Canned Dragons
Matter Refounded and Rebounded
If I were to make a list of my favorite apps (and someday, I’m sure I will), the read-it-later Matter would be near the top. I use it daily. During the day, I capture articles I want to read when I have time. At some point in the evening, I send most of the captured articles to my Kindle. When my iPad is safely stowed away for the night and I’m reading on my Kindle, I pour through the articles I’ve saved in their handy digest/magazine format. Not all of them get read, but most do.
Only a month ago, I wondered aloud why Matter hadn’t received any updates in quite a while on Bluesky. Well, it turns out there are some very good reasons for the lack of updates. Founder Ben Springwater explains in an email to subscribers.
There are years that ask questions, and years that answer. For us, last year was both.
Rob and I founded Matter together in 2020. In 2022, we became fathers, only three weeks apart.
Then, last year, we were both diagnosed with cancer.
I had radiation and two major surgeries. Rob had his lung removed. It was a surreal time.
Yet the world doesn’t stop for cancer. While we battled, Matter faced its own adversity.
We’d begun the year confidently, placing a big bet on paid growth. But by summer, it was clear the strategy wasn’t working.
Still unable to walk, I made the painful decision to let go of half our team.
Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.
Its destiny is one of slow, steady growth and enthusiast appeal. And that’s okay.
The founders decided that Matter is basically a mature app, which is true, and that they needed to focus the company (which was refounded to include two of the indespensable engineers) on expanding their portfolio of apps.
Now armed with the knowledge of what is going on with the company and why the app isn’t seeing frequent updates, I actually feel much more comfortable as a subscriber. The only issue I have with Matter is that the Obsidian plugin seems to take an inordinate amount of time to load on MacOS. Other than that, the experience is very smooth.
Having been through cancer myself, I know how disruptive it can be to a life. I am grateful and relieved that the Matter guys are back to health and rebounding.1
I would respond to wish them well, but they are requesting that kind of support on Xitter, and well, you know…↩︎
Flow
I read about the new animated film Flow recently and was sufficiently intrigued to rent it from Amazon when my youngest son and I were home by ourselves one night. I was impressed by the visuals and the well, flow, of the story, as a group of animals navigate their way through a mostly drowned world. I was drawn in to the main character, a black cat that reminded me of my own cat, Jonah. The film has no dialog, and you never learn the protagonist’s name, but my son and I kept calling him Jonah. He moved like Jonah, he displayed the same emotions as Jonah and he sounded exactly like Jonah.
I know some of you are probably thinking that these traits are common to cats but I’m here to tell you that’s not so. I have another cat, Snickers (a long haired tortie) and she has a completely different personality and presence.
Based on the buzz, I expected an engrossing and innovative experience with Flow, but what I was not expecting was how much Jonah himself would enjoy the movie. He became enraptured about halfway through and perched himself on the edge of the bed to watch. Before long, he felt he needed to get closer to the action, and jumped on the dresser to get a better look. His interest led to him pawing at the screen to see if he could interact with his doppleganger and the rest of the animals.
Jonah and the lemurs
Jonah never ceases to surprise and delight me. A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I watched A Man Called Otto. I had read the corresponding book and knew that the movie was a well regarded adaptation. Plus, you can’t go wrong with Tom Hanks. I had heard the film was a bit of a tearjerker, but since I had read the book, I reasoned that I was going to be mostly immune to the emotional moments. I knew what was coming, after all.
What I hadn’t counted on was a soundtrack that would lend some significant emotional heft to the proceedings. It would be wrong to go into detail and spoil the plot. However, I can sketch around a particularly tragic scene. I knew what was going to happen, but when the Kate Bush song, “The Woman’s Work” from The Sensual World came on, I literally said, “oh, no.” I was all too familiar with the song, which has been used to great effect in other movies, such as 1988’s She’s Having A Baby and had made appearances on some of my playlists. Seconds later, I burst into tears. I just lost it. Jonah saw me sitting on the edge of the bed weeping and ran over, concerned. I didn’t have much lap to access, but he jumped up into it anyway. He started licking my hands and face and then reached out to touch my face with his paw. His actions were so touching and that made me even more emotional. Jonah wouldn’t leave until I had settled down, though. His empathy was startling.
The Souls of Animals
The various interpretations of the Christian faith make different provisions for the souls of animals. I have read Orthodox writings that speculate that animals do indeed have souls, the same as people. This is intuitive to those of us who have been close to their pets. Those relationships feel transcendent in some ways and seem to go beyond our material existence. When I see the friendship that animals can bring, I can’t help but think of the support that God has given to us through their presence.
Bandcamp Friday
Photo by Miriana Dorobanțu / Unsplash
Bandcamp just held another one of their “Bandcamp Fridays,” during which the company waves its share of the revenue from the music and merch sold on the site, allowing the artists to capture more of the proceeds. The monthly event has been a huge success and many record labels and musicians specifically advertise their participation with sales on those days.
When Songtradr acquired Bandcamp from Epic games in 2023, there was speculation that the new owner would discontinue Bandcamp Fridays. Much to the delight of the customers and music community, Songtradr’s commitment to the tradition doesn’t seem to have wavered.
Since you asked, on 3/7, my purchases were Fine China’s new album I Felt Called and the Pia Fraus album Evening Colours from 2023. I almost missed the opportunity when I realized in the middle of the evening that I had better hurry to contribute to saving the music industry two purchases at a time.
I have a colleague who is much younger and is in a band (it’s quite a good band, at that). It disappoints me when I get his take on Bandcamp. He compares it to Spotify and wonders why you can’t create playlists. Of course, it’s apples and oranges, but it shows the mentality that the newer generations have about the need for music ownership. When all they’ve ever known is the rental model, they have a harder time than someone my age imagining the value proposition. My colleague’s band sees Bandcamp as too small time to even put their music on the platform, despite the fact that the payouts are much more in the artist’s favor.
If Spotify disappears, and Apple decides they no longer want to invest as heavily in services, the renter has no equity built up and would have to start collecting music from scratch. I’m not necessarily great at predicting the changes in the technological landscape and, as Edgar Fiedler said, “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.” I have no idea if the streaming service model will last. I have seen bit rot, though, and certain works of art disappear from the streaming landscape.
More people are starting to wake up to the possibilities of vanishing culture and more creative content becoming inaccessible. My buddy and I are frequently in conversation about it. Amazon’s move to limit downloading your Kindle books seems to have raised awareness of the precariousness of the current models.
HEY HEY HEY, Goodbye
Though I love the service, I canceled my HEY email account. I’m not happy about it, but I am pretty sure it’s the right thing to do. The founders have been saying things I’ve been critical of for some time, but it has reached the point where I don’t trust the company with my data.
For weeks now, my wife has been telling me about data that she uses to do her job being deleted from federal databases. This includes economic and health information, such as statistics on energy burden (the cost of utilties vs. household income) and maternal and infant medical facts. Of course, my spouse is not the only one to notice this disturbing trend, but the examples she has provided seem particularly egregious and incomprehensible.
It’s shocking to me to go online and see people from 37Signals, which runs the HEY service, praising this type of behavior as a service to the country. If 37Signals is as cavalier about data as those they are praising, I believe it’s only natural to question if they are good stewards of your resources.
I’ve started my switch to Proton Mail, which is an appealing alternative, given their focus on encryption and security. I’ve never been one to go overboard privacy protections, given that I’m kind of a nobody. However, with a government this adversarial towards many of its citizens (not to mention its own employees), known and unknown, I think it’s a good idea to start taking extra precautions.
My initial experience with Proton hasn’t been altogether bad (though there are some serious bugs with their MacOS client — which I will be soon reporting). However, Proton doesn’t have the same level of consideration and willingness to defy conventions as HEY, which makes the user experience less delightful. If I could in good conscience stick with a 37Signals product, I would but it’s time to move on.
I had no idea the podcast Lore was still a going concern, but it’s now on its 544th episode after ten years.
This t-shirt from Cotton Bureau makes me want to tune back in (and upgrade my wardrobe).
Unpublishable.txt
Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file.
The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s. Keeping this file feels risky. Even though it’s on a physical drive, not in the cloud. Even though it’s encrypted. I still worry that The Unpublishable will, somehow, be published. What a nightmare that would be.
Most of us who write anything substantive online probably have the equivalent of an unpublishable.txt file. I have a tag in Ulysses named “struck” that gets applied to everything I’ve decided doesn’t need to see the light of day. I’m not encrypting files like Butler, and it’s safe to say that keeping the files local is not a “the better part of valor is discretion” kind of thing. Most of these shelved thoughts are not incendiary, but they are just ones that I decided were better unexpressed in public.
I wrote recently about TikTok and decided, after getting it proofread, not to publish. It was accurate and fitting but came across as harsh in some of its criticisms. I had to remember the words of my patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov, who said, “You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other.”