Canned Dragons

A personal weblog by Robert — a mere Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, budget audiophile and paper airplane mechanic.

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  • Attie

    I just signed up for access to Attie, a new AI-based app from Bluesky, which allows you to shape your feed on the social network using plain language. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about the app when it was first announced. It can be hard these days to sift through the AI hype to locate the value in some of these propositions.

    Then I came across an old quote I had saved about blogging. Henrik Karlsson wrote in 2022 that a blog post “is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.” Karlsson was sparked to this realization after writing an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, and being introduced to it by many who wanted to discuss the topic.

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  • The Novel Cure

    Image by My Mom is Wolves via Flickr

    Every 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.

    After 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.

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  • A Change In The Atmosphere

    With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed — which has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky — was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.1 Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration working. I was either getting errors that I was missing the domain parameter when using my ActivityPub account or a 404 when I was using my domain account. Damned if you do…

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  • Hurts Like Hell

    Charlotte Cornfield is the latest musician to put out something via Durham, NC’s Merge Records. Hurts Like Hell is also the first long player by the Canadian singer/songwriter since becoming a mother. The title track, “Hurts Like Hell,” wallows in a remembered sentimentality with the advantage of looking at difficulty in the rearview mirror. We all know what it’s like to try to gain perspective when in the midst of a tough situation.

    The video immediately endeared itself to me because its protagonist is wearing a sweater just like one I purchased a couple of weeks ago. The guy looks like he’s kin to Ben Gibbard and plays a sympathetic character who appears to ingest some psychoactive substance along with a confection delivered from an anonymous sender. His enthusiasm for playing the video’s song at high volumes (with bass boost!) outside is a nuisance to his neighbors.

    Charlotte Cornfield – Hurts Like Hell (YouTube)

  • If You Change

    Widowspeak has a new record coming this June and produced a video for the lead single, “If You Change.” I first heard the band when they covered Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet,” a song that never landed with me previously. Widowspeak won me over with the wistful tenderness they gave their treatment of the track.

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  • Bishop Militia

    Fresco of the Fifth Ecumenical Council

    Most of you may know that I joined the Orthodox Christian church two years ago. I came from a lifelong background with mainline Christian churches. The Orthodox Church doesn’t describe itself as a denomination, but rather as pre-denominational, tracing its lineage back to the Apostles.

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  • A Side Hustle As The Doors

    Field Music

    We all know by now that it’s getting tougher to make a living as a musician. While tools for producing music have gotten cheaper and more accessible, the ways to make decent money as a professional in the music industry have been drying up.

    Alex Marshall and Joanna Yee write for the NYT about the members of acclaimed British indie act Field Music trying to pay the bills. Despite working regular jobs and playing in a band recognized by Prince, they were having trouble making ends meet. They decided they could put a few extra bones in the bank by… gigging as The Doors.

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  • The Shape of Paris

    This week’s Saturday Night Video is a bit different than the usual fare. It’s technically more of a skate video than a music video (but it does feature music). Powell Peralta-sponsored skateboard pro Andy Anderson and I have very different styles, but I enjoy his skating and his good nature. He’s as unconventional a skateboarder as they come, fitting decidedly old-school tricks alongside new ones, finding endless creativity with whatever objects he comes across.

    The Shape of Paris is as much an intimate look at the streets of Paris as a skate video. Its videographer, Brett Novak, is one of the best in the skateboarding films business and brings a variety of shots that showcase the city’s charms. I’ve only been to Paris once, but I wish my memories of it looked the way it appears in this video.

    via Neatorama

  • Soaking In It

    If you live in a first-world country with a sizable knowledge work sector, you might find it hard to escape the subject of AI. That’s probably an understatement. We are saturated with talk of artificial intelligence and, in particular, large language models. The economist Edgar R. Fiedler is quoted as saying, “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass,” but that hasn’t stopped the proliferation of prognostication on the subject of AI.

    Matt Shumar posts his take as an insider working with AI on the Xitter site. He issues a clarion call to those who may not be as close as he is to what is happening in the industry.

    I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies… OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you… we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

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  • 100%

    The lead track and first single off Sonic Youth’s album Dirty felt like a big deal when it dropped. By 1992, the decade already felt like a dramatic break from the previous one, and videos like the one for “100%” played a big part in setting that perception. The sleek polish that had coated 80s cultural artifacts gave way to the grit and grunge of noise rock going mainstream and skateboarders tearing up the streets in grainy black and white.

    “100%” is about the tragic death of Black Flag roadie and popular scenester Joe Cole, who was killed in a robbery outside the home he shared with Henry Rollins. Cole was shot in the face with Rollins present. Rollins still keeps a jar of the dirt that soaked up Cole’s blood in his house.

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