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Headlights Pointed At The Dawn
For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for…
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Unpublishable.txt
Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file. The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so…
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Leo the A.I. Boyfriend
Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario. A…
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Recontextualization
When I heard that Starflyer 59 was releasing a new album hot on the heels of their critically acclaimed 2024 record Lust For Gold, I was a bit surprised. Once I dove further into the concept for the record, though, I began to understand why the band was able to put this out so quickly. This…
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A CGI Ape Takes To The Screen
David Sims writes for The Atlantic about Better Man, the new Robbie Williams music biopic where the singer is depicted by a CGI ape. Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the…
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American Pharisaism
I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves. […] It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years experience of…
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An Atheist Attends All Saints
An atheist visited my parish and shared his thoughts.
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Dell Charm
Nick Heer from Pixel Envy points out that Dell hasn’t lost its branding charm. When configuring a laptop on the website, he got an error message, “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding.” He was further informed about the error: The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available…
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The Revenge of Googie
Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia. Kodé examines…
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When You Sleep
Live at The Murmrr Theatre by DIIV DIIV – LIve at The Murmrr Theatre (Bandcamp) Perhaps the definitive cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep,” from their seminal album, Loveless, is Memoryhouse’s version from their 2010 Yours Truly live session. The song was breathlessly passed around the internet and gained Memoryhouse a fair amount of attention. When I…