Canned Dragons

A colleague was just telling me about how he hasn't watched the news in approximately three years. He found himself getting so agitated by both sides of the political spectrum and the way the news was presented, that he just quit cold turkey. He feels like he's much happier for the change, and his wife fills him in if something major happens.

It seems as if I'm hearing about more and more people who decide that giving up social media is not enough to keep their frustration in check. Cheri Baker points out that it's not just social media that plays with our emotions.

I’ve decided to stop consuming American news media. It’s easy to criticize Facebook and Twitter for their amplification of misinformation and fear, yet I’ve come to see that the media provides the exact same poison, only in more moderate doses and with a better vocabulary. hypertext.monster

I think at least a part of the problem with modern media is that it's very seldom objective. It can seem almost insulting in its naked biases. In the provocatively titled piece — Disinformation is no danger. Fear polarization from Humans As Media — Andrey Mir argues that we have entered a postjournalism era. The article is an excerpt from Mir’s book Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization. Postjournalism represents the shift from presenting the news to presenting the news with a built-in guiding narrative.

Mir defines postjournalism as normative.

Mir details what makes postjournalism different from the journalism that came before it. While the distinction has always been obvious in media organizations like Fox News, it is now evident in organizations like NPR and others that would still probably attempt to claim objectivity.

Lumenette is a new musical project from Christine Byrd (Hammock contributor and wife of musician Mark Byrd). “I’m a Sensory Explosion” is the first Hammock single to credit Lumenette as a cowriter. The song is a beautiful, elegiac exploration of opening your senses to the sometimes overwhelming weight of the natural world. The textures of the song are soothingly familiar to long-time Hammock devotees and Christine’s vocals add a traditional 4AD/shoegaze sound. Perhaps the track is best listened to on a cloudy, rainy day.

This is a promising taste of what is to come from Lumenette. The new musical project will certainly bear some of the hallmarks of the Hammock sound. I’m eagerly anticipating the full album.

Lumenette’s first long-player, All Around My Head, will be released on 8/12/2022. The first proper single is due out this month, on 6/17.

I have a Kobo Libra 2 ereader, and it’s one of my favorite devices. Of course, it is used for reading books, but I spend just as much time reading articles saved from the internet. I find I have a much greater capacity for reading long materials passed from the internet on an e-ink device. I’m using Pocket as my read-it-later service, and it syncs well with the Kobo. It’s a 2-way sync, so you can favorite and archive articles from the device.

Other read-it-later services, such as Instapaper and Matter, have a 1-way push to the Kindle, but anything you do on the Kindle does not sync back to the service. While a 2-way sync is intrinsically superior to a 1-way sync, how the sync fits within your workflow determines how much more useful it is. In my case, I mainly use the 2-way Pocket sync on my Kobo to sync favorites back to the service, so I can go back to them on an iOS device and make highlights from there — something you cannot do on the Kobo. Readwise (I’m on a free trial of that service) syncs the highlighted passages and other metadata from Pocket to Obsidian. I pull article information from Obsidian into Ulysses to write about it. I’m doing that part manually. I don’t yet have it automated, like Matt Bircher.

Highlights

Although my workflow is okay, it’s a bit more manual than I would like. It would be much easier, for example, if I could highlight article passages on my Kobo and have them automatically sync to Obsidian, as I can do with books. Since I have to go back to my iOS devices to create highlights, the 2-way sync is of somewhat limited usefulness, in my case. It is hardly superior to the 1-way push from Instapaper or Matter to the Kindle, where I have to go back to my iOS device for article management, anyway.

Where Instapaper and Matter end up being superior to Pocket is in the management of highlights. Through a third party service like Readwise — that has a non-trivial monthly subscription fee — Pocket has decent highlights management. On its own, extracting highlights from the service is difficult. From the web interface, you can only copy a link to the article from the highlight. Inexplicably, there is no way to pull out highlights without going through a standard copy and paste, which makes the usefulness of highlights themselves low. On iOS, you can extract the highlights through the share button, but not many programs can accept the output and most only show a link to the article. Ulysses, for instance, only occasionally captures the quote. I would love to see the folks behind Pocket come up with better options for highlight export. Perhaps even an image you can share on your blog or social media, like many other services, such as Glasp or Matter, would be nice.

Unfortunately, I have low confidence in the ongoing development of Pocket. The “what’s new” section of their web app has not been updated for almost a year. Their parent company, Moz://a, is consistently in financial trouble. Theoretically, Pocket as a revenue stream should help, but their pay tier offerings have very little value add. I’m at a loss for what $5 a month gets you over the free tier, except more than 3 highlights per article, additional fonts and tag suggestions. I find 3 highlights per article to be plenty for most pieces, I’m fine with the Graphik font, and I can create my own tag taxonomy. One of the tags I use is an @[name] tag to remember where I found the link, so I can provide proper attribution if I write about the piece on my blog. I doubt Pocket is going to suggest tags that would fit in such a custom system.

Matter

In contrast to the slow pace of Pocket development, Matter has been aggressively improving their app. They just launched version 2.0, in what, I believe, is less than a year after the original 1.0 release. Version numbers don’t necessarily convey the pace of change, but in this case, the application was redesigned for the second release. The first version of the app was frequently criticized for being too cluttered. Matter 2.0 removed the social experience, which is better left up to dedicated social media platforms, and received a largely positive response from users.

Matter is based on the premise that the modern reading economy is being  constructed by individual writers rather than aggregates of writers brought together by publications. So, it builds in what is essentially an RSS reader for blogs and newsletters, based around writers. The creators are betting that the kind of app will become increasingly necessary in a fragmented reading environment.

Still, we can predict a few things with confidence: The supply of great content will continue to rise (and nichify), attention will always be scarce, and the returns to making good decisions about what to read will remain high — and indeed, increase — over time.

The paradigm seems to work fairly well, with the writers you would expect being recognized by the system and made easy to follow and more writers being added all the time.

Ereaders

Coming back to the reading experience on an ereader, Matter lets you push articles individually to Kindle. The feature assumes that you don’t want to automatically sync all of your saved articles to your ereader. It also assumes that you don’t necessarily want to send all the articles in your inbox to your ereader (like Instapaper does). While the Pocket/Kobo integration is smart enough not to send things like videos or articles that can’t be parsed to the Kobo, you still get everything else, which can be a plus or minus, depending on your workflow.

I might be ready to dive further into the Matter ecosystem as a forward-looking alternative to Pocket, but am I prepared to get back into the world of Amazon reading with the Kindle? Despite my strong feelings toward Amazon, I’m considering it. I’m glad I’ve got an old Kindle to try a new process on, so I don’t have to jump in without seeing what this looks like.

I’ve always wanted to experience a tiny house, which, to be clear, is different than wanting to live in a tiny house. I read somewhere recently that over half of the people who bought tiny homes a few years ago when their popularity peaked had converted them to Airbnb rentals. So, I took advantage of the trend and booked a tiny home in the mountains of NC for a long weekend for myself and the wife.

To summarize, the tiny home was just about perfect for a short stay, but I had my instinct that I wouldn't want to live in one confirmed. That understanding was probably one of the best things I could take away from the experience. For the vaction, living lightly was ideal for allowing us to getaway to destinations like Boone and Blowing Rock, where we enjoyed the hiking and downtowns, but allow us to come back to a space that felt comfortable to us and didn't require a lot of upkeep.

We were also able to catch up on some movies we had been meaning to check out, which is actually a pretty rare treat for us. I paid only minimal attention to the news, which was centered around the crisis in the Middle East, the new Speaker of the House, and the death of Matthew Perry — depressing topics, all.

I got a few pictures on the trip, as did my wife. When I reviewed the pictures, a selfie that my wife took of the two of us reminded me of my resemblance to my grandfather on my mother's side.

Of course, we got some shots of the amazing fall colors.

We attended Divine Liturgy at Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Church. It was a beautiful little parish and I'm glad we were able to experience a service there. The homily helped my wife understand the veneration of icons, which was a mystery to her previously.

A Return to Normal Life

With vacation behind us, I'm turning my attention towards more studying and training. I'm going to be preparing for the MS Azure AZ-900 exam. The subject material is pretty basic as far as understanding the platform goes, so I'm going to probably have some trouble keeping my attention on the subject, but I need to get through it so I can move on to more complex material.

Current Reading

Thinking Orthodox by Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou

Stray Fossa is a band that Apple Music kept pushing on me until I realized that I really liked them. Combining hushed tones and gentle atmospherics with chillwave sensibilities, they appeal perfectly to mid-life me. At this period in my existence, I'm looking backward and forward in equal measure. Music that contains a sense of restrained nostalgia with a nod to retro-futurism speaks to where my mind finds itself. I can imagine walking through an urban landscape with ear buds in, going from classic architecture to the most modern of skyscrapers and beholding all with a fascination brought about by realizing harmony in contradiction.

Stray Fossa picks up the baton from Small Black in making rhythms with diminutive keyboards and baselines that comfortably bounce the songs along. Breathy vocals bring to mind Cigarettes After Sex. The band guides the listener through understated verses and choruses that could serve as anthems for the contentedly indifferent.

Stray Fossa's new album Closer Than We'll Ever Know is out  6/3 on Born Losers records.

A lot of times, when I watch movies that pit good vs. evil in easily distinguishable sides, I wonder about someone actually choosing a path that is clearly evil. Take Star Wars, for example. Why would someone choose to be on the dark side, with all the available evidence that it's just evil? There are moments when I have trouble suspending my disbelief. George Lucas tried hard to make Anakin's descent into the evil persona of Darth Vader believable, but it was still rough around the edges. The depiction of evil in movies can be so exaggerated as to be cartoonish.

Most people don't just set out one day and decide that they are going to be bad. So, in the movies, when some kind of transformation happens, it's hard not to give it a little extra scrutiny as a plot device. Good films usually show some slow decent into evil. We say, “The path to hell is paved with good intentions,” and it’s usually one little thing that leads to another. A kind of breadcrumb trail that a person follows until they find themselves out in the middle of the dark forest, lost and confused, and they think that wrong is right.

Then, it turns out, some people are okay with embracing evil. Madison Cawthorn, who just lost his reelection campaign to the House of Representatives, is calling on the power of Dark MAGA to avenge him. Dark MAGA refers to a group whose main political platform is revenge. The reason the third (oh okay, call it the sixth) Star Wars movie was retitled The Return of the Jedi from The Revenge of the Jedi was that revenge is not a virtuous pursuit. The realization was that truly good people, as represented in the films by the Jedi, do not seek revenge.

The Dark MAGA adherents are consumed with the destruction of their perceived enemies. They are, in the mode of high fantasy like Star Wars, choosing the dark side, the side of the Sith. It’s all as ridiculous as it sounds. It would be laughable, except when you think of the reality that Cawthorn was elected once, and not trounced in his reelection bid. Now it’s a little too close to be humorous.

The 1980s was a decade that started with an album called The Age of Plastic. The band that released the album, the Buggles, captured the spirit of the age by announcing “Video Killed The Radio Star” in a nod to the rise of MTV (Music Television). They had their fingers on the pulse of the American music scene that was springing up in the wake of disco and the long tail of the rise of punk. Plastic was an appropriate metaphor for an embrace of everything synthetic. Synthesizers captured the popular imagination and even stole some thunder from the guitar.

The Covers EP from Mint Julep features mostly reworkings of 80s tunes. There’s a startling principle at work here, though — that these tunes from the age of plastic simply didn’t have enough synths. Even the cover of aughts-era band Headphones track “I Never Wanted You” layers more warbly synths than the original, and that band was created specifically as a synthesizer-based side project!

Though these were recorded a decade ago, the songs on the EP tread familiar territory with Angel Olsen’s covers from her Aisles EP. Many of the tracks have slower tempos than that originals and walls of synths that are so dense as to be almost impenetrable. Whether a song is from Depeche Mode or When in Rome, Mint Julep bends the track to sound like it’s theirs, making this EP a cohesive listening experience.

This post was originally published on Medium — December 13, 2015. Unfortunately, due to the incapacity of US politicians to tackle the issue of gun violence, it remains an evergreen post.

A couple of weeks ago, the NY Daily News, after yet another mass shooting in the US, posted a provocative cover blasting politicians for offering prayers instead of concrete action.

The cover featured tweets from Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, offering their prayers for the victims and families affected by the shooting that occurred in San Bernadino, CA. The text accompanying the story excoriated those politicians for offering kind words but no solutions.

As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes

Incendiary, to be sure, but then people are being killed at an alarming rate. There has been, to date, almost no movement, on the part of many politicians, to curb the violence. As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words” and the silence on this subject has been deafening.

I believe strongly in the power of intercessory prayer. I make it a daily practice and believe it is one of the most important things that I can do. Being able to move the heart of God is a blessing and a truly beautiful aspect of our human condition. Having expressed that, I can understand the frustration being conveyed in this cover story. Without calls to take measures to prevent gun violence that mars the national landscape on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, the invocation of prayer rings hollow and disingenuous. Let us not forget that even Jesus himself criticized those who offered public prayers in order to be seen by others as pious.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:5–8)

There are also biblical references to those who profess to faith but do not back their faith up with deeds. The book of James speaks fairly extensively about this issue.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (James 2:14–17)

In other countries, when faced with similar problems related to easy access to guns, leaders have reacted, with responses appropriate to the scale of such tragedies. In contrast, the current crop of US lawmakers appears to be nothing short of completely indolent. David Branes relates how in 1996, when a lone gunman in Dunblane, Scotland killed 16 five-year-old children and their teacher in a classroom, then took his own life, most handguns were subsequently banned in the UK. Though guns are used in crimes there, he states, they do not have the same threat of mass shootings. The same pattern played out in Australia after a shooting at Port Arthur in 1996. Gun laws were strengthened and there have been only 3 shooting sprees in Australia since, with only one that was seemingly random. My assumption of the politicians in those countries is that, if they offered prayers, they also offered of themselves, to carry out the will of a God who desires peace among people. Within Christianity, we refer to this desire to bring the Kingdom of Heaven closer as participatory eschatology. In this theology, we as believers are called to action, in order to further God’s will and make the world a better place.

The difference in political reactions between the US and the UK and Australia seems to be at least partially attributable to a powerful and well-funded gun lobby in the US. Shannon Coulter recently wrote an informational piece on the 46 US Senators who voted against universal background checks on gun purchases in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The piece contains the amount of campaign contributions 43 of those senators took from the gun industry. It is worth acquainting yourself with this list. I would like to believe that those with power and responsibility who trade our safety and security for campaign funds will find themselves facing increasing opposition from peace-loving people of all faiths. Especially as Christians, though, we need to call out those whose response to tragedy is “thoughts and prayers, but keep the checks coming.”

A new book entitled Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia examines how more conservative and even far-right Christians are flocking to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The phenomenon is detailed by Odette Yousef in the NPR piece Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts.

Those who have followed the influx of extremists into American Orthodoxy agree that those individuals are fringe within the church and are mostly concentrated in newly founded ROCOR parishes. But they also warn that it would be foolish to ignore them. Of particular concern are the ways in which these individuals are networking with outside extremist groups and broadcasting their ideologies in the name of Orthodoxy.

I have to wonder to what extent Christians are leaving mainline or evangelical churches for Orthodox Christianity overall. The traditional American churches have changed in substantial ways to align with contemporary American cultural values. The piece on the book points out what a small minority the extremists represent within the Orthodox Church several times. However, it doesn't get at the number of people who are making the conversion to Orthodoxy, but who couldn't be painted with that brush. I suppose that wouldn't help with the narrative that is being woven here.

After the last service I attended at a Greek Orthodox Church, I asked a member of the clergy if he could tell me one thing that has changed in the last fifty years. At first, he struggled and couldn't come up with an answer. Then, you could see the light bulb flicker on in his head. Some lines in one of the hymns in their hymnal had changed in the recent past, he told me, beaming with pride. That was all he could come up with, and he was clearly satisfied. There's a path of continuity in the Orthodox tradition. Even Catholicism, that ancient faith which traces the first Bishop of Rome back to Peter, the rock on which Jesus said He would build his church, doesn’t match the allegiance to tradition that is present in Orthodox Christianity.

It makes some sense then, as we watch other churches argue about traditional versus contemporary services, or whether worship should be changed to incorporate more gender-neutral language, that a certain segment of Christians would be attracted to the stability of Orthodoxy. The Reformers once accused the Catholics of innovation, but it’s now mostly protestant churches that change elements of belief and worship. From the perspective of this believer, the changes are sometimes helpful and sometimes not. “Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed, always reforming),” is the rallying cry, but when do the reforms go too far? It can seem like, each time a substantial change is made, a schism — seen or unseen — takes place in its wake and a new church is born. It reminds me of dubbing cassette tapes as a kid. Whenever a copy of a copy was made, there was a palpable loss of fidelity. A little more noise to go with the signal.

The Orthodox Church is not without its critics among its own ranks, particularly for its reticence to speak out on atrocities unfolding in Ukraine as vociferously as it condemns issues like abortion. It seems as if the faith leaders could take a page out of Pope Francis’ book when speaking with a more comprehensive moral clarity. Whether former Protestants are moving to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, though, it’s interesting to see the shift to high-church alternatives that are more historically consistent in how their traditions are expressed.

As I witness this happening, I'm reminded of a story that has haunted me since I read it. The Green-Eyed Christ by Adam Roberts is a cautionary metaphorical tale of church splits and new doctrines. The story takes place in the fourteenth century (pre-reformation) and follows a painter, Mijnheer Jacco Heuschrecke. Heuschrecke unknowingly gains a power by which anything he paints will be created in Heaven. As is the custom of the time, he paints mainly religious works and soon there are 12 new Christs in Heaven, all trying to decide who is the real deal. When the painter runs out of blue paint, he paints a Green-Eyed Christ, who, being the 13th and by virtue of his difference from the others, claims to be the true Christ. He comes to visit the confused painter to tell him only to sketch fourteen representations of God — that an angel has told Heuschrecke to fully paint — and give them colored eyes. Heuschrecke is troubled by sketching more beings in Heaven to add to the confusion.

‘They are already in Heaven,’ said the Green-Eyed Christ. ‘But weakly: like spectres, potentless, wandering here and there. A dab of paint will give them more substantiality in the eternal realm, but not so much as to be able to reassert the old, stifling order. And from this point the grace of God will pour down upon the world in a new way — in ten thousand variants, in new religions and new sciences, in a great flourescence of culture and life and possibility.’

‘Will it be so?’ Heuschrecke asked. His initial shock, at having an intimate conversation with the saviour of all humanity, had settled, and now he found himself uncertain as to the merits of what this Green-Eyed Christ was saying. ‘Must it be so?’

‘It is a new dawn, my friend,’ said the Green-Eyed Christ.

‘But what of Holy Mother Church?’

‘She will persist.’

‘But broken — fractured?

‘Oh yes. Broken as white light is broken into the rainbow.’

‘Heresies will prosper, like rank weeds in a beautiful flowerbed? No, Lord, surely not! Rival churches will challenge the oneness of faith?’

The painter flees, vowing to finish the paintings of God and, therefore, bring balance back to Heaven. It is hinted that Heuschrecke never finishes his paintings, but we already know how the story ends.

I love how Hollie Cook is able to blend reggae and dream pop vibes on her new single, “Full Moon Baby.” I enjoyed Cook's first album, Vessel of Love when it came out in 2018, but there's something unique about this track.

This is how you do crossover. It feels like the way forward when even pioneering genres are beginning to retread the same ground over and over again. Almost no stone has been left unturned in even some of my favorite musical styles. I'll always enjoy the familiar, but I'm eager to hear new ways to blend styles and create something that speaks of novelty.

I've never been a huge fan of reggae, but I've never disliked it, either. Even if it was a crutch for some of the early music by The Police.

Sting: The other nice thing about playing a reggae groove in the verses was that you could leave holes in the music. I needed those holes because, initially, I had a hard time singing and playing at the same time. So if we had a signature in the band it was…

Andy Summers: Big holes?

Not too long before my grandfather died, he offered me his collection of reggae cassettes. I declined the offer (cassettes were not the coveted items they've now become, at the time). What if I had accepted the offer? Would my music tastes be totally different now?

Hollie Cook's new album, Happy Hour, will be out 6/24 on Merge Records.