![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/the-white-house-54451224411.jpg\")
Even my clipboard is getting on the AI train.
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-02T07:14:30-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/06/02/even-my-clipboard-is-getting.html" }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/31/watched-singles-on-friday-night.html", "content_html": "Watched Singles 🍿 on Friday night with my lady friend. Like I needed to miss the 90s any more than I already do.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-31T07:09:24-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/31/watched-singles-on-friday-night.html" }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/30/ai-art-club-button-by.html", "content_html": "A.I. Art Club button by Matt Windsor (from Cotton Bureau).
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/ai-art.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-05-30T11:22:32-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/30/ai-art-club-button-by.html"
},
{
"id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/30/i-wish-ghost-would-let.html",
"content_html": "I wish Ghost would let you default to not sending your posts as emails because every so often I miss changing the setting and send out a post that is too short to warrant an email.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-30T09:43:53-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/30/i-wish-ghost-would-let.html" }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/30/six-flags-white-house.html", "title": "Six Flags White House", "content_html": "Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about the spectacle of setting up a UFC match on the White House lawn.
\n\n\nIt does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope—especially if it harelips the pope.
\n
My son is graduating from middle school next week.1 He tells me about the kids who get in trouble at school for bullying other kids and using racial epithets. Those kids are loud and proud supporters of the president and they emulate his style. Like our president, they are pugilists and punching people, or the verbal equivalent, is what they love. Perhaps that’s why the UFC thing is so fitting for the White House lawn.
\nThis is a far cry from the Easter Egg Rolls I used to attend as a child there. Bring back a guy dressed up as Spider-Man and Teen Titans comics where Speedy is hooked on heroin and warning kids off of using hard drugs.
\nHe gets his first full summer vacation since starting his school career due to switching from the year-round calendar to traditional for high school. ↩︎
\nThe Pope is so hot right now. Everyone is discussing the long-awaited Magnifica Humanitas papal encyclical regarding artificial intelligence from the Roman Pontiff. It makes sense. In a world where much of the responsibility for moral leadership has been abdicated, we are in much need of a figure who can provide that leadership with reach and authority. Enter Pope Leo XIV, who took his name when he ascended to the papacy from the previous Pope Leo XIII, who dedicated much of his time to helping the world come to grips with industrialization.
\nLeo XIV feels a similar responsibility with the rise of AI, so this encyclical is close to his heart. I’m still going through reviews of it, then I want to read the 43k-word document itself. There are so many shareable quotes from this encyclical, but this article in The NYT provides 5 bullet points that sum up some of the arguments made.
\nIt’s troubling that none of these things seem to be happening in any meaningful way. That’s precisely why we need a credible voice such as Leo’s to bring forth the case for their implementation.
", "date_published": "2026-05-28T07:14:16-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/28/the-roman-pontiff-vs-ai.html", "tags": ["Faith"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/28/there-are-some-amazing-photos.html", "content_html": "There are some amazing photos of holy sites in France coming from @eastbrad. I was especially enthralled with Mont-Saint-Michel.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-28T06:04:33-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/28/there-are-some-amazing-photos.html" }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/27/vans-black-and-yellow-half.html", "content_html": "Vans black and yellow Half Cabs. The official shoe of Canned Dragons.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/699e78ac37.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-05-27T21:32:04-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/27/vans-black-and-yellow-half.html"
},
{
"id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/25/black-butterflies.html",
"content_html": "Kupajo warns us to beware of black butterflies.
\n\n\nMale grayling butterflies prefer to mate with darker female graylings. When caged with a female grayling and a cardboard cutout of a grayling painted black, the male will choose the cardboard cutout over the female. Beyond being an example of bro falling for an unrealistic standard of beauty, such a preference reveals that even in matters fundamental to survival and reproduction, these creatures can be seduced by artificial models they’d never encounter in nature.
\n
The analogy holds up when you read about people falling in love with LLMs and being rewired by impossible standards of beauty. Basic humanity is now subordinate to machine slick simulacrums.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-25T22:35:43-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/25/black-butterflies.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/25/dont-panic.html", "title": "Don't Panic", "content_html": "Despite seemingly being designed by a corporation to be mostly inoffensive, sometimes to the point of banality or worse, Coldplay launched into the world consciousness hot, with “Don’t Panic,” the song in the pole position on their debut album Parachutes. Though I feel more generosity towards Chris Martin and crew, some believe “Don’t Panic” is the band’s only good song. Whatever the case, the track was certainly a winning way for Coldplay to announce their arrival on the scene.1
\nAcross the pond, the members of the Bloomington, IN band Hoops were listening. Though the band started when the members were juniors in high school, within a few years, they had established themselves as indie darlings, releasing their first LP on Fat Possum Records and reaching #21 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers chart. Their reworking of “Don’t Panic” strays from the original mostly in that they bring a trip-hop beat that ushers the song along a sprightly pace. Still, Hoops manages to retain the world-weary melancholy at the heart of the Coldplay version.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/hoops-english-breakfast.jpg\")
Unfortunately, Hoops dissolved just before the release of their album Halo in 2020 after allegations of sexual assault.
\nI once had a philosophy professor with whom I could score points on my test essays by throwing shade at Coldplay. ↩︎
\nBuddy cop movie, The Mandolorian and Grogu hit theaters this weekend. The film is expected to gross about $102 million dollars over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. A sizable chunk of change. It’s probably fair to say those box office receipts, more than any other factor, drive the direction of the series.
\nLest we ever forget that Star Wars is a product promotion vehicle as much as it is a film franchise, there’s Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs character Yogurt reminding us with his phrase, “merchandising, merchandising, merchandising,” as he hawks various Spaceballs products like breakfast cereals. It’s probably near incalculable how many units of toys the Star Wars franchise has moved over the years.
\nSo it’s interesting that so many think Star Wars really owes nothing to its fans.
\n\nRian Johnson already made one of the best SW movies. If they brought him back to make a whodunit where all the characters are Old Republic Jedi, it would (A) make a bazillion dollars and (B) kill off all the chuds in the SW fanbase by giving them all rage-induced heart attacks. Everyone wins!
— Kevin McLenithan ([@mclengthyname.bsky.social](http://mclengthyname.bsky.social)) May 22, 2026 at 8:08 PM
[image or embed]
I still see comments like that one above about Rian Johnson’s entry in the Star Wars universe, The Last Jedi. The theory being that most male fans of the series couldn’t handle a film where all the women were perfect and all the men were deeply flawed. I guess those guys are called chuds. They are also in large part responsible for the historic and ongoing success of the franchise.
\nIt’s said that no one hates Star Wars like Star Wars fans. While that may be true, it can also be said that, at least at certain times, few fan-driven properties have creators that seem to care less what the fans think. I often see comments from critics who enjoyed the lowest rated Star Wars episodic TV series, The Acolyte blaming the fans for its lack of success. One article I read claimed what Star Wars needed was to be sexier and this was a step in the right direction. Was that what the majority of devotees have been asking of the new spin offs? That they sex it up?
\nI bring up the angle of Star Wars as product because, in producing consumer entertainment, just as in producing consumer goods, one has to keep the audience in mind. I develop software, and in that business, we have to anticipate the customers wants and needs. We can’t be didactic about it, either. We don’t instruct them in what they should want and then blame them when they don’t like what we offer them. It seems to me to be a bit like post-journalism, where the journalist offers up a guiding narrative of how the consumer should feel about the facts they are providing. The creators of certain Star Wars properties want to offer the fans what they believe the fans should want, if they are to be enlightened. It comes off as patronizing, and, unsurprisingly, turns the fans off.
\nI respect the creators for wanting to take risks. It’s nice to think of Star Wars as art sometimes, that even through the sci-fi necessities of laser swords and planet destroying disco balls, it can offer stories that speak to our human condition. One can never get too far from the commercial aspects, though.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/theacolyte-poster.jpg\")
Clive Thompson has the story of how Phil Collins accidentally invented gated reverb, the drum sound of the 80s, by leaving a talkback microphone on.
\n\n\nNormally, the reverb on a drum hit is intense at first, then slowly fades away. But in the Phil Collins drum session, the accidental reverb behaved differently. It had a nice, loud, booming reverb for a moment — then the reverb abruptly stopped. This created a very cool new type of drum sound. It was boomy and huge, but wasn’t messy, because the reverb for each drum hit ended before the next drum hit.
\n
Gated reverb was used to startling effect on “In The Air Tonight” (watch a first-time reaction video to the song if you haven’t already). Prince jumped all over the drum sound, and it was also used by Kate Bush, John Cougar Mellencamp, Hall and Oates, and Duran Duran.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-17T19:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/17/clive-thompson-has-the-story.html", "tags": ["Noise"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/16/heart-still-beats.html", "title": "Heart Still Beats", "content_html": "I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithm overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat in a few years, but remembered them from this fan video using footage from the best movie ever to take place in a Target big box store — Career Opportunities.
\nThe video for “Heart Still Beats” is filled with the 80s-era skateboardings of Jaya Bonderov, shredding up the streets and occasionally being accosted by the more responsible adults from the area. The film reminds me of how fun skateboarding was in that decade. The casual tick-tacking, the tweaked-out grabs, wall rides, the freedom to take your feet off the board, the low-stakes curb grinds, and graphics with fancy monsters.
\n\nCastlebeat - Heart Still Beats (YouTube)
", "date_published": "2026-05-16T18:44:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/16/heart-still-beats.html", "tags": ["Noise","Saturday Night Video"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/15/new-cans.html", "title": "New Cans", "content_html": "I recently hit my 20th anniversary (!!!) at the company where I work. Instead of a gold watch, I got what amounts to about $400 in a foreign currency they call “Spotlight points.” Thought I didn’t pull the trigger right away, my immediate thought was to blow the lot on a pair of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones. I’ve been researching these cans for some time now, but even at a consistent 38% off, a price point of nearly 400 bones meant I wouldn’t just impulse buy these things.
\n![](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/img-1453-140864.jpg\")
It may be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I feel like I’m constantly seeing references to this particular model of headphones. Just this week, there was a thread on the Qobuz Club forum about albums to listen to with the Sennheiser’s. If I read reviews of a new DAP or DAC, it seems they often test with these headphones. While writing this post, I looked for a portable DAC with a 4.4mm headphone jack, and guess what headphones the first one I came across were connected to in the supporting image?
\nMy impressions so far are commensurate with my expectations. These things are buttery smooth and rich with detail.
\nHigh points:
\nI’m very pleased with the purchase. One of the most exciting things about getting new audio hardware is being able to listen to our collection of music in a brand-new light. It will take me a while to get through the many listening sessions to get to the end of my stack. I’ve started with my reference album, Mazzy Star’s “So Tonight That I Might See,” and the results are similarly impressive with other albums that I’ve sampled.
\nThis could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
", "date_published": "2026-05-15T18:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/05/15/new-cans.html", "tags": ["Noise"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/05/06/the-intelligence-is-still-artificial.html", "title": "The Intelligence Is Still Artificial", "content_html": "The opinions on AI that you find on the internet tend to fall in the extremes of the other side. Either AI is the downfall of humanity or its savior. My thoughts on the subject, as on many others, ride in the middle of the road.
\nIn my professional life, AI has been a great equalizer. If you know the problems you are trying to solve, absent the knowledge of how to actually go about doing that, AI can be the bridge between concept and reality. It would take me many hours to probe the depths of the Azure cloud through labyrinthine Log Analytics workspaces to find the causes of a spike in ingestion costs. With the Azure MCP and Claude Cowork/Code, it’s done in minutes.
\nI’m not blind to the problems with AI, though. As a simple illustration, when I’m using Claude in my personal life, it can almost never remember what day it is, even when I explicitly tell it.1 Aren’t calculations like that one of the easiest things for computers to do? It seems to defy logic.
\nA couple of thoughts reached my Matter inbox in the past few weeks about the Achilles’ heels of AI. One was from David French, who brings up legal culpability for problems caused by AI.
\n\n\nThe nature of A.I. puts its creators in a bind. The point of the technology is that it will do things — at least to some degree — on its own. But under common law, humans will be liable for what A.I. does. This means the A.I. companies (and perhaps individual executives) can be legally responsible for actions they didn’t commit and for effects they did not intend.
\n
Someone has to be held accountable for mistakes by AI models, some of which have been egregious. We can’t apply punitive judgments to a non-human entity, regardless of how human it may seem.
\nJacob Noti-Victor writes for The Atlantic about another secret weapon against AI dominance: copyright law.
\n\n\nBut the future of creative labor will more likely be decided through a different question within copyright law, one that has received far less attention: To what extent should AI-generated works receive copyright protection at all? In a 2024 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be protected by copyright, because copyright requires a human “author.” The Supreme Court declined to review that decision in March. With the lower-court decision left in place, the question now becomes how much AI content can be incorporated into a work before it becomes mostly or totally uncopyrightable; courts have not yet weighed in on this but may soon.
\n
Works generated by AI cannot, at least at this point, be legally copyrighted. Mickey Mouse may be in the public domain now, but how would Disney have built their brand if he had not been protected by intellectual property laws early on?
\nMany times, AI triumphalism is taken for granted. History is not written in stone, though, and there are still some weighty considerations that could disrupt the inevitability of AI dominance.
\nClaude, with its vast capabilities and empathetic tone, can be ideal for managing chronic illness. ↩︎
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/e46e85b2-0709-4150-a10e-90b48245ef98.jpg\")
Everyone has been posting about the Aadam Jacobs collection. Since I love indie music from the 90s, I’m certainly going to spend some time with the massive 10,000 live recordings collection. I went to the page on the Internet Archive and one of the first recordings I saw was Rachel’s at Lounge Ax. I bought The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation compilation created to save the venerable Chicago club when it released. I’ve spun that disc hundreds of times. The song Rachel’s contributed to the comp, “Those Pearls,” is probably my favorite by the band.
\nImmediate download. Let’s get this exploration started.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-17T23:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/04/17/the-collection.html", "tags": ["Noise"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2026/04/03/the-novel-cure.html", "title": "The Novel Cure", "content_html": "![\"Image](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2026/duckett-corn-meal.jpg\")
\nEvery time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some even after entering a new story.
\nAfter I wrapped up reading Demon Copperhead last weekend, I had these feelings. I almost shed tears at the end of the book. There are no novels piling up in a stack for me to read, so I was bereft. I was almost present in Lee County, that little corner of Appalachia where most of the book takes place, for some period. My own trip to Appalachia recently only reinforced that feeling.
\nI won’t deny that Barbara Kingsolver’s latest was a tough read. When the drug use started getting heavy, I had to put it down for a bit. My mom showed interest in reading it, and I steered her away. The extended time it took me to get through the proceedings somehow only integrated it more into my mind’s eye.
\nI’ve never lived in Appalachia, and certainly never had the foster care experience, but I do know someone in both those categories. My dad grew up in rural Eastern, NC, and would remind me of how he had to pick tobacco or shovel chicken sh*t if he ever thought I was trying to get out of doing work. In my lifetime, I saw a degradation in the neighborhood where my grandparents used to live. The last time we visited the area (after their passing), it was scary to walk down the street. This past week, 3 people were shot on that same street.
\nI’m not entirely unfamiliar with youth drug culture, either. The high school I went to has a crazy story about an LSD ring you can read about on Wikipedia. I talked with the guy who, while high on LSD and dancing naked in a field, shot a police officer with his own gun just a week before the incident while skateboarding at an outdoor mall.
\nKingsolver was masterful in crafting the voice of the protagonist of Demon Copperhead, Damon. Even if I had no experience with the challenges represented in the book, I still would have felt myself traveling in that world, painted so effortlessly as it was by the narrative voice of Damon.
\nIf you can stomach a tough read, I strongly recommend Demon Copperhead. What’s next?
", "date_published": "2026-04-03T20:56:22-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2026/04/03/the-novel-cure.html", "tags": ["Culture"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/12/13/web-ads.html", "title": "Web Ads", "content_html": "Not many people profess a love of advertisements on the internet. Among people I follow, particularly on the indie web, few really like Instagram, either. There’s a distaste for big web companies like Meta who make their money on data harvesting and targeted ads.
\nAt the risk of turning this blog commercial, I confess that I’ve really benefitted from the ads on Instagram. I got a pair of my all-time favorite shoes after seeing ads for custom leather converse. Wired Magazine writer Martin Cizmar refers to the Henson Razor as the best he’s ever used — I agree, and discovered that product on Instagram. Thanks to that razor, and some tips from [@jack](https://micro.blog/jack), I’ve got a whole “shave like your grandfather” thing going on with a ceramic bowl, shaving puck and brush. It’s a wonderful ritual even if it sets me apart from most of the men at my church.Â
\nI only visit the Meta-owned site about once or twice a month, but I have to admit I sometimes feel like the advertisements are one of the strengths of the service.
", "date_published": "2025-12-13T15:44:00-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2025/12/13/web-ads.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/12/13/the-demise-of-a-newsletter.html", "title": "The Demise of a Newsletter", "content_html": "One of the few newsletters I pay to subscribe to is Spruce Island from Orthodox Christian writer Michael Warren Davis. Davis is packing it in after a send-off entitled “Death to Substack.” Davis minces no words in his antipathy towards the platform. As someone who writes on matters of faith, he’s able to easily target the content that dominates that niche on Substack.
\n\n\nJust look at the Faith & Spirituality bestsellers. #1 is some Nostradamus bullshit. #2 is The Pillar, which is the exception that proves the rule. #3 is a liberal LGBT Lutheran ladypastor. #4 is a guy who literally posts about nothing but how much he hates Donald Trump. Then there’s more hooky bullshit about prophecies and astrology before you find really thoughtful writers like Emily Stimpson Chapman, David Bentley Hart, and Peter Kwasniewski.
\n
Unlike Casey Newton and that writer from the Atlantic who spends his time online trolling real journalists, Davis isn’t making claims that Substack is some kind of “Nazi bar.”1
\nDavis is rooting his criticism in material changes that the platform has made to promote the notes feature heavily, resulting in a more social-media-like approach and a degradation of the level of thought. Davis also doesn’t trade in Doctorow-esque vulgarities to describe the platform’s decline. However, if you read through his critique, it doesn’t veer too far from the regression that Doctorow has outlined these sorts of companies go through.
\nWhat I don’t understand is why people think Substack is the only platform out there that does blogs/newsletters. At least Newton realized that he could do the same thing on Ghost with more ownership. I think I’ll drop Davis a line and suggest that he could move Spruce Island and keep roughly the same business model.
\nI’ve read hundreds of publications on Substack and never once come across a Nazi account. Not to say that a scant few don’t exist, but you’d expect to see at least one Nazi if you went to a “Nazi bar.” So much for the big scoop. ↩︎
\nThis interstitial period leading into the fall seemed like as good a time as any to update my /now page.
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-05T10:31:34-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2025/09/05/this-interstitial-period-leading-into.html" }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/08/24/tangled-up-in-chaos.html", "title": "Tangled Up In Chaos", "content_html": "A few days ago, I received a plea in my usual email from the media outlet Tangle.
\n\n\nThe last six months have been a difficult time for media outlets. Overwhelmed by the news, many readers and listeners are tuning out. Those who are staying up to date are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence round-ups to get their news, which has caused website traffic to fall.
\n
I feel bad about the situation that Isaac Saul, who founded Tangle, and his crew find themselves in. They have a publication that does a wonderful job balancing perspectives on the news of the day. They are trustworthy and thorough. Yet, I find myself deciding again and again not to upgrade to a paid subscription when I consider the option.
\nWith so much admiration for Tangle, why don’t I just support them? The problem is that I don’t always read the newsletters they send. It’s not because I don’t have faith in them to introduce me to viewpoints that I may not have considered on my own or read elsewhere in publications with clear biases that drive coverage. It’s that I’m worn out by the news. I’m fatigued by constantly reading of the shifts in the political landscape. I have a subscription to the New York Times gifted to me by my employer, and the number of emails I get from them claiming to carry “breaking news” is breaking my brain. In other words, my response to the good folks at Tangle would be, “it’s not you, it’s me.”
\nIn my feed reader service (Feedbin) I have a rule to filter out mentions of our president. For some time, I wondered if The Atlantic was even still publishing, so few were the pieces that made it through the filter. My sister—who gifted me a subscription to the publication every year for my birthday—quit doing so this year because of the cost increase. At first, I was bummed, but now I find that I hardly miss it. Similarly, I enjoy the perspectives from The Dispatch, but my paid subscription to that site didn’t even last a month because I just didn’t want to read about politics any more than is reasonable.
", "date_published": "2025-08-24T18:52:26-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2025/08/24/tangled-up-in-chaos.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/08/24/you-know-a-cd-is.html", "content_html": "You know a CD is old when the insert explains compact disc technolgy. The Cure Staring At The Sea sounds wonderful on disc, though.
\n![\"\"](\"https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/165686/2025/img-0799.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2025-08-24T16:32:25-04:00",
"url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2025/08/24/you-know-a-cd-is.html"
},
{
"id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/08/24/billie-bean-king.html",
"title": "Billie Bean King",
"content_html": "Zachary Brown writes for the Verge about a new game/utililty from Hank Green. The premise of the Focus Friend app is sort of like an updated Tamagotchi for phone addicts. You are the virtual caretaker of a character like Billy Bean King, a bean who can only work to upgrade its environment and wardrobe (it knits) if you put down your phone.
\n\n\nAs it turns out, helping furnish a virtual bean’s lo-fi room is exactly what I needed. Over the last week, Billie Bean King and I have been on an absolute grindset. We’ve been locking in for half an hour and hourlong chunks of work: Billie knitting while I clack away on a keyboard. The longer I work, the more Billie can produce, and the better the decorations I can buy for their space. (I’m saving up for the gorgeous plant-covered furniture in the Greenhouse set.) The gamified nature of the app has helped quiet the static and improve my focus. I’m motivated to work because I want to unlock the best decorations for Billie’s home, and, like a Tamagotchi, I want to care for them.
\n
Brown, who admits to struggling with attention for most of his life, found Focus Friend to be effective, but having blown through other methods of avoiding distraction, wonders if it will stick. Fortunately, Green is adding more pieces to the game to give its bean something else to work towards.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-24T15:55:47-04:00", "url": "https://micro.canneddragons.net/2025/08/24/billie-bean-king.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://canneddragons.micro.blog/2025/08/23/falling-on-my-sword.html", "title": "Falling On My Sword", "content_html": "In honor of Tops’ new album Bury The Key being released yesterday, I’m featuring one of the tracks, “Falling On My Sword,” as the Saturday Night Video this week.Â
\n“Falling On My Sword” is my favorite among the early singles from this LP and probably the one that most closely matches the 70’s prog rock-inspired cover art. It’s a bit of a left turn for Tops. Based on their previous work, you would think anything born of a seventies influence would be more in line with late-decade disco (and the remainder of the album features some of that).
\nThe tempo on this song will mess with your sense of equilibrium. It speeds up and down mindless of whether or not you are packing your Dramamine. The fuzzed out guitars bring a level of sludge previously unheard in the indie pop band’s music and the bassline sounds like being chased by a demon. Â
\n\nTops - Falling On My Sword (YouTube)
\nI don’t harbor many regrets in my life, but there are a few shows that I wish I had attended. When Tops played locally with Men I Trust a couple of years ago, I missed it due to my frustration with Ticketmaster and their service charge shenanigans. I refused to purchase tickets simply on principle. I’m so glad I get another chance to see the band.1
\nI still have to get out to see Men I Trust at some point. What a split bill. ↩︎
\nThe third edition of John Brady’s This & That. zine reached my mailbox this week. As I read through it, I thought about the slower pace of communication from the past. In the book Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, the residents of a small British town at the turn of the 20th century share a newspaper, each taking shifts throughout the day.
\n\n\nSoon after breakfast Mary Ann brought in the Times. Mr. Carey shared it with two neighbours. He had it from ten till one, when the gardener took it over to Mr. Ellis at the Limes, with whom it remained till seven; then it was taken to Miss Brooks at the Manor House, who, since she got it late, had the advantage of keeping it.
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There’s something quaint and romantic about having such little and proscribed access to information. It’s almost the exact opposite of what we have today, with the glut of news and entertainment that we can barely hold off.
\nI came across Of Human Bondage by way of the original film adaption of the novel (which is in the public domain). It looked interesting when I was browsing through Tubi. Tubi autoplays movies when you click on the title, even if you only intended to get more details. Once the film started, I was quickly drawn in. I like Leslie Howard and this was the film that is widely regarded as having made Bette Davis a star. You get a sense as to why in the infamous scene in which Davis chews through the scenery like only she can after Howard’s character, Philip, tells her she disgusts him.
\n\nOf Human Bondage - “Wipe my mouth” (YouTube)
\nMy wife was distracted by Davis’ intermittent cockney accent in the scene, but as The Radio Times Guide To Film puts it, “Bette Davis proves her credentials in this latter role, offering a nuanced portrayal that rises above her cockney accent.”1
\nIt’s trite to say the book is better than the movie, but in this case, you could argue that is objectively the case. The events depicted in the movie don’t even begin until a full 40% of the book is complete. The emotions that are either unexplored or inexplicable on the screen come through more fully realized on the page.
\nDavis hired a nanny with a cockney accent to prep for the role. ↩︎
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