Canned Dragons

@canneddragons

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  • No More Mere Christianity?

    Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of print and web publication Mere Orthodoxy, has noticed the rise in Christian denominational distinctiveness that stands in contrast to a “mere Christianity” type of ecumenical approach.

    Younger people who have grown up without tradition or custom and often strapped to a screen for hours every day desire belonging, desire to enter into something that offers moral direction, identity, and a fixed way of life they don’t have to generate for themselves. But the only way to have something like that is through particularity and even some hard edges. So, Scrivener argues, Mere Christianity is out. Orthodoxy is back. Rome is back. Distinct Protestant traditions are back. In short, denominationalism is back.

    I’ve seen this with the incredible explosion of interest in Eastern Orthodoxy, which is very distinctive. I’ve seen Presbyterians move to Rome. I’ve seen curiosity about Anglicanism. At this point, it seems the more your church leans into what makes it unique, the more attractive it is going to be for the seeker.

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  • Watched: Rental Family 🍿 last night. Many moments of trying to hold back tears. I’m happy to say I was fairly successful.

  • I tried Obsidian plugins for three blogging services. To my surprise, the one with the least features and most limitations was the one for WordPress, which is the most popular of the services I tested.

  • Cross My Heart and Hope to Die

    “Cross My Heart and Hope to Die” marks a distinctively different sound from the early days of Yumi Zouma. The track kicks off their new album, No Love Lost to Kindness. With their first couple of EPs, especially, the New Zealand band distinguished themselves with a fresh, balearic, breezy sound. The tunes were as light as air, and even the the subject of difficult interpersonal relationships came across with just a sigh and a shrug.

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  • I’m really disappointed in the Hopscotch Festival 2006 lineup, which dropped yesterday. There is only one band I would be interested in seeing (Pearl and the Oysters). The festival seems to have cut back, eliminating one main stage, reducing water stations, less social media, etc.

  • Dave Kendall, creator and host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, has passed away.

    The British-born Kendall conceived 120 Minutes after joining MTV as a producer, pitching the network a dedicated program for the punk, post-punk, goth, synth-pop, ska, and other underground sounds largely ignored by corporate rock radio. 120 Minutes debuted on March 10th, 1986, and Kendall later served as its host from 1989 through 1992. “By far the most important thing about 120 Minutes was that it acted as a distribution channel for organic musical produce, if you will,” Kendall told CONSEQUENCE in a 2016 interview. “The only other outlet for non-mainstream music at the time was a few local college radio stations.”

    Apparently, Kendall was the force behind getting the show greenlit. You know he must have had to push just to get a terrible time slot like 12am on a Sunday night. I think I learned how to program my VCR just so I could record 120 Minutes. It was a school night, after all.

    Matt Pinfield, the last to host the show, offered a tribute on Instagram.

  • Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.

    The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”

    The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.

  • Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar

    One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my /now page, only to get deeply into a new Swedish jazz EP very shortly after.

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  • Just updated my now page (birthdays edition).

  • A wood cassette shelf full of used Reba McEntire tapes.

    Found this impressive collection of used Reba McEntire cassettes.

    “Y’all can we not?”

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