Canned Dragons

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 his obituary for the meta verse, tends to blame one particular CEO. He lays a great deal of responsibility for the hype at the feet — or in the space below the floating torso — of one man.

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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 the Fittest. The bulk of Survival of the Richest isn’t about apocalypse escape routes for the super-wealthy. It’s preoccupied with something Rushkoff calls The Mindset, which roughly translates to “the way Silicon Valley technocrats think.

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Last updated 05/14/2023 What Information is Collected and HowCanned Dragons is a personal blog. When you opt-in to join the site, you are asked for your email and name. You can provide your full name or only your first name or an alias. You are asked if would like to also subscribe to the Treasure Hoard newsletter digest email. You will not be asked to create a password for this site.

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The Legend of Zelda Gets An UpdateThe latest The Legend of Zelda installation, Tears of the Kingdom, came out yesterday. Although this piece by Zachary Small in the New York Times gets a little too ambitious with typography and integrating videos into the text, it's still a great read. The article goes into the history of the iconic Zelda games and the direction they are headed in, and underscores the legacy they have left.

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I don't typically use fan-made videos for Friday Night Videos, but this one is just so perfect. The found footage of rollerskating archives, most of which looks like it was filmed at California beaches, fits so perfectly with the breezy, upbeat track by The Ice Choir. The lyrics about sun and spray and escaping winter contrast with the name of the band and their tagline, "winter synths abound, all year round.

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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 year, and then my convictions started to wear thin. I started watching shows on Prime. I started ordering things like supplements from Amazon when I realized how expensive and inconvenient it was to buy them from multiple vendors.

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“The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” ~ N.T Wright In this piece (NYT gift article), Tish Harrison Warren interviews New Testament scholar N.T. Wright about Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus. The scholar makes the point, as others have, that the Resurrection was just as unbelievable in Jesus's time as it is in ours. Therefore, for those that knew him closely to carry on his ministry in the way that they did, and in the face of almost certain death, the only explanation is that they saw and they believed.

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I recently listened to an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast about the ability to shut up in a world that won't stop talking. The guest on the show was Dan Lyons, who recently wrote the book STFU: The Power Of Keeping Your Mouth Shut In An Endlessly Noisy World. Unfortunately, at least a few people who read Lyons' book thought the author himself had a problem shutting up. Ironically, Lyons couldn't help himself from putting partisan political jabs in a book where they didn't really fit the subject.

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Adam Wood hosts a show called Flux Observer that features one of my favorite podcast concepts: Wood reviews a cultural artifact from years ago to determine how his relationship to it has changed over the years. I've always wanted to do something like this, though I never considered doing it via a podcast. For years I've talked about revisiting albums that I enjoyed years ago to write about how well they hold up.

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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 and a process that greatly helped Lukianoff recover from his own difficult bout with the dark clouds. CBT, in short, helps an individual to regain their sense of agency over mental processes like catastrophizing or intrusive thoughts.

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