Canned Dragons

I’ve always loved peering into the inner workings of imaginary houses via cutout illustrations.

This post has a wonderful collection.

Via Things

On the latest episode of the Symbolic World podcast, Jonathan Pageau explains why Disney trying to map contemporary cultural values onto an older story results in a jumbled mess.

My wife and I are generally aware of the same cultural touchstones. I would say I was a bit more deeply engaged in certain subcultures, though, which can lead to some interesting reactions when I bust out singing a song like Stryper’s “To Hell With The Devil.”

Back when our local newspaper, The News & Observer, was more of a going concern, I used to dig following the columns from Craig D. Lindsey. Lindsey, AKA Uncle Crizzle, had a keen eye for culture and finding overlooked treasures. When the paper let him go as part of broader cutbacks, I considered it a real setback to their coverage of the arts.¹

I remember reading on Lindsey’s Tumblr around the time of this dismissal from the newspaper that he was going through a time of real struggle. This was right around the time that the nation was facing a particularly strong sense of outrage about the treatment of minorites by the authorities. He felt a lack of self-worth. The demand for those in his profession was abating (at least in the sense that they could find paying work). Frankly, I was worried about the guy.

After buying this razor from Henson, I have officially made two purchases after seeing the products on Instagram. I guess ads aren’t all bad?

For this Friday Night Video, we’re going back a way, to the mid-nineties. Smashing Pumpkins had released Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness a fittingly grandiose title for an ambitious and widely varied double-album. At the time, I heard the first single, the “rat in a cage” song, and I thought this latest effort wasn’t for me. I actually went out and sold my Smashing Pumpkins CDs, which I had been collecting since shortly after the release of their debut, Gish.

Chris Butler writes about the words he chooses not to publish online and that end up in his unpublishable.txt file.

The Unpublishable file is filled with half-formed critiques of the systems I work within, questions about the ethical implications of design decisions I’ve helped implement, and doubts about the very nature of the work so many of us do in the digital age. I regularly open this document and add a few lines and close it quickly, assuming that’s as far as they will go — safely out of my head and into no one else’s. Keeping this file feels risky. Even though it’s on a physical drive, not in the cloud. Even though it’s encrypted. I still worry that The Unpublishable will, somehow, be published. What a nightmare that would be.

Most of us who write anything substantive online probably have the equivalent of an unpublishable.txt file. I have a tag in Ulysses named “struck” that gets applied to everything I’ve decided doesn’t need to see the light of day. I’m not encrypting files like Butler, and it’s safe to say that keeping the files local is not a “the better part of valor is discretion” kind of thing. Most of these shelved thoughts are not incendiary, but they are just ones that I decided were better unexpressed in public.

I wrote recently about TikTok and decided, after getting it proofread, not to publish. It was accurate and fitting but came across as harsh in some of its criticisms. I had to remember the words of my patron saint, Seraphim of Sarov, who said, “You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other.”

Anna Kodé has a piece in the New York Times (gift article) about the early Space Age Googie style of architecture. The article is filled with eye candy and visual delights from the style, some prominent artifacts of which were still around when I was young. It brings a tremendous sense of nostalgia.

Nick Heer from Pixel Envy points out that Dell hasn’t lost its branding charm. When configuring a laptop on the website, he got an error message, “Composite Rule Error: Invalid selection in Processor Branding.” He was further informed about the error:

The Chassis Option requires the matching Memory size. The 16gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 236V/226V and Ultra 7 266V. The 32gb Memory is only available with the Ultra 5 238V and Ultra 7 268V.

I have often marveled at the challenging model names that PC manufacturers give their products, which starkly contrast to those from Apple. Everyday people can remember the names of their Apple devices. Not so for most of what PC manufacturers come up with.

Maybe it’s a bit early to be making New Year’s resolutions. Though this used to be a popular practice, many now don’t even believe in setting stretch goals just because the calendar changes. I confess that I have waxed and waned in my observance of making annual resolutions. This year, though, I have something lined up that I think will actually improve my life in meaningful ways.