Weekend Reads: Warp Records, COVID's Lingering Effects, Arecibo, Facebook, Saving Tolkien's Home
Recommended weekend reading material for December 5, 2020.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Yet another iconic record label comes to Bandcamp. This time, it’s Warp Records, home to Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Broadcast, Squarepusher, and many more influential musicians on “the vanguard of electronic music” (according to Bandcamp’s announcement).
If you’re looking for a good place to start with the Warp discography, then I recommend Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James Album, Boards of Canada’s Music Has The Right To Children, and/or Broadcast’s Haha Sound.
If you’re looking for some good (modern) anime to watch during the upcoming holiday, then this Japanese fan survey has some great options.
Over the last 10 years, anime as an industry has grown immensely, thanks in part due to the massive box office growth of anime films in theaters in Japan. Japanese survey site Rankingoo asked 10,314 people ranging from teens to 60-year-olds what they thought was the most impressive anime film of the last decade, barring sequels to TV anime and compilation films.
The top result doesn’t surprise me one bit (read my review).
Speaking of anime, Studio Ghibli has been releasing hi-res artwork from their many films, including My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Whisper of the Heart. The famed anime studio has released the artwork for people “to use freely…within the bounds of common sense.” (For example, they’ll make nice backgrounds for your next Zoom call.)
In her most recent newsletter for The Dispatch, Rachael Larimore wonders what this year’s COVID-related holiday restrictions might mean for family traditions and future holidays.
What happens when we suspend ritual and tradition, even for the most worthwhile of reasons? If we can Zoom with our geographically distant relatives for an hour on Thanksgiving, is it really worth it to take vacation days, pile everyone into the family truckster and spend hours on the road for an in-person visit? Or for a different demographic: Sure, it’s been fun to meet for a weekend with your dearest friends from college, but is it necessary to keep it going? Isn’t that what social media is for?
As I read Larimore’s newsletter, I thought of my wife’s family. They always hold their big family Christmas on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but cancelled it this year due to COVID. It was the first time we didn’t go in nearly fifteen years, and it had already been shrinking as cousins grew up, moved away, and started their own families. Assuming that COVID is no longer an issue this time next year, what will it look like in 2021?
The pandemic’s effect on the movie industry just keeps on keepin’ on: Warner Bros. has announced that all of their 2021 films will also be available to stream on HBO Max for no additional cost.
Today the studio behind some of the biggest blockbusters in the world has announced that its entire 2021 movie slate will follow the model being established by Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas day: they will launch in theaters and on-demand on HBO Max simultaneously, available in 4K HDR and free to subscribers in the US for one month, before continuing their theatrical runs domestically and internationally.
Some of the films on this list include Godzilla vs. Kong (May 21), Dune (October 1), and The Matrix 4 (December 22).
I never thought I’d feel nostalgic for Microsoft FrontPage — if you were a web developer in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, you know what I’m talking about — but I loved reading this breakdown of Microsoft’s popular webpage builder.
Microsoft FrontPage. The mere mention of that name is making most (if not all) of you seasoned web devs groan. “FrontPage was utter rubbish from dark ages of GeoCities” you say. “Everything it touched was ruined with horrific output and proprietary nonsense!” And yes, it was.
But… FrontPage as a concept. As a dream of what could have been, and a window into what was. Letting the typical home user at the time create websites, express creativity, and conquer the world by storm, all without being forced to learn HTML or CSS or JavaScript… In that regard, FrontPage couldn’t be beat.
Although FrontPage represented so much of what was terrible about late ‘90s/early ‘00s web development, it also represented what was so great about that era, i.e., the absolute freedom to build whatever you wanted, which is harder to achieve these days with tools like WordPress and Squarespace. Via Frontend Focus.
The collapse of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory — one of the world’s most distinctive observatories — signals the end of an era for many scientists.
The U.S. National Science Foundation had earlier announced that the Arecibo Observatory would be closed. An auxiliary cable snapped in August, causing a 100-foot gash on the 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish and damaged the receiver platform that hung above it. Then a main cable broke in early November.
The collapse stunned many scientists who had relied on what was until recently the largest radio telescope in the world.
You can find videos of the collapse here. Among other things, the radio telescope had been used to track asteroids and locate other habitable planets. (James Bond fans will recognize Arecibo as the sight of GoldenEye’s climax.) Via Gizmodo.
Although people may continually criticize Facebook, they actually find it hard to leave because of one particular feature.
Like many Facebook users, Norrington realized that quitting the world’s largest social network isn’t as easy as hitting a delete button, especially when you’re part of its online communities. It’s hard to persuade people to leave, to learn a new tool, and to re-create the ease of gathering such a large variety of people.
Via Publisher Weekly.
R. Lucas Stamps meditates on Clem Snide’s music and Roger Ebert’s final words.
Now, from a Christian perspective, this way of describing whatever it was that Ebert experienced isn’t quite right. The material world is actually not an elaborate hoax. It is instead “the theater of God’s glory,” as Calvin put it — the spatio-temporal product of God’s eternally willed act of love, the object of God’s providential care, and the locus of God’s eschatological purposes. The Christian hope is not some gnostic flight from this world to heaven but the descent of heaven to earth at the resurrection of the just.
Still, there is some truth in Ebert’s (and Barzelay’s) observation: the world in its present fallen state is, in some sense, a shadow of something more real, more permanent, more heavenly.
This small, family-operated mochi shop in Kyoto, Japan has been in business for over 1,000 years.
Like many businesses in Japan, her family’s shop, Ichiwa, takes the long view — albeit longer than most. By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth, Ichiwa has weathered wars, plagues, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires. Through it all, its rice flour cakes have remained the same.
Via NextDraft.
Several stars from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies — including Sir Ian McKellen and John Rhys-Davies — are promoting a fundraising campaign to purchase and renovate the house where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his most famous stories.
Unlike other writers of his stature, there is no centre devoted to Tolkien anywhere in the world — we seek to change that. Our vision is to make Tolkien’s house, not a dry museum, but a homely house of continuing creativity, inspiring new generations of writers, artists and filmmakers. The house will also have an engaging online presence to bring into the house’s programme those who cannot travel to Oxford.
Via io9.
From the Blog
The final subscriber playlist for 2020 has been published, along with its complementary playlist breakdown podcast. Titled “Vapor Trails,” the playlist is a two-hour-long exploration of the mercurial and mystifying sounds of vaporwave.
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