Written by Robert, a Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, budget audiophile, software dev manager and paper airplane mechanic.
In June, I hope to see long-time indie pop favorites Tennis on their farewell tour. The husband and wife duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore are calling it quits after an impressive run.
The pair made this statement regarding the end of their time as Tennis:
read more…It became clear that we had said everything we wanted to say and achieved everything we wanted to achieve with our band … We are ready to pursue other creative projects and to make space in our lives for new things.
If I could internalize the words of Thoreau that, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone,” then I probably wouldn’t have spent several days this week investigating cassette culture.
I have to admit something: After writing about quitting the email service HEY from 37Signals, I ended up going back and resubscribing (before my data was deleted). Sure, I tried other services. Proton was a total bust. I ran into bugs that rendered the platform unusable, unless I wanted to wait for hours to be able to access the emails the alerts were telling me I had in my inbox, or deal with the emails that, for some reason, couldn’t be deleted. Fastmail was better, but lacked polish. There were some unpainted spots, carpet that had a few stains, etc.
When HEY warned me that my data would soon be deleted, I dutifully entered my credit card information and resubscribed for another year. Reading debates about the service, I often come across discussions about the unique features, such as the screener. People have come up with some clever hacks to replicate the functionality of the screener in other email tools. My needs/wants are not so simple, though.
read more…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
I noticed that The Cure was advertising their heavily praised new album Songs From A Lost World in a bio vinyl format. I was curious about what that meant. Fortunately, I had my good buddy Claude to help answer the question. He responded with this:
Read more…Bio vinyl refers to vinyl materials manufactured using bio-based or renewable raw materials instead of traditional petroleum-based ingredients. This type of vinyl is part of a broader category of sustainable alternatives to conventional plastics.
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.
Read more…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.