Canned Dragons

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:05:38 -0400

Moses the Black

Artist: Hunter Biden

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:23:42 -0400

The repaving action around here has been insane. Spotted on the walk home.

Chemicals Make You Small

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:42:31 -0400

When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are brash, experimentally noisy, irreverent, sometimes goofy and often oversaturated. They seem to have almost the opposite of Hammock’s ethereal, slow, quiet and completive approach.

Echoes and Dust features an interview with the lads from Hammock in which they discuss the influences for their new album, The Second Coming Was A Moonrise. In it, they explain being inspired by American Head by The Flaming Lips.

We just really connected with how American Head delved into the way drug use can back fire and destroy… not only for the individual using drugs, but also the devastation it has on the rest of the family and/or friends. Like Wayne, I very briefly sold a little weed, I worked at a chain restaurant, I had friends who were on drugs and decided to turn their headlights off while they were driving at night and ended up wrapping their car around a tree and dying. The Lips are from Oklahoma City, we’re from Arkansas and Tennessee. All of these similarities led to us reaching out to the Lips and asking if they wanted to collaborate on our song, ‘Chemicals Make You Small’. That particular lyric captured a real moment when a friend of mine was in the back seat thinking he was gonna die because of the drugs he was on. We had some correspondence with Wayne through Instagram, so we thought we’d just ask if they wanted to collaborate. They did way more than we asked them to do. We’re so grateful. We wish both of them nothing but love and light.

The Second Coming Was A Moonrise features more songs with vocals than most Hammock releases and “Chemicals Make You Small” fits in line with their usual vocal style, despite the presence of special guests. The tones are hushed, protracted, emotive and fit with the instrumentation, especially the lush strings.

The Second Coming Was a Moonrise by Hammock

Jim Carol New Year

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0400

With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project’s creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album’s description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.

It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need to compromise your values for the tempting illusion of success.

I periodically look at Tiny Houses on the internet, compelled by the idea that life can become more expansive by scaling back. My youngest son’s favorite show for a while was Tiny House Nation, and we used to speculate on what life would be like with some bespoke small dwelling.

“Jim Carol New Year” is the first track available from the album, and it’s not a giant departure from Stewart’s previous work as Black Marble. ¹ The album is described as having more guitar replacing the ever present synths, but evidence of that is scant on this song.

Black Marble - Jim Carol New Year (YouTube)

What, if anything, this song has to do with Jim Carol of Basketball Diaries fame, I’m not sure. ↩︎

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:46:36 -0400

One thing struck me particularly forcefully about Yuval Levin’s recent essay, Idols of the Valley, on the Pope’s recent encyclical. While the previous Pope Leo was able to formulate his philosophy regarding the industrial revolution after its effects had become mostly clear, the current Pope Leo has no such luxury in regard to AI. We are all still grasping at what the future holds for this technology and how we are going to adapt. This puts the Pope at a disadvantage, but it still makes sense for him to tackle the subject now, while we still have a better chance to put up moral and human guardrails to guide the course of events, rather than letting them overwhelm us.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:12:38 -0400

My 18-month-old neice is participating in the “Flamingo Revolution” protests in Albania.

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:14:48 -0400

Chamomile tea + magnesium + the new Hammock LP = sleepy boy mocktail

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:14:30 -0400

Even my clipboard is getting on the AI train.

Sun, 31 May 2026 07:09:24 -0400

Watched Singles 🍿 on Friday night with my lady friend. Like I needed to miss the 90s any more than I already do.

Sat, 30 May 2026 11:22:32 -0400

A.I. Art Club button by Matt Windsor (from Cotton Bureau).

Sat, 30 May 2026 09:43:53 -0400

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.

Six Flags White House

Sat, 30 May 2026 07:45:11 -0400

Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about the spectacle of setting up a UFC match on the White House lawn.

It 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.

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.

This 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.

The president at a UFC fight, courtesty of The White House

He gets his first full summer vacation since starting his school career due to switching from the year-round calendar to traditional for high school. ↩︎

The Pontiff vs. AI

Thu, 28 May 2026 07:14:16 -0400

The 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.

Leo 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.

Government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of AI.
Protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened.
Education to help students think critically about the technology.
Action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized, or fake information online that is often generated by AI.
Safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons.

It’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.

Thu, 28 May 2026 06:04:33 -0400

There are some amazing photos of holy sites in France coming from @eastbrad. I was especially enthralled with Mont-Saint-Michel.

Wed, 27 May 2026 21:32:04 -0400

Vans black and yellow Half Cabs. The official shoe of Canned Dragons.

Mon, 25 May 2026 22:35:43 -0400

Kupajo warns us to beware of black butterflies.

Male 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.

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.

Don't Panic

Mon, 25 May 2026 19:41:30 -0400

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

Across 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.

English Breakfast by Hoops

Unfortunately, Hoops dissolved just before the release of their album Halo in 2020 after allegations of sexual assault.

I once had a philosophy professor with whom I could score points on my test essays by throwing shade at Coldplay. ↩︎

Star Wars The Product

Sun, 24 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Buddy 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.

Lest 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.

So it’s interesting that so many think Star Wars really owes nothing to its fans.

Rian 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!

[image or embed]
— Kevin McLenithan ([@mclengthyname.bsky.social](http://mclengthyname.bsky.social)) May 22, 2026 at 8:08 PM

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.

It’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?

What you should like

I 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.

I 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.

Sun, 17 May 2026 19:00:00 -0400

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.

Normally, 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.

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.

Heart Still Beats

Sat, 16 May 2026 18:44:00 -0400

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.

The 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.

Castlebeat - Heart Still Beats (YouTube)

New Cans

Fri, 15 May 2026 18:00:00 -0400

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.

Photo by Alphacolor / Unsplash

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?

My impressions so far are commensurate with my expectations. These things are buttery smooth and rich with detail.

High points:

Comfort : This was a key selling point for me. I had two sets of headphones. The Sony WH-1000XM5’s, a closed-back noise-cancelling set that is plenty comfortable. I use those primarily for work calls. The other pair, my primary music listening set, was a pair of the Grado SR80x’s. These are open-back and sound immediate and spacious. However, they get uncomfortable after about 15 minutes. All the reviews I read mentioned the Sennheisers as the most comfortable headphones the reviewers have ever worn. This is a big incentive to someone like me who sometimes listens to music hours on end.
Build Quality : Solid, stocky, without being too heavy, and well-padded, the Sennheier’s are the nice blend of durability and ergonomics. I do wish they were aluminum like the Apple AirPods Max, though.
Sound : The open-back design gives you a great soundstage, with music sounding like it fills up the space. I love my Sony’s, but the closed-back architecture adds a bit of a claustrophobic feeling to the experience. The Sennheisers have even more precision without sacrificing warmth.

I’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.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Intelligence Is Still Artificial

Wed, 06 May 2026 23:00:00 -0400

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.

In 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.

I’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.

A 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.

The 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.

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.

Jacob Noti-Victor writes for The Atlantic about another secret weapon against AI dominance: copyright law.

But 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.

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?

Many 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.

Claude, with its vast capabilities and empathetic tone, can be ideal for managing chronic illness. ↩︎

The Collection

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:00:00 -0400

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.

Immediate download. Let’s get this exploration started.

The Novel Cure

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:56:22 -0400

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.

I 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.

I’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.

I’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.

Kingsolver 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.

If you can stomach a tough read, I strongly recommend Demon Copperhead. What’s next?

Web Ads

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:44:00 -0400

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.

At 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.

I 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.