Year: 2015
The Death (and Salvation?) of Religious Studies: A Conversation with Carrie Schroeder
Thomas and I have a new Thinking Religion podcast episode featuring Prof. Carrie Shroeder where we discuss all sorts of things… Stargate to Digital Humanities to why you should blog on your own site (academic or church or individual). Fun listen (I think).
Enjoy…
Yahoo’s Livetext Brings Us “Giffing”
“Yahoo describes the app as “live video texting,” essentially a combination of self-facing live video and chat. Each Livetext starts as a livestream akin to Periscope, which is then overlaid with text messages typed by the user in real time, scrolling upwards like a conventional texting program. Each Livetext is one-to-one and doesn’t begin until both parties agree to open the channel, cutting down on the potential for spam or abuse.”
Source: Yahoo reveals Livetext, its new silent video chat app
I’m initially skeptical of the prospect of Yahoo breaking into the messaging space and competing with the likes of Snapchat. However, silent or muted video is big on mobile in the forms of gifs. Most apps from Google’s Hangouts to Facebook’s Messenger and Whatsapp to Apple’s iMessage all support animated gifs.
Perhaps Yahoo is on to something with this one-to-one hybrid gif / texting app?
Probably not… Livetext is a terrible name and has no resonance. I can imagine the marketing meeting now where alternatives to “snap” and “chat” were all being thrown at a whiteboard in various colored markers.
Still, it’s nice to see Yahoo innovating and attempting to join an already crowded playing field.
Oh, Microsoft
First thing you see when you begin the upgrade to Windows 10… binding arbitration clause. Thanks, lawyers.
Litmus Test
If you get upset when people mispronounce Suetonius, you should listen to Thinking Religion with Thomas Whitley and me.
We love you and we feel your pain.
Civilians Using Handguns in Self Defense
The NRA likes the idea of training so much that it’s floated the idea of mandatory firearms training for school children. On the other hand, it’s opposed laws requiring mandatory training for gun purchases. Many states allow concealed carry without any training or permit for people as young as 16. Most states don’t require gun owners or purchasers to even be licensed, much less trained. And a handful, like Arizona, have passed laws prohibiting localities from imposing their own training requirements.
Source: Watch what happens when regular people try to use handguns in self-defense – Washington Post
I grew up around guns in our home and the homes of my friends (and the occasional gun rack on the back glass of pickups), and hunting culture. I understand the sentiment that guns are tools and can be used for evil just like any other tool. What I don’t understand is the resistance from some groups to legislate mandatory licensing and training (similar to what we do with automobiles).
If you’re really of the “government wants to take away our guns” so we need to hold up the 2nd amendment as our way to preserve freedom persuasion, I’d argue that a citizenry that is licensed and trained to handle firearms is a much bigger threat to “the government” than the current situation.
Wilco’s Star Wars and My Personal Helicon
Only Wilco could make something this eruptive feel so comfy, like a steel-wool security blanket.
Source: Wilco’s New Album: Star Wars | Rolling Stone
I’ve been enjoying the heck out of this album over the past week. I was skeptical at first … it being a “free” and “surprise” album with a cutesy yet askew title that Wilco just dropped on us all last week.
After listening to it in the office throughout the week then on replay during a 5 hour drive (the album is just over 30 mins, which is something of a miracle in itself for a Wilco production), I’m a believer.
To make it completely personal and anecdotal, Tweedy’s lyrics and the band’s music reminds me that even though I’m heading into my 37th year of being here and continue to find my own way in business while working with my clients, there are still opportunities to explore the cracks in the sidewalk and allow myself to be creative. I’ve smoothed over those moments of opportunity. I’ve wasted my words and openings for personal and work actualization. This album has helped me realize that.
It’s not enough to coast. Sky Blue Sky, Wilco (The Album) and The Whole Love were fine albums in their own rights. But they didn’t cause the type of “woah, wait a minute … think about how these lyrics and this music can get you to explore your own space, Sam” moments that made me start listening to Wilco in the first place.
The first time I heard Misunderstood from Being There, I was in college and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life. So, I got a religion major. It made sense at the time. That song was a part of that decision that seemed so flippant yet daring looking back on my younger self. “I would never do that today,” I think to myself as I take my multivitamin supplements and do my morning stretches while looking at my agenda.
Shortly after I took my first office job, my friend Jon said I needed to listen to something and slipped me a CD (it was the style of the times). While sitting in my fluorescent cubicle, I plugged in my headphones and the first cacophonous notes of  I Am Trying to Break Your Heart from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot entered my consciousness. I started blogging. My career took me on a path I could have never imagined. That song could be a metaphor for my 20’s (at least in my own head) both in terms of work, exploring my creativity, and relationships. It still gives me chills. It, like Misunderstood, was a strange reflecting pool where I could see myself askew and needed to explore that further before I could look away.
The songs on Star Wars are pushing me to that type of mirror pool reflection. The trick, I think, as I turn 37 is to realize that there will be other songs to push and pull me later, but I need to enjoy these for now and see where they go. Creativity in work, and life, is a blessing and a curse as it seems to come as quickly as it goes. You’re thinking up the color of the tech world at 27 and then you realize you’re 35 and still using the same palette.
It’s time to push the obtuse in my work, and find the angles that I smoothed over.
Then, I have to walk on and find the next mirror pond of songs before settling in as I did before:
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
âGo Set a First Draftâ
“In one of her last interviews, conducted in 1964, Lee said: âI think the thing that I most deplore about American writing ⊠is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this â the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.â
A publisher that cared about Harper Leeâs legacy would have taken those words to heart, and declined to publish âGo Set a Watchman,â the good idea that Lee eventually transformed into a gem.That HarperCollins decided instead to manufacture a phony literary event isnât surprising. Itâs just sad.”
Source: The Harper Lee âGo Set a Watchmanâ Fraud – NY Times
“What is Left is Pretty Much McDonalds”
“What is left is pretty much McDonaldâs â the restaurant of the masses, the great democratizer, the substitute for the community square, where it is possible to read or nurse a cheap cup of coffee for hours, or to nap after taking a daily methadone dose.”
Source: A Manhattan McDonaldâs With Many Off-the-Menu Sales – The New York Times
Confessions of a Congress Member
Discouragement is for wimps. We aren’t going to change the Constitution, so we need to make the system we have work. We are still, despite our shortcomings, the most successful experiment in self-government in history. Our greatest strength is our ability to bounce back from mistakes like we are making today. Get over your nostalgia: Congress has never been more than a sausage factory. The point here isn’t to make us something we’re not. The point is to get us to make sausage again. But for that to happen, the people have to rise up and demand better.
Source: Confessions of a congressman: 9 secrets from the inside – Vox
Anonymous member of Congress with some interesting insight into the workings of our government in 2015.
The title refers to a “congressman,” so I assumed this is a male. However the writer never uses that term but frequently uses “member of Congress” or “Congress member.”