canned dragons
“No matter how ‘right’ you may be on various points, the most important thing is not ‘rightness’ at all, but Christian love and harmony. Most ‘crazy converts’ have been ‘right’ in their criticisms, but they were lacking in Christian love and charity and so went off the deep end, alone in their self-righteousness. Don’t you follow them!”
- Father Seraphim Rose
Locked Down Media
Bandcamp sent an email this week on the impact of tariffs to bands that sell physical media via the site.
Significant changes are coming to global tariffs (import taxes imposed by a government) that may impact how packages enter the United States.
In practice, this means fees may be applied to some types of merchandise on US-bound shipments, and some Bandcamp sellers may choose to temporarily pause shipments to the US.
Also, several international postal carriers are temporarily suspending delivery to the US. These restrictions do not come from the artists or labels but from global carriers. If you have questions about how an artist or label is handling this for your order, you can contact them directly by clicking the “Contact” link on the right side of their page.
Remember, that while some artists and labels may suspend shipments to the US, you can always support them directly by purchasing digital music.
For more information, head to our help center.
It’s a frustrating experience not to be able to purchase music from overseas. Cherry Red records, a fine UK purveyor of music on physical media, suspended shipping to the U.S., at least temporarily, “WHILST OUR DISTRIBUTION PARTNER GATHERS INFORMATION ON THE CORRECT PROCEDURE TO SHIP ITEMS.” In the days of the internet and ubiquitous knowledge at our fingertips, we are in such a confused and chaotic state that European countries don’t know how to ship records.
It creates more than a little resentment for me that my ability to buy music from overseas is being used as a bargaining chip in a trade war. Claiming you live in a free country but can’t order a new wave compilation on CD from a friendly nation is farcical.
I guess the official position of the government is that film and music, like automobiles, Game Boys or household commodities, should be made only in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Tangled Up In Chaos
A few days ago, I recieved a plea in my normal email from the media outlet Tangle.
The last six months have been a difficult time for media outlets. Overwhelmed by the news, many readers and listeners are tuning out. Those who are staying up to date are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence round-ups to get their news, which has caused website traffic to fall.
I feel bad about the situation that Isaac Saul, who founded Tangle, and his crew find themselves in. They have a publication that does a wonderful job balancing perspectives on the news of the day. They are trustworth and thorough. Yet, I find myself deciding again and again not to upgrade to a paid subscription when I consider the option.
With so much admiration for Tangle, why don’t I just support them? The problem is that I don’t always read the newsletters they send. It’s not because I don’t have faith in them to introduce me to viewpoints that I may not have considered on my own or read elsewhere in publications with clear biases that drive coverage. It’s that I’m worn out by the news. I’m fatigued by constantly reading of the shifts in the political landscape. I have a subscription to the New York Times gifted to me by my employer and the number of emails I get from them claiming to carry “breaking news” is breaking my brain. In other words, my response to the good folks at Tangle would be, “it’s not you, it’s me.”
In my feed reader service (Feedbin) I have a rule to filter out mentions of our president. For some time, I wondered if The Atlantic was even still publishing. My sister—who gifted me a subscription to the publication every year for my birthday—quit doing so this year because of the cost increase. At first I was bummed, but now I find that I hardly miss it. Similarly, I enjoy the perspectives from The Dispatch, but my paid subscription to that site didn’t even last a month, because I just didn’t want to read about politics any more than is reasonable.
Matter Refounded and Rebounded
If I were to make a list of my favorite apps (and someday, I’m sure I will), the read-it-later Matter would be near the top. I use it daily. During the day, I capture articles I want to read when I have time. At some point in the evening, I send most of the captured articles to my Kindle. When my iPad is safely stowed away for the night and I’m reading on my Kindle, I pour through the articles I’ve saved in their handy digest/magazine format. Not all of them get read, but most do.
Only a month ago, I wondered aloud why Matter hadn’t received any updates in quite a while on Bluesky. Well, it turns out there are some very good reasons for the lack of updates. Founder Ben Springwater explains in an email to subscribers.
There are years that ask questions, and years that answer. For us, last year was both.
Rob and I founded Matter together in 2020. In 2022, we became fathers, only three weeks apart.
Then, last year, we were both diagnosed with cancer.
I had radiation and two major surgeries. Rob had his lung removed. It was a surreal time.
Yet the world doesn’t stop for cancer. While we battled, Matter faced its own adversity.
We’d begun the year confidently, placing a big bet on paid growth. But by summer, it was clear the strategy wasn’t working.
Still unable to walk, I made the painful decision to let go of half our team.
Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.
Its destiny is one of slow, steady growth and enthusiast appeal. And that’s okay.
The founders decided that Matter is basically a mature app, which is true, and that they needed to focus the company (which was refounded to include two of the indespensable engineers) on expanding their portfolio of apps.
Now armed with the knowledge of what is going on with the company and why the app isn’t seeing frequent updates, I actually feel much more comfortable as a subscriber. The only issue I have with Matter is that the Obsidian plugin seems to take an inordinate amount of time to load on MacOS. Other than that, the experience is very smooth.
Having been through cancer myself, I know how disruptive it can be to a life. I am grateful and relieved that the Matter guys are back to health and rebounding.1
I would respond to wish them well, but they are requesting that kind of support on Xitter, and well, you know…↩︎
Flow
I read about the new animated film Flow recently and was sufficiently intrigued to rent it from Amazon when my youngest son and I were home by ourselves one night. I was impressed by the visuals and the well, flow, of the story, as a group of animals navigate their way through a mostly drowned world. I was drawn in to the main character, a black cat that reminded me of my own cat, Jonah. The film has no dialog, and you never learn the protagonist’s name, but my son and I kept calling him Jonah. He moved like Jonah, he displayed the same emotions as Jonah and he sounded exactly like Jonah.
I know some of you are probably thinking that these traits are common to cats but I’m here to tell you that’s not so. I have another cat, Snickers (a long haired tortie) and she has a completely different personality and presence.
Based on the buzz, I expected an engrossing and innovative experience with Flow, but what I was not expecting was how much Jonah himself would enjoy the movie. He became enraptured about halfway through and perched himself on the edge of the bed to watch. Before long, he felt he needed to get closer to the action, and jumped on the dresser to get a better look. His interest led to him pawing at the screen to see if he could interact with his doppleganger and the rest of the animals.
Jonah and the lemurs
Jonah never ceases to surprise and delight me. A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I watched A Man Called Otto. I had read the corresponding book and knew that the movie was a well regarded adaptation. Plus, you can’t go wrong with Tom Hanks. I had heard the film was a bit of a tearjerker, but since I had read the book, I reasoned that I was going to be mostly immune to the emotional moments. I knew what was coming, after all.
What I hadn’t counted on was a soundtrack that would lend some significant emotional heft to the proceedings. It would be wrong to go into detail and spoil the plot. However, I can sketch around a particularly tragic scene. I knew what was going to happen, but when the Kate Bush song, “The Woman’s Work” from The Sensual World came on, I literally said, “oh, no.” I was all too familiar with the song, which has been used to great effect in other movies, such as 1988’s She’s Having A Baby and had made appearances on some of my playlists. Seconds later, I burst into tears. I just lost it. Jonah saw me sitting on the edge of the bed weeping and ran over, concerned. I didn’t have much lap to access, but he jumped up into it anyway. He started licking my hands and face and then reached out to touch my face with his paw. His actions were so touching and that made me even more emotional. Jonah wouldn’t leave until I had settled down, though. His empathy was startling.
The Souls of Animals
The various interpretations of the Christian faith make different provisions for the souls of animals. I have read Orthodox writings that speculate that animals do indeed have souls, the same as people. This is intuitive to those of us who have been close to their pets. Those relationships feel transcendent in some ways and seem to go beyond our material existence. When I see the friendship that animals can bring, I can’t help but think of the support that God has given to us through their presence.
Bandcamp Friday
Photo by Miriana Dorobanțu / Unsplash
Bandcamp just held another one of their “Bandcamp Fridays,” during which the company waves its share of the revenue from the music and merch sold on the site, allowing the artists to capture more of the proceeds. The monthly event has been a huge success and many record labels and musicians specifically advertise their participation with sales on those days.
When Songtradr acquired Bandcamp from Epic games in 2023, there was speculation that the new owner would discontinue Bandcamp Fridays. Much to the delight of the customers and music community, Songtradr’s commitment to the tradition doesn’t seem to have wavered.
Since you asked, on 3/7, my purchases were Fine China’s new album I Felt Called and the Pia Fraus album Evening Colours from 2023. I almost missed the opportunity when I realized in the middle of the evening that I had better hurry to contribute to saving the music industry two purchases at a time.
I have a colleague who is much younger and is in a band (it’s quite a good band, at that). It disappoints me when I get his take on Bandcamp. He compares it to Spotify and wonders why you can’t create playlists. Of course, it’s apples and oranges, but it shows the mentality that the newer generations have about the need for music ownership. When all they’ve ever known is the rental model, they have a harder time than someone my age imagining the value proposition. My colleague’s band sees Bandcamp as too small time to even put their music on the platform, despite the fact that the payouts are much more in the artist’s favor.
If Spotify disappears, and Apple decides they no longer want to invest as heavily in services, the renter has no equity built up and would have to start collecting music from scratch. I’m not necessarily great at predicting the changes in the technological landscape and, as Edgar Fiedler said, “He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass.” I have no idea if the streaming service model will last. I have seen bit rot, though, and certain works of art disappear from the streaming landscape.
More people are starting to wake up to the possibilities of vanishing culture and more creative content becoming inaccessible. My buddy and I are frequently in conversation about it. Amazon’s move to limit downloading your Kindle books seems to have raised awareness of the precariousness of the current models.
HEY HEY HEY, Goodbye
Though I love the service, I canceled my HEY email account. I’m not happy about it, but I am pretty sure it’s the right thing to do. The founders have been saying things I’ve been critical of for some time, but it has reached the point where I don’t trust the company with my data.
For weeks now, my wife has been telling me about data that she uses to do her job being deleted from federal databases. This includes economic and health information, such as statistics on energy burden (the cost of utilties vs. household income) and maternal and infant medical facts. Of course, my spouse is not the only one to notice this disturbing trend, but the examples she has provided seem particularly egregious and incomprehensible.
It’s shocking to me to go online and see people from 37Signals, which runs the HEY service, praising this type of behavior as a service to the country. If 37Signals is as cavalier about data as those they are praising, I believe it’s only natural to question if they are good stewards of your resources.
I’ve started my switch to Proton Mail, which is an appealing alternative, given their focus on encryption and security. I’ve never been one to go overboard privacy protections, given that I’m kind of a nobody. However, with a government this adversarial towards many of its citizens (not to mention its own employees), known and unknown, I think it’s a good idea to start taking extra precautions.
My initial experience with Proton hasn’t been altogether bad (though there are some serious bugs with their MacOS client — which I will be soon reporting). However, Proton doesn’t have the same level of consideration and willingness to defy conventions as HEY, which makes the user experience less delightful. If I could in good conscience stick with a 37Signals product, I would but it’s time to move on.
I had no idea the podcast Lore was still a going concern, but it’s now on its 544th episode after ten years.
This t-shirt from Cotton Bureau makes me want to tune back in (and upgrade my wardrobe).
