Unravel Two

An exercise in getting closer through playing a cooperative video game together.

🎵 Romantic Piano

Gia Margaret caught my ear a few years ago, after she contracted a vocal illness that forced her to create instrumental music for her second album. I was mesmerized by the ambient track "Body" and the accompanying video. Margaret just dropped a new album entitled Romantic Piano. It still follows

Noise

🎵 New Beginning

In this retro-futuristic video, the members of Automatic live through the final days on Earth and are transported to locations that look like they came from the original Star Trek TV series. In their new home, they make do with gardening, liquid food and excursions in outer space ensconced in

Noise

Road To Knowhere

I return to an old favorite and realize a lot has happened while I was away.

Doctrine of the Mean

A few months ago, in my Orthodoxy 101 class, we discussed Aristotle's "doctrine of the mean." I immediately felt attached to the framework, as I tend towards moderation. In Aristotle's conception, the golden mean is avoiding the extremes of any given characteristic. A common example given to explain the doctrine

The Prescience of Seinfeld

Maya Salam writes for The New York Times (gift article) about how close Seinfeld was to capturing many of the sociocultural aspects of our present age. She particularly hones in on the adults in the show living their lives in a sort of perpetual state of childhood, eschewing typical adult

Tech

That's So Meta

John Herrman writes about the failure of the metaverse concept. He's clearly disillusioned with legless avatars and unearned hype. The premise for the piece is that there is no "there" there. The metaverse as a concept is simply lacking a reason for existence. Herrman references Ed Zitron, who in writing

Tongues of the Future

Malcolm Harris writes for Wired magazine about Doug Rushkoff, a techno optimist who had his predictions and assumptions about the future challenged. As a consequence, Rushkoff had to overhaul his outlook on technology. Rushkoff is a prolific author and Harris writes about his various books, including one called Survival of

Friday Night Video

Windsurf

Winter synths abound, even in summer.

Tech

I'm Still Uncomfortable With Amazon

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Amazon and my discomfort with a number of the practices that the company employed. After writing the post, I was on a kick in which I was shunning Amazon and avoiding being a consumer of their services. That lasted for about a

Faith

Rise Above

A scholar makes the case that, if Jesus rose from the dead, that changes everything.

Here's To Shutting Up

It might be time to consider silence a virtue.

Noise

Flux Observer

A podcast idea that has me hooked.

Tech

Tumbling Down

Jonathan Haidt and his colleague, Greg Lukianoff, believe that the enormous increase in mental health issues for young women who are identified as "liberal" has to do with going through a sort of reverse CBT process. CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is one of the most effective tools for combating depression

Culture

The Candy Culture Wars

John Paul Brammer wades into the candy culture wars (which are adjacent to the chicken sandwich culture wars and seem to provoke no less depth of feeling, if not many true casualties) on his Substack. No one really asked for the M&Ms to be more relatable or for Velma

Noise

American Shoegaze

The recent piece on the new wave of American shoegaze in Stereogum was nothing if not exhaustive. Spanning obscure sub-genres and scenes, it shone a light on some of the mostly heavier U.S. based bands carrying on the tradition of outfits like Catherine Wheel and Ringo Deathstarr. The piece

Faith

Last Known Good

I've been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a "last known good" configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a

Culture

Rock and Roll As Youth Culture

I used to have a well-worn VHS cassette of Sonic Youth's tour video, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It featured a just-experiencing-stardom phase of Nirvana, but that wasn't the reason I watched it over and over. I was more interested in the Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. performances that were

Friday Night Video

No Roof, No Floor

I generally don't do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year's, I get a chance to reflect back on what I've enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time. I

Tech

Is Mastodon Really Is The Spiritual Successor To Twitter?

By defining itself as the anti-Twitter, Mastodon feels like a reactionary platform.

Faith

Rooted In Place

In a worship service recently, our pastor explored the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the book of Matthew. It was a thought-provoking homily about family ties. Alastair Roberts writes for Plough magazine about how we fit our own lives into the continuum of people that have come before us.

Noise

Junca De Sol Andromeda

I was already a fan of the angular and noisy Truman's Water, Glen Galloway's former band, when he launched Soul-Junk. The new group was conceived after Galloway had a tour van conversion to Christianity. My friend, who was not a believer, but was a fan of Shrimper Records, made me

Noise

When You Sleep

DIIV brings a slower paced, more intimate sound to a newly released live record.

Tech

This Time, I'm Out

After 14 years and over 10,000 tweets, I've deactivated my Twitter account. I've been critical of Twitter for a long time now without actually leaving the platform. Obviously, things have changed rapidly for the worse. When, on Saturday, Elon Musk let DT back on the platform, while including a

Tech

Predicted Collapse

My degree is in psychology, and though I focused on family and child counseling, industrial/organizational psychology was a close second in my affections. I loved taking a case study from a disaster at NASA — like the Challenger shuttle explosion — and looking at what went wrong organizationally to allow that