad vibe). It’s an interesting choice for for Gillett, who also covers Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” on the EP — which sounds completely fitting for her retro country-pop feel.

Here Gillett doesn't shed the Broadcast sound, but adds some punch to the track. There’s a noisy but slow guitar solo that heats things up. Gillett mimes shredding the guitar using a broom in the video. It’s obvious she’s having a lot of fun with this recording, which was originally done in September 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, for a tribute compilation to the late Broadcast singer, Trish Keenan. Since the order of the day was to stay home and stay well, any movement outside of out that space was carefully calculated. So the lyrics to the song, which go: “what’s the point in wasting time, with people you’ll never know,” really spoke to Gillette about the current state of affairs. You had to be judicious about who you spent time with and the song, written decades ago, pointed straight at that situation. Gillette's voice sounds less coy than Keenan's does on the song, and she compensates in the video by nodding affirmatively during the chorus. As she sings "come on let's go," heaven help you if you aren't at least curious to see where Gillett is going to take you.

My first thought when read (at the end of a long day of work) that Elon Musk had purchased Twitter, was some measure of disbelief. I'm almost embarrassed to admit the second thought that popped into my head after reading the news. Yep, it is definitely with some shame that I tell you my disbelief was quickly followed by relief. I'm aware that may be surprising. It surprised me, too.

I'm not certain that I've ever really spent much time writing about Elon Musk, but my feelings toward the man are not very positive. I have spent a lot of time (maybe too much) writing about Twitter, and its many faults. Recently, I took a Lenten break from Twitter and, when I came back, found it pretty unappealing. Someone once joked that the game of Twitter was to not be the person who was being talked about on Twitter on any given day. On the day I came back — Easter Sunday — that person (or those people, rather) was a crew of zealous, evangelistic Christians singing songs about Jesus on an airplane. My whole timeline was filled with what the extremely online call "takes" about this incident. It didn't leave me wanting more. After seeing recommendations from Twitter, which, as usual, seemed designed to spark outrage, I felt even less inclined to log in. So, I just haven't been on the platform much during this Eastertide.

In the midst of my neglect of the Twitter timeline, though, one thing that has been weighing on my mind is Twitter's financial future. You see, I'm a TWTR shareholder, conflicted about my distrust of the platform and being financially intertwined with its fate. I have been waiting for a chance to sell my shares at a reasonable price and get out. I now have a way to cash in my chips, not having gained much over the years, but at least some. If I wanted to wash my hands of the whole affair, I could be done with Twitter today. It is somewhat liberating.

When I started writing this post, I thought I was probably mostly alone in my feelings. Then I read this from M.G. Seigler.

And with the market now in a state of turbulence, the chaos of Elon Musk must have in some ways felt welcoming. A chokehold that felt like a warm embrace.

I can't come up with a better metaphor than "a chokehold that felt like a warm embrace." An online place that I used to love has fallen into the hands of a billionaire with an ax to grind, and I feel fine.

Sometimes Apple Music inspires me by algorithmically playing fitting sequential songs after a self-made playlist. This happened recently when I had been listening to some tracks I had stuck together and it followed them up with a Chromeo and then a Cut Copy song. I never would have thought to put the two together, but the combo worked really well. I could imagine myself DJ’ing — spinning those tracks back to back to get people moving. That was the inspiration for this playlist, Dance Music For Introverts. It's a bit of a misnomer, since some of it is just straight up dance music, but it works.

I continue to be amazed by how tightly Apple Music has been tuned since it first debuted. Obviously, whenever you are dealing with machine learning, the more data you have, the better the recommendation engine can be. In this case, after listening to the first few songs I added to the playlist, I was literally thinking, "I need to put Toro Y Moi’s 'New Beat' on here." Before I could even do that, Apple Music played the song when the playlist had ended.

That's entertainment.

I look at Easter not just as a day, but as a kickoff, if you will, for Eastertide. I see it as somewhat analogous to New Year's Day. Resolutions start then, and don't end when the day is over. Eastertide is a time to look at renewal in your life. If that renewal is simply a present fact, as is my continuing recovery from ME/CFS — thanks be to God — then it is a time for celebration. Sometimes, though, you may have to gently invite that renewal.

Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar and it means a lot to me and other believers. This year, I wanted to write something to convey the beauty of Easter, but I didn’t come across any articles that really sparked my imagination and spurred my writing. Then I realized, while sitting in church, that I had actually already read a post that spoke to me about Easter in way that was relevant to my recent experiences – that I wanted to share.

Peggy Noonan writes for The Wall Street Journal about “America’s Most Tumultuous Holy Week,” which she believes was the week in April 1865. To make her case, she subtitles her piece: “On Palm Sunday, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln was dead by Easter.” It’s a pretty strong argument for a superlative level of tumult. What impressed me about her account of the surrender of General Lee to General Grant was the amount of grace that the North gave to the South after such a bloody war. The reason for grace wasn’t that the figures in the North thought that the cause of the South was anything but criminally unjust.

Grant would write in his memoirs “What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know.” His own feelings, which had earlier been jubilant, were now “sad and depressed.” He couldn’t rejoice at the downfall of a foe that had “suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard those lines before in the Ken Burns Civil War documentary because when I read it, I hear it said, in one of Burns’ reliable narrator’s voices. It shows the disdain that the Union soldiers must have had for the Confederate cause. Yet, when it came time to negotiate the terms of surrender, they were merciful terms. The Confederate soldiers were allowed to keep their personal arms, take a horse or a donkey, were fed and sent on their way back to farm their lands. Noonan relates, "Grant’s commissary chief later asked, 'Were such terms ever before given by a conqueror to a defeated foe?'" Perhaps they were, but that kind of treatment is not the standard following a war.

The United States perhaps would not have remained united following the war, were it not for those terms. As I remember why Christ died for us, I like think His sacrifice to earn forgiveness for our sins can be best celebrated by forgiving others. At a time when bickering in this country happens over seemingly everything, this Easter reminds me that we can be reconciled over even some of the most difficult things.

Other than writing, I have been trying to avoid too much screen time. This week, I turned to paper craft and made my favorite Transformer, Galvatron.

We are rapidly approaching the end of Holy Week for Christians. Happy Easter to everyone celebrating! To my Tamil friends, Puthaandu Nalvalthukkal!

For those who are into bullet journaling, the Creative Block Party has a bunch of freebies for the price of an email address. I like some of the ideas they have for habit trackers.

I have struggled to find a habit tracker interesting enough for me to stick to it and I’m hoping that I can use some of these to complete my circles. Most of my habits will revolve around reading, writing and prayer.

Anna Havron urges you to create a personal “Yes and No” list to have a framework with which to guide your life. Such a list helps you document what you are committed to doing and what you are committed to not doing. Here’s a good example from Anna’s own list that I’m trying to put into practice:

Respond, don’t react. Whenever possible, I iterate on my reaction to something important for 12-24 hours before talking about it. Applies to work emails too.

I’m currently in the middle of watching Ken Burns’ documentary on Ben Franklin. This reminds me of Franklin using his 13 virtues to guide his daily life and decision making. He had 12 virtues, but was bragging about how good he had gotten at implementing them that his friend suggested adding a 13th: humility. Franklin thought the best way to introduce a touch more humility was to imitate Jesus and Socrates.

I was going to order a bamboo back scratcher to get at those hard-to-reach itches this week, but Etsy sellers are asking their customers not to buy from the site between April 11 and April 18. Mia Sato profiles the sellers from the online marketplace Etsy who are going on strike to protest changes to the platform. She interviews a seller who is participating in the strike and for whom Etsy is not what it once was.

But for the last few years, changes at Etsy that she feels hurt sellers were piling up — rising fees, mandatory marketing programs, and an influx of drop shippers — and the marketplace no longer felt like somewhere where artisan products and hand-picked vintage items were prioritized.

I have also noticed a change in Etsy over the years. It sometimes feels more like eBay than the online crafts fair it used to be. I can't speak to the fees and other things that sellers are protesting, but I've definitely seen the impact of the drop shippers. It sometimes seems like you may be just as likely to come across a mass-produced item as you are something bespoke and handmade.

→ Etsy Sellers Will Go On Strike In April And Want Customers To Boycott | The Verge

Greg Morris realizes he doesn't need a blog, but ponders how much it benefits him, anyway.

The benefits of it run far deeper than the sum of its parts. No person should judge their blog based on the number of views the posts get because it always serves a different purpose. It allows you to publish whatever it is you want to publish, get it out of your brain and own it from start to end. I don’t need a blog, but everyone should have one.

I totally agree with Morris that everyone should have a blog. I’m trying to get a friend who is currently sending out thoughts about the situation in Ukraine, globalization, etc. to an email distribution list. His emails are insightful and informative, and I’d love to be able to point people to a blog post that lays out what he is sending through email.

→ I Don’t Need A Blog | Greg Morris

There has been recent talk of people going into "goblin mode," a pandemic-associated mode of isolation and hunkering down. Sam George from the University of Hertfordshire argues that this is a mischaracterization of the goblin.

Most goblins depicted in literature and folklore are active, playing pranks and generally causing trouble for the humans around them. They do not sit passively at home, surrounded by creature comforts, lazing the day away.

Instead, George says we should look to the vampire for a more direct comparison. Vampires have gone from being thought of as hideous, odious creatures to being sex symbols (think the Twilight series). We too can come out from our dark cocoons and into the light.

But over the last 200 years, Vampires in popular culture have evolved from plague-ridden creatures like Nosferatu to sparkling, aspirational sex symbols. Instead of holing up and resigning to a fate forever in goblin mode, we should follow the example set by vampires and aim to emerge from the pandemic as better versions of ourselves.

George has fun with the mythology behind these menacing creatures being brought into contemporary times as points of reference for our behaviors.

From the blog

The Slide from Epistemic Bubble to Echo Chamber

We are trees rooted alongside each other, and tearing up the roots of one tree threatens to encroach on the rootedness of another.

Frosted EchoesRobert Rackley

Derek Thompson wrote a newsletter edition for the Altantic about population growth collapsing in the US. The statistics he cites are alarming.

U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

I know that there are some people who won't see this as a bad thing. After all, population growth leads to competition for resources and overpopulation. The humans who exist now can't all get access to appropriate resources. People still freeze to death outside of homes that could keep them warm. Unfortunates starve while others eat until they are stuffed. Equality seems further and further away in many places.

So why do we need more people in the world and specifically in the countries in Europe and Japan and the US, where birth rates are declining and population growth through immigration is sometimes viewed with suspicion? Thompson is careful to state that he thinks that ultimately, family planning is a matter for individuals to decide, even as the macro-level consequences may be economically devastating. He doesn't shy away from elaborating on those consequences, though.

The implications of permanently slumped population growth are wide-ranging. Shrinking populations produce stagnant economies. Stagnant economies create wonky cultural knock-on effects, like a zero-sum mentality that ironically makes it harder to pursue pro-growth policies. (For example, people in slow-growth regions might be fearful of immigrants because they seem to represent a threat to scarce business opportunities, even though immigration represents these places’ best chance to grow their population and economy.) The sector-by-sector implications of declining population would also get very wonky very fast.

He calls this course we are on as leading us into a "demographic danger zone." In another piece that summarizes the problem, potential causes and predicted outcomes, Scott Lanman lays out the challenges that Japan is experiencing due to their extremely low population growth.

In Japan, employers often struggle to fill job vacancies. Spending on health care and pensions has swollen Japan’s public debt to more than twice the size of its economy. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that the country’s annual economic growth could be 1 percentage point lower for the next three decades because of Japan’s aging population. That means the country’s economy, forecast to expand 1 percent this year and next, may stagnate further.

To mix metaphors, Japan is the canary in the coal mine for other nations who are heading down this road. It's a scary prospect when the younger population cannot produce enough to support programs that take care of the elderly. Thompson mentions the situation pitting the younger generation against the older generation in his post and let us hope it doesn't come to that.

The religion connection

One surprising thing that both pieces have in common is that they both ignore the correlation between religiosity and fertility. Though not completely universal, in the majority of cases, fertility declines along with religiosity. Expectations of gender roles plays a part here, with more conservative religious expressions tending to have the greatest fertility. A study of the relationship between the two factors in 2002 takes the data that shows the correlation and examines causation.

Using data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), we show that women who report that religion is "very important" in their everyday life have both higher fertility and higher intended fertility than those saying religion is "somewhat important" or "not important." Factors such as unwanted fertility, age at childbearing, or degree of fertility postponement seem not to contribute to religiosity differentials in fertility. This answer prompts more fundamental questions: what is the nature of this greater "religiosity"? And why do the more religious want more children? We show that those saying religion is more important have more traditional gender and family attitudes and that these attitudinal differences account for a substantial part of the fertility differential. We speculate regarding other contributing causes.

With traditional attitudes about gender declining along with religiosity, we should probably be worried about the trend. Those who would either celebrate the rise of secularism or at the very least shrug their shoulders should be informed about the overall results of the shift. Demographic changes brought about by attitudinal and lifestyle changes are poised to have destructive consequences. While Thompson may very well be correct that the choices about reproduction should be up to individuals, the aggregate of those decisions will effect everyone.

In his book, The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt examines the group cohesion brought by religion, and the loosening of those ties and ends up in the same place as Thompson and Lanman. Haidt is another secular writer who sees the trend of lower birth rates, but brings different attributional causes to the table. He looks at increasingly irreligious Europe as a cautionary tale.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Haidt doesn’t lay out the outcome of fewer offspring, but it would be surprising if he anticipated anything other than what is predicted by others and reported by Thompson and Lanman. Haidt does get into more specifics about what happens in general when group cohesion dissolves in the absence of religion.

But if you are an atheist living in a looser community with a less binding moral matrix, you might have to rely somewhat more on an internal moral compass, read by the rider. That might sound appealing to rationalists, but it is also a recipe for anomie—Durkheim’s word for what happens to a society that no longer has a shared moral order.(It means, literally, “normlessness.”) We evolved to live, trade and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decrease in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.

Haidt uses the metaphor of the elephant and the rider to describe our intuitive and rational selves, respectively. Does the situation he outlines sound familiar? You don’t have to look far to find statistics and analysis about a growing mental health crisis and rise in suicide in the United States. What you don’t typically see is what Emile Durkheim (considered the founder of sociology) observed around the turn of the 20th century, namely that dissolving group cohesion along with the ties of religious affiliations correlate directly to the negative mental health outcomes to which we are now bearing witness.

The mainstream media, being mostly secular, tends to avoid the potential causality of these problems being the weakening institutions of religion. However, there is plenty of evidence which which to make the case that there is a relatively linear relationship between this phenomenon and a number of troubling societal trends.

With no formal announcement (whoops), Wordpress.com changed their pricing significantly, removing the paid tiers for personal blogging and leaving nothing in between the free plan and the $180 Business plan. I've often thought that Wordpress doesn't want to be in the business of personal blogging. Before they recently made the switch to block-based themes, most of their newer themes on Wordpress.com were geared towards businesses. It was clear from the descriptions of the themes and the static homepages advertising businesses that they weren't built with blogging in mind.

As Manton Reece points out, this move makes Micro.blog an even better value proposition at $5 a month or $50 a year.

As Micro.blog hosting has improved, I’ve thought our $5/month plan compares favorably with WordPress.com’s similarly-priced plans. Surprised that WordPress.com has now gutted their pricing lineup, with nothing in between $0 and $180/year. $5 to me is still simple and obvious.

Another reason you may want to think about blogging on Micro.blog is the fact that Elon Musk is now the largest shareholder of Twitter.

Given that he has criticized the platform for free speech and is a heavy and popular user, it is unlikely that Musk is buying Twitter stock as a passive investment.

"We would expect this passive stake as just the start of broader conversations with the Twitter board/management that could ultimately lead to an active stake and a potential more aggressive ownership role of Twitter," Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said in a client note early Monday.

As a soon-to-be-former Twitter shareholder, I can state that this news is not comforting.

Last week, Twitter banned the conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee for what it termed “hate speech.” Specifically, the “satire” involved misgendering U.S. Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine as a man. I’m not sure what’s satirical about that, but it seems cruel and certainly not at all funny. As a sign of the coming apocalypse, Elon Musk was interviewed by the Babylon Bee in December 2021. Is it possible that this ban was the act which spurred Musk into thinking of buying into Twitter to change its direction?

These changes to the biggest blogging and microblogging platforms, respectively, should give people pause. Now might be the right time to switch platforms to one like Micro.blog, where you can create long and short-form content. M.b. has a reasonable pricing structure, and you own your blog and possibly domain, with plenty of export options if you decide to move it elsewhere.

At Micro Camp 2021, Patrick Rhone did a talk on writing a book and he delved into the topic of blogging, which he framed as writing essays for an online audience. His point was that if you are a blogger, you are a writer. A writer for those who read your content online. It was an inspirational talk in how it shifted the way you can think about your writing and your readers. A little change in perspective can go a long way when you are trying to motivate yourself to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, in this case.

One of the things I’ve noticed when writing online is that people read very differently and prefer to get their content across different mediums. Even within my family, my writing is more likely to be read by certain individuals if it is presented in a way that they prefer. For instance:

• My mom is most likely to read something if she sees a link on Twitter. Less so if the content is delivered via email, partially because her inbox is out-of-control.
• My sister is more likely to read what I’ve written if it comes through email. She is not on very many social media platforms, and won’t see anything I’ve posted to Twitter.
• My wife is more likely to read an email, as well. She is heavily on Twitter, and follows a lot of people, so sometimes my posts get lost in the stream.

It’s apparent that how I share something and on what platform is important, if I want it to be accessible. My preference is that content is made available via:

1. The open web (for general traffic and new readers)
2. RSS (for the more tech savvy - this is my preferred way of reading)
3. Social media (short posts to syndicate to services like Micro.blog and Twitter and a good way of getting public comments)
4. Email (for folks who like newsletters and for email replies, which are a good way to get private comments)

There are four solutions of which I am aware that do all the above well. Write.as, Ghost, HEY World and Micro.blog. I know a lot of people like Write.as, which has a social component, somewhat similar to, but not as complete as Micro.blog and also has email options for blog posts. I haven’t tried Write.as, because honestly I don’t love the aesthetics and the theme or app design. I have tried Ghost, both self-hosted and the Ghost Pro hosted solution, several times. Although, I ran into a lot of trouble with Mailgun (for newsletters) and upgrades with self-hosted Ghost, so I don’t recommend that solution. Ghost Pro was really nice: increasingly stable and reliable with a set of features that was powerful but didn’t overwhelm. Their support team was responsive and helpful. Ghost is built for bloggers who want to “monetize their content,” though, and I’m not in that group. I’m writing because I enjoy it. I don’t want to strategize about expanding my audience, something Ghost is always pushing. So, for now, I’m sticking with Micro.blog and HEY World, the former for its customizability and social component, the latter for its complete lack of those features and its simplicity.

I’m grateful that blogging services are starting to take into account all the ways people want to read writing from an independent publisher. This is especially helpful when, let’s face it, traditional blog commenting systems are not great. They invite half-baked responses (I was guilty of this, back in the day) instead of real conversation. Don’t even get me started on anonymous comments, which remind me most of someone yelling from a car window as they pass you by on the road. With email and some of the micro-blogging platforms, the discourse is improved, both privately and publicly, because of the robust ability of those systems to handle discussion and the level of accountability that comes with using a real identity (Twitter can sometimes be an exception here).

Even with the popularity of social media, it has never been a better time to consider blogging. There are all sorts of ways to reach those who may want to read your thoughts.

Rebecca Riddell has an opinion piece for the Washington Post (🔗 Via Lisa Sieverts) on the US trying to export privatized healthcare to nations that in some cases, at least, have pretty robust public healthcare systems in place. The example that she hones in on is Kenya, where the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is trying to push "market-based approaches" to incentivize private actors in the healthcare space. In many case "privatization" becomes a euphemism for exploitation, just as "consumer choice" in healthcare is code for the patient pays the cost. While many countries around the world have capitalism as their economic model, it seem only the US has a sort of hyper-capitalism.

Hyper-capitalism holds that nothing is too sacred, personal or integral to life to be off-limits to a profit motive. For instance, even in most capitalist countries (wealthy and not-so wealthy), healthcare is provided for citizens as a right. In the US, that cannot be the case, because private actors are making too much money to give up on their ability to extract capital from the most basic of human conditions.

The United States famously spends more per capita on health care than any other country, even though the system performs far worse than that of many peer countries. Access is highly unequal, and sky-high prices push millions into poverty and discourage others from seeking care altogether. This heavily privatized system is indisputably excellent at one thing: generating profits. And powerful vested interests have blocked serious reforms for nearly a century.

Experience over the past year has cemented what reason and intuition had already led me to believe: for-profit healthcare dehumanizes people. I understand that the NHS in the UK is not perfect, and, in some cases, has ridiculously long waiting periods for care. I'm also under no illusion that Kenya has the best healthcare in the world. The care in those places, though, is setup to benefit the patient. Positive outcomes are when people get well, not when insurance companies make more money.

Ministry mastermind Al Jourgenson, or "Uncle Al" as he is affectionately known (probably as much for his crazy, constantly revised stories about his past as for his status as elder statesman and progenitor of the industrial genre of music) tried to erase the synthpop era of the band. Their first album, 1983’s With Sympathy was recorded for Arista Records who, according to Uncle Al, was constantly forcing him to compromise his artistic vision. When Ministry moved to Sire Records for their second album, 1986's Twitch, Jourgenson disclaimed the first record and told fans to burn it.

During my teenage years, I was a pretty big Ministry fan. I once high-fived my friend Billy at the counter of a record store in my excitement about buying In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up (live), causing him to light up with embarrassment. Jourgenson came up with sounds like no one else, despite other industrial music luminaries, like Trent Reznor, following in his wake. I never got into Nine Inch Nails, which a musician in my tenth grade creative writing class called "scary keyboard music." I could admit the undeniable strength of a single like "Head Like A Hole," but the rest of Pretty Hate Machine left me cold. Ministry on the other hand, sounded like someone hooked a distortion pedal up to a vacuum cleaner and ran it back and forth over bare floor and carpet (“Stigmata” and “Burning Inside”), creating some warped loop and stimulating my auditory nerves.

Jourgenson, who wouldn't really admit to playing any instruments, managed to create unmatched soundscapes from some dystopian future that might be fun to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there. Computers, which even back then, were used by visionaries like Ministry to supplant traditional instruments and come up with something entirely new, sometimes disturbing, but frequently dopamine stimulating. Later on, Ministry lost that creative spark, due mostly to Jourgenson's increasing dependence on heroin, which almost killed him several times over.

Back to the future

When I was regularly listening to Ministry, I knew of the existence of their earlier work and had heard from friends that it didn't really sound like the same band. I had limited funds for music discovery, so I stayed away from it, just as Uncle Al would have wanted. I didn't hear songs like "Work For Love" until I was well into my adult years, and was surprised by how good it was. Fortunately for listeners, With Sympathy is readily available on today's streaming services. Fans also recorded footage of Ministry playing live during this era. Despite all his objections, Jourgenson looks perfectly happy to be playing these tunes. You can see his excitement when he preps the crowd for the song, with his faux-British accent, seeming like a Johnny Depp character in a futuristic pirate band. Back then, Patty Jourgenson, Al's wife (before he was married to heroin) played keyboards in the group. The full band sounded cohesive and tight, putting on what must have been exhilarating shows for their audience.

→ Ministry - Work For Love, live in Boston, 1984

I wanted to include a video of the Burger King Super Bowl commercial from a few years ago that featured "Work For Love" but couldn't find it anywhere on the widest of worldwide webs.

Frank Yang, of the late Chromewaves.net, has a new blog called Space Echo, where he does what he couldn't really do on his previous music blog: feature older music. With Chromewaves, he was writing about new music coming out. He hustled to stay on top of the latest noises, but eventually burned out and shut the blog in 2013.

This gave Yang the freedom to check out what he had been missing in the decades before he started really taking in music and then writing about it.

I felt free to go back and explore and educate in private, and let me tell you - being able to listen to nothing but Bowie and Eno albums without having to write a single word about it was divine. I delved into the scenes and movements that laid the groundwork for the music I loved most and… I loved it even more. And now, seven years on, the bulk of my listening is of artists I rarely if ever blogged about; some I didn't even know existed.

Content as Yang is to go back even further than the shoegaze scene's beginnings, he loves the shoegaze genre. In his latest post, he writes briefly about the history of Curve, why they don't get as much attention as some of their peers and how their releases were so hard to find before they showed up on Bandcamp. He showcases the video for "Horror Head," which is, most probably, my favorite shoegaze track. I love Toni Halliday's ethereal vocals and the bass line that jumps all over the fretboard. I was smitten when I saw the video on 120 Minutes on MTV and went out and bought the Doppleganger CD. Its strange artwork of mutilated dolls reminded me of the doll terror in Barbarella. This was in the days before I could work and compact discs were something that I didn't often have the money to buy. The disc was the last album I bought before moving from Virginia to Albuquerque, NM, in the eleventh grade.

When I purchased it, Doppleganger was an almost total disappointment. I literally only liked the one song for which I had acquired it. I played the h*ck out of "Horror Head" and left the rest of the disc alone after a couple of initial listens. It made me sad because I knew what the band was capable of and yet they didn't seem to be living up to their promise. I was also bummed because the drive from Virginia to New Mexico is a long one and I didn't have new music to keep me company.

In Albuquerque, I bought a goth magazine at some record store near UNM in downtown, and it had a feature on Curve. When I read the article, I couldn't believe that singer Tony Halliday's parents were actual legit pirates of the Caribbean.

I used to pass by the locker of a girl who had a Curve poster taped to the door and she would say things like, "aww, he got his hair cut" and other remarks that would make me blush. I was too chicken to talk to her because I had no idea who she was. She kind of reminded me of Halliday, though, who was the prototypical early nineties alterna-girl.

Years later, watching this video still evokes a lot of memories.

In a piece entitled It's Not Your Fault You're a Jerk on Twitter, Katherine Cross writes for Wired Magazine about the psychological dynamics that drive antisocial behavior patterns on social networks. Her analysis on how the platforms accelerate what is already dissociative behavior from the human beings behind the keyboard draws parallels from unlikely places, such as urban planning.

Road design in countries like the Netherlands promotes what is known as "traffic calming," reducing pedestrian deaths and car accidents; by contrast, road design in North America promotes high-speed driving, passively nudging drivers to step on the gas, giving them less time to stop, even in crowded areas. Understood this way, you can get away from solely individualist narratives about accidents-about bad drivers or "pedestrians who weren't looking"-and focus on how design encourages broad outcomes not attributable to any one actor.

Similarly, social media is designed in a way that agitates, rather than calms, its traffic. It leans into, rather than curbs, the augmented reality aspects that arise from computer use-tricking you into believing you're somewhere other than reality.

Our level of abstraction from a conversation on the internet breaks down the inhibitions that would normally be provided by our sense of empathy for others. That's the failure of our human moral and psychological underpinnings. The fault of the machine is in that it exacerbates and aggregates the failures of single individuals into a juggernaut with a powerful capacity for damage. The dynamics that play out in Twitter pile-ons is why I had my profile private for years and am still not totally comfortable with the fact that it's now public. The effects of being beaten down by a Twitter mob can be severe. Many of those so afflicted have serious mental health implications and suicidal ideation.

The effect of being attacked and shunned

Cross uses specific examples of individuals who have been attacked on Twitter. In a piece for the Atlantic, Helen Lewis writes about the same effects that play themselves out in the narratives shared by Cross.

A true cancellation typically involves the subject being cast out of their professional network, denied the ability to make money, and rejected by their social circle. One reason it is so alarming an experience is the sense of contagion-without obvious coordination, a person becomes a nonentity. Many of the canceled people I have known, or reported on, have experienced depression or even contemplated suicide.

Lewis illustrates how Russian sanctions can show us the effects of ostracism.

When a Russian spymaster complains about his country's cancellation, our response should not be to laugh at an idiot confusing a culture war and a real one. Instead, we should recognize that economic and social isolation is a powerful weapon, and resolve to use it with the same restraint as any other weapon.

It seems the devastation that cancellation can bring applies at a macro or micro level.

A different way

You don't see the same dynamics on a social network like Micro.blog. The technology limits the snowball effect by the deliberate exclusion of features like the like and the retweet. Micro.blog also has a human being who manages the community and that gives people a level of accountability for their words. When you are interacting with a faceless apparatus like Twitter, that same sense of accountability is not there. Cross has an accurate description of this phenomenon: "There is a seductive quality to posting into the void, a Möbius strip sense that you're the voyeur who no one can see, and the exhibitionist who everyone must see."

How well can these measures work? The proof is in the pudding, as they say. On Micro.blog, people are rarely even impolite, never mind hostile. If someone does get a little too strident in their opinions, they usually back up and apologize. Micro.blog has different issues, and obviously community policing wouldn't scale to a very large network. It serves as a good example of ways to curb the excesses of the large social media networks, though.

It's also worth remembering that the angry people on Twitter are usually a vocal minority. According to this short post on Axios, 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.

After my Lenten fast, I'll probably return to Twitter, but I'll be even more mindful of how the platform distorts our thinking.

When I was a kid, I spent a good amount of time with a cousin of the same age. Throughout our elementary school years, he and I shared a deep and abiding love for all things G.I. Joe. We hunted down the elusive Snake Eyes figure together. We turned our grandparent's spare room into a miniature theater of play warfare. I remember meeting him one time and he had setup a whole battle scene in my grandfather's caddy while on the way to pick me up. He and I discussed comic book intrigue and far-fetched military plots. There was one difference in our collecting, though. His parents bought him every G.I. Joe toy that he wanted. He had almost every action figure, vehicle and play set that rolled off the production line.

Despite the largesse of my cousin's collection (or perhaps because of it), he was fastidious about the condition of his toys. I distinctly remember getting to his house and wanting to use his new Major Bludd figure in our play, but he refused to take the plastic mercenary from his box. The 3.5" G.I. Joe figures were mostly well designed, but they didn't hold up well with excessive play. Their joints succumbed to wear and their arms and legs became floppy, like they had a connective tissue/screw disorder. Sometimes, the hook that connected to the rubber band, which held their upper and lower torso together, busted through their crotch. The missing plastic codpiece gave them a look that was most pitiable among Hasbro manufactured men. My cousin understood well the ravages of time and use on an action figure and would rather look at his pristine toy soldier than risk the soldier's health and manhood in the play wars that raged.

Rationing your music

I've been thinking about all of this recently as I decide how to listen to music. I've been squirreling away some of my favorite tunes, including the new Ronnie Martin album, From The Womb Of The Morning The Dew Of Youth Will Be Yours. I don't want to "wear out" my favorite songs from too many listens. It's more than just the degradation of the polyvinyl chloride that the record is made from. It's also the diminishing level of pleasure that comes with repeated spins. I want to retain the feeling of intentionality and the enjoyment of discerning that comes with savoring the music. This feeling seems to be mostly confined to music that I have on vinyl, as there is a layer of friction in taking the record off the shelf, extracting it from its many layers of protection and putting the needle down on the spinning platter. Digital music is just too easy to play, skip past and move on. Its retention seems more ephemeral, no matter how good the music is.

Of course, I still listen to albums like Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me quite frequently, despite the fact that I own copies on CD, cassette, 2 different colors of vinyl and digital and have been listening to it since 1992. As I grow older, though, the music that holds my fascination for years like the tunes from my youth is harder to find (even though I love a lot of it for short periods of time - 2022 has been great so far).  

I will play my Now Sounds playlist over and over again without worrying about diminishing returns. I constantly refresh it with new music and that keeps the dopamine hits coming. It's a different model than what I employ with the work I truly treasure. In fact, I find myself avoiding putting new songs from albums that I really adore as a whole on playlists, so I won't get tired of individual tracks and ruin the enjoyment of the album in total.

Doling it out

Does anyone else ration things that they enjoy? Do you ever find yourself saving "the good stuff" for the right occasions, just to avoid making it commonplace? It can be a movie, a soundtrack, a meal, a desert or even a special book. What do you only dole out to yourself every so often to retain its specialness?

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.