Canned Dragons

So sentiments expressing objective claims of morality or beauty are still, as in Lewis’s day, found to be offensive, but sentiments expressing identity are seen as sacred.

~ Alan Noble, on C.S. Lewis and education

Just as I’m starting to get back into vinyl records, one of the format’s proponents, a popular record club called Vinyl Me, Please is shutting down.

Since launching in 2012, Vinyl Me, Please has offered boutique, collectible record pressings to a subscriber base paying as much as $654 a year for the highest-tier membership, as The Denver Post’s John Wenzel reported last month. The article traces the period of instability back to the firing, in March 2024, of three senior staff, whom the board of directors allege had conspired to divert company funds to build a pressing plant. Cameron Schaefer, the company’s former chief executive, said he believed that he and the two others had been fired to save on severance.

At least the accused were (allegedly) trying to do something that would benefit the record industry!

One of the advantages to my seventh grader not having much homework is that he’s using some of that time at night to take a Udemy course on Python.

It seems that being a Firefox user means being in a constant state of trepidation about whether the app will last the year. For a long while now, it has been well known that the browser’s very survival depends on the largesse of its search partner, Google. The Mozilla Foundation, which develops Firefox, is a non-profit, but it gets 85% of its funding thanks to the commercial interests of the biggest beneficiary of ad revenue on the internet.

David Brooks on doing things that aren’t easy because you feel compelled to do them.

But when you look around you see a lot of people out there choosing to do unpleasant things. I don’t just mean those adventure freaks who feel compelled to climb Mount Everest, walk across Antarctica or row the Atlantic — though all those things sound truly miserable. I mean us regular folks leading our regular lives.

It’s hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of Hookmark until recently. The crowd I follow online doesn’t tend to miss Mac productivity tools, but this one seems to have escaped mass publicity within that community. The premise seems like a powerful one:

Hookmark is the standalone contextual bookmarking app. It complements your launcher by also being the contextual launcher. Hookmark enables you to create and link robust bookmarks to files, emails, tasks and more, making it easy for you to access information without needing to search.

Amazon’s Rufus, which must be some kind of AI chatbot, wonders if I’ve got the following questions about Stereolab’s upcoming album Instant Holograms On Metal Film:

• Can it be used on any type of metal surface?
• Does it leave any residue after removal?
• Is it easy to apply without bubbles?

The future is cleaning your tub with space-age bachelor pad records.

Chris Butler writes about the glut of information to which we are exposed and how that does not advance our wisdom or understanding.

Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy. I’m not here to moralize, so I compare to pornography with all the necessary trepidation. Without judgement, it’s my observation that pornography depicts physical connection while creating emotional distance. I think information is like that. There’s a difference between information and wisdom that hinges on volume. More information promises to show us more of reality, but too much of it can easily hide the truth. Information can be pornography—a simulation that, when consumed without limits, can weaken our ability to experience the real thing.

Straight outta Estonia.

New Mexico governor mobilizes National Guard to tackle crime emergency in Albuquerque

I briefly attended high school in Albuquerque during the early 90s as my family deliberated on whether we wanted to live there (we ultimately didn’t). When I started making friends, I was quickly warned about looking people in the eyes, lest they interpret the action as “mad dogging” them and respond with suitable hostility. It sounded like something I would have heard on a show about prison life on HBO and I wondered if I had actually been sent to a penitentiary instead of a place for learning. A student had been fatally shot in the parking lot of the high school the year before I arrived by another student. Our school was broken into and vandalized by members of a rival school not long after I started there.

I am not the least bit surprised to read this news.