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culture faith favorite highlighted noise saturday night video tech

  • Pocket Closing

    Mozilla made a surprise announcement today that they are closing the Pocket read-it-later service. With nothing but a bland, corporate statement to go on, I imagine users have a fair amount of confusion about the move. I was actually looking at the Pocket entry on the App Store earlier in the day to see if it had been updated lately. I always had dreams of the service/app being improved, so I could go back to using it with a Kobo, which is a quite delightful combo. I had a Kobo a few years ago, and the sync with Pocket, while it could use a few features (like highlight sync), was key for me. I probably read more articles than books on the device. I kept this option in the back of my mind for a possible switch back.

    I would have been extremely frustrated if I had bought another Kobo under the assumption that I could fulfill my use case of synchronizing with my saved articles from Pocket.

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  • Closed Off

    My son watched the Spike Jonze movie Her a few days ago and remarked to me about how prescient some of the ideas were. I was thinking about how accurately Jonze (who also wrote the screenplay) predicted some of the aspects of generative AI and the role that it could play in our lives. The film was made not too long ago, but remember how quickly OpenAI sprang up with most of its current capabilities and how taken by surprise everyone was.

    My son mentioned the fact that everyone in the movie walked around with headphones on and how that’s now the case when you are out and about. My wife actually wears AirPods most of the day in the house. It makes it challenging to have conversations with her. I always feel like I’m intruding into her little audio bubble.

  • Cultural Stasis

    The first part of this piece was published as a separate post but I wanted to expand my thoughts and references. Expect more to come on the subject.

    W David Marx put out an edition of Culture: An Owner’s Manual last year focused on the significance of Rocky IV as a cultural artifact.

    But unlike most bad films made in 1985, Rocky IV remains fascinating nearly forty years later. It has great value to us in 2024 as a relic — an artwork that embodies the unique stylistic choices of a particular point in time. Rocky IV is a time-traveling passport to 1985: the Manichaean Reaganite politics, the sassy robot maid, the soundtrack of power ballads and cold digital synths, the artless action-film editing and over-use of freeze-frame fade-outs, the casual lack of verisimilitude in using Wyoming as a stand-in for the Russian countryside.

    My wife was arguing tonight that much of indie music in the 90s still sounds fresh and timeless today. I can see that in some ways, but overall I think the 90s was the last decade to have a real distinctiveness to its culture. You couldn’t make Empire Records or Belly’s “Feed The Tree” today. They just wouldn’t feel right in the current context.

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  • Do Not Pass Me Just To Slow Down

    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.

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  • 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 into my subscription, I finally purchased my first album. Frankie Rose – Seventeen Seconds. Burned a CD and it sounds fantastic.

  • I’ve been trying for years to get my oldest son to embrace blogging. He’s an excellent writer and has unique perspectives. I bought him a Blot blog but he never used it. Now I find out he’s publishing on Substack. I feel betrayed.

  • Tennis – At The Apartment (Live)

    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.

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  • If I could internalize the words of Thoreau that, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” then I probably wouldn’t have spent several days this week investigating cassette culture.

  • Oh HEY, Hello

    I have to admit something: After writing about quitting the email service HEY from 37Signals, I ended up going back and resubscribing (before my data was deleted). Sure, I tried other services. Proton was a total bust. I ran into bugs that rendered the platform unusable, unless I wanted to wait for hours to be able to access the emails the alerts were telling me I had in my inbox, or deal with the emails that, for some reason, couldn’t be deleted. Fastmail was better, but lacked polish. There were some unpainted spots, carpet that had a few stains, etc.

    When HEY warned me that my data would soon be deleted, I dutifully entered my credit card information and resubscribed for another year. Reading debates about the service, I often come across discussions about the unique features, such as the screener. People have come up with some clever hacks to replicate the functionality of the screener in other email tools. My needs/wants are not so simple, though.

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  • 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