Weekend Reads (Mar 30): Brandon Sanderson, Michael Knott, “Red vs. Blue,” Effective Altruism, Easter
Recommended weekend reading for March 30, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful authors, fantasy or otherwise, in recent memory. He’s also very prolific, which can make it challenging to know where to start. But Samantha Nelson offers a guide for getting into Sanderson’s books, including his epic Stormlight Archive series.
You can enjoy The Way of Kings without having read any of Sanderson’s other books, but if you have, the series quickly becomes much more complex, with Sanderson’s world-building growing to encompass thousands of years of history spread across multiple planets. The clashes on Roshar turn out to be just a front in a war between Shards that has roped in characters from previous books. Even if you’ve read everything Sanderson’s written, it can be hard to figure out who’s who, since characters often go by different names or hide the full extent of their abilities and knowledge.
The Chrindie ’94 project is a new blogging endeavor to highlight classic and influential indie/alternative Christian albums that were released in 1994. The first article is an in-depth piece on Michael Knott’s Rocket and a Bomb.
There was always a risk that these songs would turn into some sort of musical freak show. Knott tells the story of a ’60s burnout illegally subletting his apartment to an enormously fat man with ambiguous intentions (“Jan the Weatherman”); the wastrel scion of a famous acting dynasty, reduced to giving “acting lessons” in an apartment crowded with cats (“John Barrymore, Jr.”); a male victim of domestic abuse (“Adrian”); a man who promises to commit suicide if someone will only bring him a shotgun (“Serious”); and, most infamously, a woman who gives every indication of having killed her husband and cooked him into some sort of stew (“Kitty”). Only “Kitty” seriously risks being turned into a novelty; on all the other tracks, Knott shows a kind of divine affection for his neighbors. Whatever irony exists in his delivery (and it’s not much) is covered over by the warmth of the album’s production. Knott, for reasons known only to him and God, loves these broken people, and he invites us to love them too.
I’ll be contributing an article to the project, as well. We’ve got a cool line-up of writers covering some really great unsung albums.
Longtime Opus readers will know that I’m a fan of the dark ambient music genre. And one of the genre’s most influential and iconic figures is Brian Williams, aka, Lustmord.
Williams’s process is as singular as his music. He claims to have no musical ability. He’s not proficient on any instrument and he can’t read music. He works instead from a vast library of sounds he’s amassed over the years, some drawn from library music, others collected via field recording, still others acquired from unlikely sources, like the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab or the Manhattan Project archives at Los Alamos. Williams then uses digital software to manipulate those sounds into the spacious, post-industrial drones that make up Lustmord’s records and live performances. The point, for Williams, is the mood, not the gear.
I still remember the first time I heard Lustmord. A classmate let me borrow a copy of 1992’s The Monstrous Soul, which creeped me out so much that I listened to it in the middle of the day with all of the window shades open. But it also intrigued me; up until then, I’d never listened to an album with that sort of effect.
Related: This article actually inspired me to revisit some of the Lustmord albums in my collection, which led me to review Stalker, his 1995 collaboration with Robert Rich.
In light of Beyoncé’s new country album, here are ten more artists who “went country” at least once in their careers, starting with Ray Charles.
This was the Big Bang of country crossovers. In pre-Civil Rights Act America, there were still separate bathrooms and water fountains for Black people, never mind bridging the color divide in music. Ray Charles’ country gambit was a radical act both musically and politically. It turned out to be a game-changer on both levels, achieving a total pop culture takeover and becoming ubiquitous in the living rooms of R&B and country music lovers alike. Instead of coming to country, Charles brought country to him, redefining both sides of the musical merger in the process.
The Polygon staff share their most anticipated movies, TV series, anime titles, and books of Spring 2024.
Physical media like CDs and Blu-ray discs are getting harder to find as retailers like Best Buy stop carrying them. But some fans won’t let go of their silver discs without a fight.
My Damascene moment came last year, after one too many times I couldn’t find films I wanted on my streaming services. I started borrowing DVDs from the public library, and buying my favorites on Blu-ray. I wondered if other people had come full circle. On a recent evening, I posted on some online forums for movie buffs, asking if anyone still bought physical media and wanted to talk.
I got 180 emails. People cited all sorts of reasons for refusing to give up physical media: desire to protect old or obscure films; nostalgia; fear that streaming services will retroactively censor films; physical media’s dramatically better audiovisual fidelity; fondness for behind-the-scenes featurettes and other bonus content included on discs; distaste for the numbing nightly ritual of scrolling streaming menus.
Shortly after moving into our new house, I went through a purge and got rid of a bunch of my CDs, DVDs, etc. At the time, I think I was bitter at having had to lug all of them from our old residence. Now, thanks to online stores like Eureka and 88 Films, I’m slowly rebuilding my Blu-ray collection, especially with titles that will almost certainly never appear on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, et al.
In 1983, Louis Gossett Jr. made history as the first Black man to win a “Best Supporting Actor” Oscar for his performance in An Officer and a Gentleman. Gossett died earlier this week at the age of 87.
Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He made his stage debut at 17 in a school production of You Can’t Take It With You; a sports injury had prompted his decision to take an acting class. He also fought polio while growing. He was offered an athletic scholarship but went on his own dime to NYU, where the tall young man could have played varsity basketball, which he declined to do in favor of theatrical pursuits.
Gossett had already made his Broadway debut, in 1953, despite no formal training as an actor, replacing Bill Gunn as Spencer Scott in Take a Giant Step, which the New York Times’ drama critics named one of the 10 best shows of the year. He drew his first mention in Variety for his work in the play.
If you’re a gamer of a certain age, then you almost certainly watched a few episodes of Red vs. Blue, a machinima series that parodied the Halo franchise. And now, it’s coming to an end after more than 20 years.
After twenty-one years, the Rooster Teeth Halo parody Red vs. Blue is officially coming to an end. In a little over a month, the final installment, an eighty-seven-minute feature titled Red vs. Blue: Restoration, will become available for digital purchase and promises to give an ending to the series that started before YouTube was even a thing.
Earlier this week, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the fraud he committed as CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was a proponent of effective altruism, a philosophy that claims to present very rational solutions to the world’s problems. But Leif Wenar ain’t buyin’ it.
Before the fall of SBF, the philosophers who founded [effective altruism] glowed in his glory. Then SBF’s crypto empire crumbled, and his EA employees turned witness against him. The philosopher-founders of EA scrambled to frame Bankman-Fried as a sinner who strayed from their faith.
Yet Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect prophet of EA, the epitome of its moral bankruptcy. The EA saga is not just a modern fable of corruption by money and fame, told in exaflops of computing power. This is a stranger story of how some small-time philosophers captured some big-bet billionaires, who in turn captured the philosophers — and how the two groups spun themselves into an opulent vortex that has sucked up thousands of bright minds worldwide.
Related: Gizmodo’s Lucas Ropek ranks the tech industry’s C-suite convicts. “Those criminals may be smart, well-dressed, and charismatic but, at the end of the day, they are still, ultimately, crooks.”
In yet another sign of AI’s ascendancy, a chatbot touted by New York’s mayor has been giving businesses illegal advice.
The NYC bot also appeared clueless about the city’s consumer and worker protections. For example, in 2020, the City Council passed a law requiring businesses to accept cash to prevent discrimination against unbanked customers. But the bot didn’t know about that policy when we asked. “Yes, you can make your restaurant cash-free,” the bot said in one wholly false response. “There are no regulations in New York City that require businesses to accept cash as a form of payment.”
The bot said it was fine to take workers’ tips (wrong, although they sometimes can count tips toward minimum wage requirements) and that there were no regulations on informing staff about scheduling changes (also wrong). It didn’t do better with more specific industries, suggesting it was OK to conceal funeral service prices, for example, which the Federal Trade Commission has outlawed. Similar errors appeared when the questions were asked in other languages, The Markup found.
This Easter weekend, it seems only appropriate for Justin Brierley to see some signs of life in British Christianity.
If conservative-leaning intellectuals only “cosplay” at Christianity (Tom Holland’s phrase) without really believing it, then this “New Theist” movement will inevitably fade away. Co-opting Christianity in the cause of an anti-woke agenda or in order to fend off radical Islam turns it into a useful political tool, but drains it of any life-giving power. A Christian nationalism of the right will become as pallid and pointless as the Christianity of the progressive left that parrots the latest politically correct talking points.
However, they say God moves in mysterious ways. As a believing Christian, I see signs that he is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognising that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead.
Related: “Good Friday, which commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus, and Easter, which celebrates his resurrection, are very good occasions to reflect on faith, human power, and its ephemerality,” writes Peter Wehner.
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