Weekend Reads (August 10): Doomgaze, Political Branding, Google’s Monopoly, Dumbphones
Recommended weekend reading for August 10, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Zoe Camp dives into the extreme sounds of doomgaze, that unlikely melding of doom metal and shoegaze.
Perhaps the ambiguous definition stems from the collective context under which it entered the public consciousness. Compared to styles like dungeon synth and blackgaze — which major record labels and prominent music critics quickly embraced, and therefore legitimized — doomgaze is more of an “if you know you know” kind of thing, largely concentrated around communities on RateYourMusic and Reddit. Bearing that in mind, consider the perspective of the preeminent doomgaze scholar: a fan known simply as Wyyvern, whose 2020 primer is the most comprehensive writing on the subject to date. “‘Slow, wall-of-sound post-metal’ is the shortest, most accurate description I can think of,” they write. “Why did doomgaze end up being the term? Not too sure, but it’s not as bad as “trap metal,” at least.” (Amen to that.)
I’m familiar with a handful of the artists in Camp’s list, and in particular, The Angelic Process. 2007’s Weighing Souls With Sand is an absolute juggernaut of an album. Or, as I wrote in my 2018 review, “Weighing Souls With Sand is an album that leaves you feeling stronger and more whole for having survived its onslaughts.”
As the frontman for Spiritualized, Jason Pierce has spent decades creating some of the most beautifully psychedelic sounds in modern rock n’ roll. (Everyone raves about 1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space but I’m partial to 1995’s Pure Phase, myself.) But where did his sound come from? Speaking to The Quietus, Pierce shares 13 of his favorite albums of all time.
Spanning soul, gospel, country, jazz and R&B, there’s no theme as such but there is an inescapable feeling that many of these records are slightly overlooked or less well known — in some instances even to Pierce himself. “I’m fascinated with records that I know nothing about and then find out that they’re absolutely incredible pieces of work,” he says. “I used to think with, say dub reggae or soul music, that you start to get weaker the deeper you dig, but that’s really not the case. Then when I find these records I love, I can drive people crazy with them. I can endlessly play the same thing. At that moment in time, there’s nothing better.”
It’s easy to pile on M. Night Shyamalan after duds like The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth, but critic Matt Zoller Seitz is still a fan.
You know the Maya Angelou quote, “’People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”? It explains why I’m in the tank, so to speak, for certain storytellers, Shyamalan being an example here. I love the craft and vision that certain artists bring to every project, the themes and motifs they revisit, and most of all how their work makes me feel — in Shyamalan’s case, unnerved, bothered, occasionally disturbed, but somehow at the same time open-hearted and delighted and inspired.
Hunter Schwarz breaks down the political branding for Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaigns.
At rallies, signage handed out to supporters shows the slogans the campaigns hope to push. At Harris’s rallies, signs feature a slogan about beating Trump, “When we fight, we win,” and others read simply “Kamala,” putting the vice president on a first-name basis with voters, many of whom are still getting to know her.
At Trump’s rallies, his signs show slogans that play to his priorities in a potential second term, like “Back the Blue” or “Never Surrender,” which appears on signs with an image of Trump’s mugshot. Four years ago, Trump-Pence campaign signs used darker colors like navy blue and deep red. This year, with the exception of his black “Never Surrender” signs, his signs are using a brighter blue and red.
Via TLDR Design.
In a decision that will almost certainly be protested and appealed, a judge has ruled that Google’s search engine represents an illegal monopoly.
The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically has thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centerpiece of a digital advertising machine that generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year. Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while also enjoying the luxury of not having to invest more time and money into improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that hurt consumers.
As the article points out, there’s a certain irony at play here. Any penalties enforced on Google could end up helping Microsoft, which was itself the target of antitrust legislation in the late ’90s that opened up opportunities for Google to become what it is today.
Of course, whether or not ordinary consumers will actually benefit from any legal action taken against Google — like prohibiting the company from being the default search engine on new smartphones — remains to be seen.
Related: Everyone, regardless of their political persuasion, seems to love to hate Google these days. “Google’s rapid rise from ‘scrappy search engine with doodles’ to ‘dystopic mega-corporation’ has been remarkable in many ways, especially when you consider just how much goodwill the company squandered so quickly.”
Molly White reflects on the current state of the web, the way it used to be, and how we might be able to get that back.
[S]ome of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then. Fewer trolls, and a lot fewer bots. Google search results that actually returned what you were looking for, not just the sites that paid the most. Cobbled-together blogs and LiveJournal pages written by people who felt authentic, who maybe wanted to attract more visitors to tick up their pageview counters or add entries to their guestbook pages, but who weren’t trying to cultivate a persona as an influencer or a thought leader, “build a brand”, or monetize their audience. More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, and less fear that people might interpret your social media post as uncharitably as possible. The worry that the girl you were talking to might be a man pretending to be a girl, but probably not the fear that she’s a crypto romance scammer or part of a state-sponsored disinformation network. Fewer and less intrusive ads, less engagement farming, less surveillance. Fewer paywalls, more “information wants to be free”.
Via CSS Tricks.
Related: If you’re fascinated by the flaming trainwreck that is crypto, then White’s Web3 is Going Just Great project is a must-read.
Tired of wasting time in social media and easily disabled “Screen Time” settings, Daniel John has found the perfect dumbphone for his life.
[P]erhaps the best thing about the Punkt MP02 is the aesthetic. Conceived by industrial designer Jasper Morrison, the phone has a delightful retro and somewhat brutalist 1970s-inspired look. I’ve been asked whether it’s a calculator, which just about sums it up. In a world of ‘Y2K’ dumbphone designs, it’s refreshing to see something that stands out.
I’ve occasionally been tempted to ditch my iPhone and switch to a dumbphone. I haven’t yet made the switch — I still find my smartphone too useful right now — but I definitely understand and admire John’s quest.
Related: Brennan Doherty notes that while interest in dumbphones might be growing, companies “have little economic incentive to keep churning out new dumbphones or updating their existing line-ups.”
Witchcraft is experiencing a recent surge in popularity via social media and wellness movements, with some witches charging thousands of dollars for consultations, readings, and other magical practices. Some witches, however, are concerned by the negative impact that could have witchcraft as a whole.
“Witchcraft has definitely been co-opted by the wellness sector,” says Michael Cardenas, head witch at Olde Ways, an internet hub for mystical information, magical services and apothecary goods. “It is actually having an incredibly negative cultural impact on witchcraft practices, watering them down and ‘normalising’ them to the point that the term ‘witch’ has started to lose its meaning.” Cardenas offers various services to clients, ranging from clairvoyance and tarot readings to medium sessions and spellwork consultations.
[…]
What being a witch is not, Cardenas says, is merely going on a “glorified meditation retreat with juicing, journaling, and intention-setting on a gentrified island somewhere”. Nonetheless, if you search through WitchTok long enough, you’ll find representations of this exact thing rather quickly. The majority of them will also be trying to sell you something.
Via 1440. I’ve seen many debates and discussions over the years concerning what is essentially orthodoxy (i.e., what it means to be a “real” Christian). Some of them have been legitimate and necessary while others have been tedious, controversial, and/or toxic. It will never not be fascinating to me to see similar debates pop up in other religious traditions, particularly outré ones like witchcraft.
Finally, we’ve been watching a lot of the Olympics lately, like countless others around the globe. All of the athletic feats are, of course, amazing and mind-boggling, especially the track and field events. And of all those events, science indicates that the toughest race is the 400-meter sprint.
An athlete’s body first uses an energy store that allows them to have a short, sharp burst to get them up to top speed across the first five to 10 seconds across 50 metres.
The next 150 metres sees runners run at below their maximum speed, with lactic acid causing the muscles to fatigue.
The body will then produce anaerobic energy over the next 100 metres. But will produce it much more slowly than the other two energy sources — meaning the demand outweighs the supply.
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For breaking the hold of smart phone scrolling on my life, I installed Refocus. It’s a lot better than Screentime for nudging you in the direction of not picking it up.