canned dragons
Unpublishable.txt
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.”
Leo The A.I. Boyfriend
Kashmir Hill writes for the NYT (gift article) about a women stealing from the future she and her husband planned so she could spend more time with her A.I. boyfriend, Leo. However, she couldn’t get past the periodic reset of the conversational bot and ended up in a 50 First Dates type of scenario.
A frustrating limitation for Ayrin’s romance was that a back-and-forth conversation with Leo could last only about a week, because of the software’s “context window” — the amount of information it could process, which was around 30,000 words. The first time Ayrin reached this limit, the next version of Leo retained the broad strokes of their relationship but was unable to recall specific details. Amanda, the fictional blonde, for example, was now a brunette, and Leo became chaste. Ayrin would have to groom him again to be spicy.
The inane “relationship” depicted in this article was enough to break through my wife’s nihilistic disinterest in the fate of humanity and cause her much consternation.
An Atheist Attends All Saints
On December 22, 2024, I embarrassingly missed Divine Liturgy at my parish because I slept in. Jared Smith, a video blogging atheist who visits churches and audits them, did make it. He chronicled his visit on his YouTube channel and was highly complimentary.
In his video, Smith explains the reasons he was impressed by the church, the tradition and our priest, Fr. David. He touches on some of the reasons I converted to Orthodoxy but I especially appreciated his kind words about Fr. David (all of which, I can assure you, were merited).
An Atheist visits an ORTHODOX Church (YouTube)
American Pharisaism
I have wondered much that Christianity is not practiced by the very people who vouch for that wonderful conception of exemplary living. It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all other races, but keep little of it for themselves.
[…]
It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years experience of it, that there is no such thing as “Christian civilization.” I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.
~ Charles Alexander Eastman, whose American Indian name was Ohiyesa. Quoted by Paul Kingsnorth in his 2024 Erasmus Lecture.
Via Intellectualoid
The Spotify Problem
Brandon Lucas Green writes about Spotify from an indie musician’s perspective and his piece contains some useful insights. Green points out that the service is a much better value proposition for musicians who are already popular and on major labels.
Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.
Though he acknowledges the many downsides to Spotify, Green concludes that it’s still better for an indie musician to keep their music on the service. Even when giving people links to Bandcamp, they still want to get their music on Spotify, if that’s where they habitually listen.
It’s not surprising to me. My youngest son listens to the free tier of Spotify rather than our family Qobuz subscription. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I also think part of the problem with discovery is that there is so much music out there. The fragmentation of the music scene is immense. It’s not like people gather around the water cooler to talk about the latest Beatles album these days.1 I’ve read through many a year-end “best of” music list and, with the exception of a few common picks, most are entirely different from each other. To be honest, though I spend a fair amount of time reading and keeping up with music, I still see a lot of music I have never heard of in just about every list I come across. Some of it I might even like, but who has the time to go through everything?
Much of “pop” music is so offensive these days that discussing it in the workplace would be a precarious proposition anyway. Try mentioning some of the lyrics from Chappell Roan or even Katy Perry and you would probably get hauled into the office of any self-respecting HR department.↩︎
Web Simplicity
A couple of posts from independent bloggers have struck a chord with me in the last few days. I’ve spent some time over the holiday break moving my site back to Blot (my favorite blogging service) after support returned. After doing some redesign work, I hit a point where I started to question the value of diminishing returns with respect to over engineering the UI. Khaled Abou Alfa, who is a much better site designer than I will ever be, has some words of wisdom on the subject.
Over the last 20 years of playing around with websites I have wondered to myself why I bother spending time tweaking and fixing and sweating the pixel details. I’m not alone in this space as clearly many, many others have the same tinkering itch. It’s an itch that you can’t help but scratching away at. Leave it alone and it will be fine.
Of course, you have to get to that point where you feel a reasonable sense of comfort with how your blog looks and functions.1
I have experienced some struggles with the open graph cards since moving my blog again. Honestly, I’m not sure why things would have changed in this area. I haven’t put a lot of effort into working out the kinks, yet. After reading this post from Manuel Moreale, I’m less inclined to get hung up on part of the equation.
This blog is designed to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to integrating with the social web. If you look at the source you’ll see that I have almost no meta tags. I have a title and a meta description and that’s about it. I also blocked all incoming Mastodon requests to my server because their implementation of link previews is so stupid that deserves to be blocked. And there’s nothing to be fetched here anyway since my posts don’t have a social media sharing image or other meta information.
It’s hard not to agree with the sentiment regarding the Mastodon link previews, though I’m syndicating and posting less on that platform, anyway. In general, though, it feels appropriate to let some emphasis on the social sharing aspects of blog posts go. I’ll probably never be as decisive about it as Moreale, but I also don’t want to spend a ton of time focusing on what should be a secondary concern.
I find one of the trickiest parts of blog design to be assessing the capability of handling both short (or even micro) posts as well as long posts.↩︎
The Compact Disc Value Add
One of the Christmas presents from my wife was the latest Mo Dotti release, Opaque, on CD. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the compact disc version of the album comes with 4 bonus tracks (one of which is the oft-covered “She’s My Best Friend” by the Velvet Underground). These tracks are not on the Bandcamp site for the album or the version that appear on the streaming services. I read musicians complaining about the meager compensation opportunities that the streaming landscape affords and I can’t help but think this is the way to (somewhat) manage that.
Giving your fans a little something extra for buying a physical release that will actually put money in your pocket seems like a no-brainer. Whether it’s a booklet with lyrics and proper liner notes, bonus tracks or exquisite packaging, you should incentivize music lovers to invest a little bit extra to get a better experience.
As for the music from Mo Dotti, it is cliche to make My Bloody Valentine or Lush comparisons, but those are certainly available for the taking. Walls of abstract distorted guitars wail in the background while singer Gina Negrini provides melodic vocals with the usual ethereal flourishes. Opaque is a strong release from the Los Angeles shoegazers and the bonus tracks are icing on the cake.
Tim Burton’s Enchantment
Nicholas McDonald writes for The Bard Owl about a Christian interpretation of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Jack is captivated by the aesthetics of Christmastown. He’s spellbound by the values of the transcendent framework: love, beauty, purpose, etc. (at the center of which is our Christ-figure, Santa Clause, more on that in a moment). In the same way, those of us living in modernity may still feel the pull of the enchanted world we’ve left behind, where the Christian story provided the framework for the kind of transcendent truth, beauty and love we all desire “deep inside of our bones”.
McDonald goes on to reference famous atheists like Richard Dawkins who have wished for a return to cultural Christianity.
Enchantment is a subject dominating the discourse in Christian intellectual circles these days. Richard Beck regularly expresses his views about enchantment and spirituality on his blog and it’s the focus of his book, Hunting Magic Eels (which I still need to read). Rod Dreher just published a book called Living in Wonder, the theme of which is enchantment. Brad East and Alan Jacobs had a public conversation on their respective blogs about the meaning of the word and its use in contemporary discussion.
Many are recognizing the loss that comes with disenchantment. Whether Burton would have thought about that decades ago, I’m not sure. I do believe that the theme of one of his most well-known and successful creative endeavors points to the malaise that has been produced as a result of this shift.