Memoryhouse consists of Canadians Evan Abeele and Denise Nouvion. The band had a minor hit with their piano-driven live cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep” for Yours Truly in 2011. They capitalized on their success with that cover and the well-regarded EP, The Years, by signing to indie heavyweight Sub Pop Records. When their follow-up full length, Slideshow Effect didn’t garner as much attention, the band unceremoniously parted ways with their label and went out on their own.
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Hardcore IndieWeb
Jason Kratz runs down the set of solid blogging platforms in this post which serves as a rebuttal to OMG.lol’s Adam Newbold. Newbold believes if you use indie blogging services you are not truly on the indieweb. Even if your data is totally portable, he’s convinced that somehow you’ve given up control of your content. He’s written a tutorial on how to create a blog from scratch.
Personally, I feel like it’s a lot more hassle to create a less powerful blogging platform myself rather than have an expert work on something more capable for me. It’s the low-key version of why I don’t build my own house. Leave some things to the professionals.
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No More Mere Christianity?
Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of print and web publication Mere Orthodoxy, has noticed the rise in Christian denominational distinctiveness that stands in contrast to a “mere Christianity” type of ecumenical approach.
Younger people who have grown up without tradition or custom and often strapped to a screen for hours every day desire belonging, desire to enter into something that offers moral direction, identity, and a fixed way of life they don’t have to generate for themselves. But the only way to have something like that is through particularity and even some hard edges. So, Scrivener argues, Mere Christianity is out. Orthodoxy is back. Rome is back. Distinct Protestant traditions are back. In short, denominationalism is back.
I’ve seen this with the incredible explosion of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, which is very distinctive. I’ve seen Presbyterians move to Rome. I’ve seen curiosity about Anglicanism. At this point, it seems the more your church leans into what makes it unique, the more attractive it is going to be for the seeker.
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Cross My Heart and Hope to Die
“Cross My Heart and Hope to Die” marks a distinctively different sound from the early days of Yumi Zouma. The track kicks off their new album, No Love Lost to Kindness. With their first couple of EPs, especially, the New Zealand band distinguished themselves with a fresh, balearic, breezy sound. The tunes were as light as air, and even the the subject of difficult interpersonal relationships came across with just a sigh and a shrug.
(more…)Fediverse reactions
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Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar
One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my /now page, only to get deeply into a new Swedish jazz EP very shortly after.
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It’s All About The Benjamins
In another in a seemingly endless supply of misguided moves, the administration is putting in place a new federal rule under which a college program must prove that it’s graduates earn more than if they had never enrolled or lose access to federal loans. This administration is so focused on money it’s inconceivable to its leadership that there could be any other purpose to an education.
“We know we need nurses. We know we need journalists. We know we need early childhood educators,” he said. “We don’t know how many artists we need, but I can guarantee that if you eliminate access, we will impoverish our cultural life nationally.”
It’s amazing that we could devalue and disincentivize these professions even more, but here’s a way to do it as well as adding to the bureaucratic load.
Fediverse reactions
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Poptimus Prime
Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That’s why we have record reviews that treat pay-for-play pabulum like Rebecca Black songs as if they were written by Neil Young. It’s a culture that feeds our desire for comfort rather than challenge.
(more…)Fediverse reactions
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Corporation Games
Will Gottsegen writes for The Atlantic about Sony’s decision to discontinue manufacturing physical discs for their games.
The convenience of downloads may be an upside, though there are certainly real downsides in the transition away from physical media. When you buy a disc, you own it and can resell it or lend it out the old fashioned way—without online mediation. No corporate middleman was watching me hand my copy of Red Dead Redemption to my friend when I was done with it. Although physical games can be damaged or even decay over long periods of time, I could still loan that same copy out today if I wanted. Digital purchases only grant you a license for use, and that license can be revoked. At around the same time that Sony announced the digital transition for PlayStation, it also alerted customers that more than 500 movies and shows would be pulled from its online marketplace, removing them from the libraries of users who had purchased them. (As an Arts Technica headline put it, “We’re Reminded We Don’t Own What We Buy.”).
The new rental culture comes with some sobering thoughts about our limited ability to retain access to some of our favorite entertainment, be it games, movies or music. Luke Plunkett has even gone as far as to suggest that, without ownership, we have lost the concept of media piracy.
Would you be willing to pay $60 for generous rental terms on a video game? Does the framing of the question shift the mindset of how your money is being spent?
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Orthodox Burnout
A new blog/newsletter to me as of today is Ghost Drive America, which belongs to Edwin Robinson.1 Robinson writes about burnout five years after becoming Orthodox as part of a ROCOR church.
I haven’t been Orthodox quite as long as Robinson, but nevertheless, I identified with almost all his points. One in particular that struck me was his belief that his conversion would eventually draw in his family.
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Eveningstar
Recently, a friend on Mastodon asked followers about their first cassette purchase. I had no trouble recollecting getting Starship’s Knee Deep In The Hoopla when I was in the fourth grade as my introduction to the world of music on tape. I wore that tape out playing the all-too radio friendly songs like “We Built This City” (some might say the song was pandering — the shoutout to all the cities hasn’t aged well). Following that popular anthem in the track sequencing was “Sara,” a ballad at a time when that was almost a separate genre within a genre. Rock bands used to touring arenas had their slower, more romantic songs interspersed with the more upbeat anthemic fare on their records.
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