I've been working on my blog design lately. Occasionally, a situation will arise in which I do something that totally messes things up, and I wish for the option to roll back to a "last known good" configuration. I used to love this option on Windows. If you (or a process or driver) did something that put the operating system in a bad state, you could always roll back to the last known good state and get things up and running.
Canned Dragons is a weblog about faith, noise and technology, written by Robert Rackley. "For the memory can both provoke the dragon and the memory can also subdue him." ~ St. John Chrysostom
I used to have a well-worn VHS cassette of Sonic Youth’s tour video, 1991: The Year Punk Broke. It featured a just-experiencing-stardom phase of Nirvana, but that wasn’t the reason I watched it over and over. I was more interested in the Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. performances that were recorded at these giant European music festivals. Until Lollapalooza sprang forth from the mind of Perry Farrell, we didn’t have bands like Sonic Youth playing huge outdoor venues in North America.
I generally don't do year-end lists, but I like to share a couple of my favorites things from the past year. In this interstitial time between Christmas and New Year's, I get a chance to reflect back on what I've enjoyed, while having very few demands on my time.
I first wrote about Scout Gillett earlier in the year, when she covered a Broadcast song, before her debut record No Roof, No Floor was released.
Mastodon was created in 2016, and the site still harkens back to its origins, a time when Gamergate and the atrocious harassment of women in tech on Twitter was still very fresh in our minds. The platform was in a way a reaction to that and the rising toxic atmosphere on social media. At the time, Twitter was also in the throes of dealing with the side effects of a Donald Trump candidacy and subsequent presidency.
In a worship service recently, our pastor explored the genealogy of Jesus as presented in the book of Matthew. It was a thought-provoking homily about family ties. Alastair Roberts writes for Plough magazine about how we fit our own lives into the continuum of people that have come before us.
Moderns have become dulled to our own place in the generations, to the ways that we receive, bear, and pass on legacies, to the ways we are the harvest of former generations’ labors and how our own labors await the harvest of future generations.
I was already a fan of the angular and noisy Truman's Water, Glen Galloway's former band, when he launched Soul-Junk. The new group was conceived after Galloway had a tour van conversion to Christianity. My friend, who was not a believer, but was a fan of Shrimper Records, made me a mix tape with Soul-Junk's "I Turned My Back On You." I listened to the mix tape while I was exploring a return to Christianity.
Live at The Murmrr Theatre by DIIV
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 saw Memoryhouse play live, I asked the band’s Even Abeele if they were ever going to record a studio version of the cover.
After 14 years and over 10,000 tweets, I've deactivated my Twitter account. I've been critical of Twitter for a long time now without actually leaving the platform. Obviously, things have changed rapidly for the worse. When, on Saturday, Elon Musk let DT back on the platform, while including a little blasphemy with his announcement, that was the last straw. Almost all of my tweets were syndicated from Micro.blog, anyway. I thought about pinning a tweet that pointed to where you can find me now, but if you have been following my account for any length of time, you already have that information.
My degree is in psychology, and though I focused on family and child counseling, industrial/organizational psychology was a close second in my affections. I loved taking a case study from a disaster at NASA — like the Challenger shuttle explosion — and looking at what went wrong organizationally to allow that to happen. So, as you can imagine, I’m riveted by the Twitter saga. The twists and turns. The overall smugness of the CEO in the face of a serious threat to the product’s existence.
