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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Leo The A.I. Boyfriend

Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.

A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.

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An Atheist Attends All Saints

On December 22, 2024, I embarrassingly missed Divine Liturgy at my parish because I slept in. Jared Smith, a video blogging atheist who visits churches and audits them, did make it. He chronicled his visit on his YouTube channel and was highly complimentary.

In his video, Smith explains the reasons he was impressed by the church, the tradition and our priest, Fr. David. He touches on some of the reasons I converted to Orthodoxy but I especially appreciated his kind words about Fr. David (all of which, I can assure you, were merited).

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American Pharisaism

I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves.

[…]

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The Spotify Problem

Brandon Lucas Green writes about Spotify from an indie musician’s perspective and his piece contains some useful insights. Green points out that the service is a much better value proposition for musicians who are already popular and on major labels.

Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.

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