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The 8BitDo FlipPad looks like a lot of fun, but I have no idea what games I would play with it.
Canned Dragons
Latest posts
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Watched: Project Hail Mary 🍿 last night. Though he shares my nickname, Rocky reminded me of my cat Jonah. Very enthusiastic, overfamiliar, and with a lack for respect for boundaries.
These Dreams
Heart was the band that broke the glass ceiling and bought women-fronted hard rock to the masses. By 1985, they had expanded beyond just pummeling riffage and Renaissance Fair folk that betrayed their love for Led Zeppelin. They didn’t completely eschew the hard stuff, but they had synths and they were going to use them. “These Dreams” was the hit from Heart’s self-titled…
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Emma Collins brings up the point that no one calls Wendell Berry a “country writer,” like we call musicians from rural areas “country musicians” and “country singers.” Perhaps, we should, like she does, start calling them “agrarian singers.” Her piece, Not the Times, The Eternities goes into the American love of nature. Since you can’t dig into…
Jacket
Designer Jon Hicks’ obsession with music apps left him with a problem — he couldn’t find any that met all his needs. So, like many others in the age of LLMs, he built his own. Hicks calls his app Jacket, and it’s easy to understand why when you see all the references to physical media. Giant artwork, extensive liner notes integration and perhaps most surprising and impressive,…
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Something about the combination of a good mechanical keyboard and typing in iA Writer just feels so right. It just clicks (NPI).
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Reading the Claude watermark topic reminds me of how my son in college, who doesn’t use LLMs when writing his papers, has to check them with an LLM to make sure they don’t sound too much like AI. If they sound like AI, they’ll get flagged, even though the tools for detection are notorious for false positives.
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Testing out lossless wireless listening with my Sony XM5s through the Queststyle QCC Pro2 and LDAC. Liking what I’m hearing.
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This blog post by Tessa Brown teases apart the difference between social networking and social media. I suppose what the story above suggests is that social media became the pretense for social networking. I’m reminded of this article I used to teach about the role menus played in restaurant interactions between servers and patrons. Basically the finding was that all of the conversations between…
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The team behind Matter, my favorite read-it-later service, has a new app out. It that promises to help you manage time on your phone one day a week. The app is called Sabbath , drawing from the ancient and holy practice of taking one day a week to rest. Unfortunately, it’s iPhone only (the Matter crew are an Apple shop) and I spend more time on my iPad and Mac.
The Wagon
Reviews of Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind don’t always focus on what a shift it was for the band. For the first time, it was J. Mascis’ unadulterated vision, updated to fit perfectly with the alternative scene that was strengthening in the early nineties. However, nothing about it presaged the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind, bringing sludge rock to the mainstream. It was at once…
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Isaac Greene has the human interest angle on data centers through the lense of his brother, a farmer, who will have his farm surrounded on both sides by new data centers. Greene highlights the trivial or destructive ways A.I. is used to show the trade-offs we are making. But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t…
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Trying to teach the boy to skate last weekend and ended up with some road rash. I’m too old for this.
Jokes From Truth
Bluesky CEO, Toni Schneider, was interviewed by Nilay Patel on a recent episode of The Decoder podcast. I like Patel’s interview style and thought he brought a good selection of questions to the discussion. After much business strategy and technical discussion, Patel asked Schneider about the common perception that the network is full of left-leaning users. Schneider acknowledged that as an…
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I’ve been playing a new video game called MIO: Memories in Orbit . I have a bit of a soft spot for what they call Metroidvania’s (a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania), having grown up loving games in the genre. In this game, you “Play MIO, a nimble robot with extraordinary abilities, and unravel the mysteries of the Vessel, an enormous technological ark overgrown with lush…
Shaker Style
I was going through my social media feeds this morning and realized that it was just a bunch of disconnected thoughts with no coherence. I wondered why I even bothered. Then I remembered posting about seeing a movie last weekend and the ensuing conversation on Micro.blog and I had my answer. There is value in bonding over a shared appreciation for certain media. I’ve continued to be…
Dream Shake
Memoryhouse consists of Canadians Evan Abeele and Denise Nouvion. The band had a minor hit with their piano-driven live cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep” for Yours Truly in 2011. They capitalized on their success with that cover and the well-regarded EP, The Years , by signing to indie heavyweight Sub Pop Records. When their follow-up full length, Slideshow Effect…
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Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased . The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for…
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Dave Kendall, creator and host of MTV’s 120 Minutes , has passed away . The British-born Kendall conceived 120 Minutes after joining MTV as a producer, pitching the network a dedicated program for the punk, post-punk, goth, synth-pop, ska, and other underground sounds largely ignored by corporate rock radio. 120 Minutes debuted on March 10th, 1986, and Kendall later served as its host from…
Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar
Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar by Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my /now page, only to get deeply into a Swedish jazz EP very shortly after. Though this new 3-song Bandcamp-only EP is from Western Europe, it…
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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 its leadership that there could be any other purpose to an…
Poptimus Prime
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 treat pay-for-play pabulum like Rebecca Black songs as if they were…
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Freedom Fuel gas stations sound like a J.R. Ewing scheme.
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I’m glad I don’t like lobster or I might have been tempted to act on the skate shop owner’s recommendation of the lobster rolls at Dollar General.
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Sticker selection from the skate shop.