In another in a seemingly endless supply of misguided moves, the administration is putting in place a new federal rule under which a college program must prove that it's gradautes earn more than if they had never enrolled or lose access to federal loans. This administration is so focused on money it's inconceivable to...

Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That's why we have record reviews that...

Will Gottsegen writes for The Atlantic about Sony's decision to discontinue manufacturing physical discs for their games. The convenience of downloads may be an upside, though there are certainly real downsides in the transition away from physical media. When you buy a disc, you own it and can resell it or lend it out...

A new blog/newsletter to me as of today is Ghost Drive America, which belongs to Edwin Robinson. Robinson writes about burnout six years after becoming Orthodox as part of a ROCOR church. I haven't been Orthodox quite as long as Robinson, but nevertheless, I identified with almost all his points. One in particular was...

Noble Oak - Eveningstar (YouTube) Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship's Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio...

Trying to get into the Semisequicentennial spirit.

Tortoise - I Set My Face to the Hillside (YouTube) Last year, I bought TNT by Tortoise on CD from a Discogs seller, though I already own it on snow white vinyl. I should tell you, this sort of activity is as sure a sign of my devotion to a particular album as any. After all, I’ve got access to high-quality digital...

Naz Hamid has redone his website. The impetus seems to have been changing from a color palette that has been adopted as the de facto standard among LLMs. He worried that his visitors would think it was something coded on vibes. So he switched to blues.

Terry Godier might be a certain kind of genius, as evidenced by his masterfully crafted RSS reader, Current, and the ideas behind it. So when I saw he had created a short documentary about music formats, one of my favorite subjects, I had high expectations. Godier hits upon a lot of the problems intrinsic to streaming...

Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it’s a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989–1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.

I recently watched a documentary called Nightclubbing, which chronicled the rise and fall of Max’s Kansas City, a legendary New York club that helped birth the NYC punk scene and was sort of a rival of CBGB. I sensed that it didn’t take too much embellishment to highlight the wildness of that time and place. My favorite...

I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithm overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat...

I recently hit my 20th anniversary (!!!) at the company where I work. Instead of a gold watch, I got what amounts to about $400 in a foreign currency they call “Spotlight points.” Thought I didn’t pull the trigger right away, my immediate thought was to blow the lot on a pair of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones. I’ve been...

A few weeks ago, I saw Mark Robinson from Unrest/Air Miami/Flin Flon open for the Wedding Present at the Motorco Music Hall in Durham. Although the bill clearly stated that Robinson would be playing Unrest songs, imagining him doing those songs without the two other band members, Phil Krauth and Bridget Cross was...

Olly, the developer of the Pagecord blogging software, just published a post on something I was thinking about with regards to music. I'm not buying a lot of physical media these days, but when I do, it's usually CDs. I just went to a new record store called Hunky Dory that just opened downtown near me, but they weren’t...