I’ve long been a little allergic to brandishing symbols of my Christian faith. When I was a youth, I had a beloved cross that I used to wear around my neck. The chain for it was broken whilst I took a thrashing at the hands of a playground bully in the sixth grade. For many years afterward, I refrained from adorning myself with anything that reflected my beliefs.
One of the reasons I chose Qobuz as my streaming music service was the ability to download tracks in a DRM-free format. About a year and a half into my subscription, I finally purchased my first album. Frankie Rose – Seventeen Seconds. Burned a CD and it sounds fantastic.
Finished reading Shōgun, Part Two by James Clavell 📚a while ago but I still think about it on the regs.
In June, I hope to see long-time indie pop favorites Tennis on their farewell tour. The husband and wife duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore are calling it quits after an impressive run.
The pair made this statement regarding the end of their time as Tennis:
It became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band … We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things.
It sounds like a standard, almost corporate-like goodbye message. When they were promoting their just-released 7th album Face Down In The Garden, though, they were a bit more candid about the challenges they had faced.
What I’m up to /now.
I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:
Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.
So sentiments expressing objective claims of morality or beauty are still, as in Lewis’s day, found to be offensive, but sentiments expressing identity are seen as sacred.
~ Alan Noble, on C.S. Lewis and education
Just as I’m starting to get back into vinyl records, one of the format’s proponents, a popular record club called Vinyl Me, Please is shutting down.
Since launching in 2012, Vinyl Me, Please has offered boutique, collectible record pressings to a subscriber base paying as much as $654 a year for the highest-tier membership, as The Denver Post’s John Wenzel reported last month. The article traces the period of instability back to the firing, in March 2024, of three senior staff, whom the board of directors allege had conspired to divert company funds to build a pressing plant. Cameron Schaefer, the company’s former chief executive, said he believed that he and the two others had been fired to save on severance.
At least the accused were (allegedly) trying to do something that would benefit the record industry!
One of the advantages to my seventh grader not having much homework is that he’s using some of that time at night to take a Udemy course on Python.
It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.