As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I recently returned from an epic road trip that took the missus and me everywhere from lonely byways in the heart of the Great Plains to the unrestrained hedonism of the Las Vegas Strip. But no matter where we happened to be, there was always one thing we could count on: people taking selfies.

I’m not entirely sure why, by I find the practice to be one of the most obnoxious developments of the Digital Age. Is it narcissism that drives people to take a selfie at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon? Or is it simply an example of herd mentality? Perhaps both.

But that’s not all. According to Dr. David Ludden at Psychology Today, people use selfies to, depending on their intended audience, create a certain impression:

Just like other animals, humans also equate size with dominance and submission. The priest stands at the altar before a kneeling congregation. The orator struts upon a dais before a seated audience. And the king sits on his raised throne before his prostrate subjects. These are all ancient practices, but there’s also a modern ritual in which people try to manage other people’s impressions of how tall they are—the selfie!

And it turns out that this “impression management” actually works. Read the whole article.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Last week (6.26), Courtney shared with us this link, taking us to a world that many have forgotten. This week, I’ll share with you a bit of information I found out…SEGA has released some of their original games for free. And according to the website they will release a new one every month. As an added bonus, they aren’t discriminating against a mobile platform, it’s available for both Android and iOS. So hop on the app store, search for SEGA, and download your favorite. From Sonic to Crazy Taxi to Kid Chameleon to Comix Zone to Altered Beast, there’s so many to choose from.

Clearly productivity around the office is slowly dwindling.

posted by: Steven Kutsch  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

When you find something this cool on the internet, you share it.

1. Click on this link
2. Pick a video that most intrigues you
3. Once it begins to play, click drag on the video left or right
4. Enjoy

posted by: Courtney Sowards  |  category: the design life  |  make a comment

While enjoying my coffee this morning I found this and it made me smile. And then it made me sentimental as hell. Now, after a deep-dive Google session, I’m playing this. Happy Monday, all.

posted by: Courtney Sowards  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

Remember how last week I alerted you to Kalefa Sanneh’s New Yorker article on progressive rock? Now Forbes is getting in on the action. The key difference between the two pieces, though, is that Sanneh’s is worth reading—and it’s not just because the author of the Forbes piece, Rob Salkowitz, admits to being a “prog-hating Clash fan” (apparently you can’t, like me, be a fan of both prog and the Clash).

No, it’s because Salkowitz feels compelled to call into question the humanity of prog fans. No, for reals.

First, he asserts that prog bands (“aging, fat white guys living a rich lifestyle”) are “lightly regarded outside of a hard core of mostly male fans who self-identify as the nerds of the music world.” Then he wonders about “the appeal of this particular brand of indulgent, over-intellectualized music to male listeners of a certain bent.”

A certain bent? What could he possibly mean? Oh…of course. We’re racists!

Prog is “the whitest of white-boy music,” he writes, that “played in the segregation of album rock radio in the 1970s.”

Whereas Top 40 was inherently colorblind, playing James Brown, the Beatles, Motown and Bob Dylan as long as it was popular, the FM stations that championed prog rock, hard rock and heavy metal in the 1970s started systematically excluding black artists. [Note: How many black prog rock, hard rock, and heavy metal bands were there in the 1970s? Exactly.] That led to a massive division between R&B, soul and other “urban” (African-American) styles and what’s become known as “classic rock” for white kids in the suburbs – a casually racist state of affairs that persisted until the crossover of hip hop in the late 80s and lingers on to this day.

Huh. Who knew? And here I thought I liked King Crimson on accounta it’s musically interesting. Didn’t know I hated “African-American” styles. Guess I’d better get rid of all those CDs by Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock, Taj Mahal, Freddie Hubbard, Wadada Leo Smith, Isaac Hayes, McCoy Tyner…

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  comments(2)

Can you spot the typo in the following excerpt from page 243 of Where the Water Goes (2017) by David Owen?

“The company ended up not drilling, because that area wasn’t terribly attractive,” Holsinger told me. “Now my parents have a little next egg, and they paid off debt, and the ranch is still in the family.”

Right. It’s nest egg, not next egg. Simple mistake—after all, the S and X keys are adjacent to each other. And no spell-check software is gonna pick up on it, on accounta next is a real word.

“But wait a minute, Mister Smarty-Pants,” you’re thinking right now, “maybe Holsinger actually said ‘next egg,’ and the author is simply quoting him accurately.” If that were the case, the insertion of [sic] after next would indicate precisely that: that it’s been transcribed exactly as quoted, warts and all.

So what’s the point?

Simply that the publisher of Where the Water Goes is Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, which is in turn owned by a German media conglomerate and a British multinational publishing company. Penguin Random House has nearly 250 imprints and brands on five continents. It sells more than 15,000 new titles and 800 million print, audio, and e-books every year. Its revenue in 2015 was 3.7 billion EUR, up 11.8 percent from 2014—while operating EBIDTA rose 23.2 percent to 557 million EUR.

It’s safe to say, then, that PRH has at its disposal some of the best proofreaders money can buy. And they still missed one.

So. We’re all human. Stuff happens. Perfection is unattainable. And that’s okay.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: the writing life  |  make a comment

The subtitle of Kelefa Sanneh’s New Yorker article on progressive rock reads “Critics think that the genre was an embarrassing dead end. So why do fans and musicians still love it?”

As a recovering musician and an ardent fan of the genre, I’ve always been somewhat baffled by the prog haters out there. And speaking as a former critic, it’s simply not true that prog is a dead end—embarrassing or otherwise. The success of Kscope is proof of that.

In fact, it’s precisely those artists who have been influenced by Gentle Giant, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, et al.—like, oh, I dunno…Steven Wilson—who seem to be the only ones doing anything remotely interesting these days. (To his credit, Sanneh reminds readers that Tool, Meshuggah, and Opeth are also “latter-day [prog] innovators.”)

Like any musical genre, there’s both good and bad. If you dismiss all of prog because, like Robert Christgau, you think that the members of Emerson, Lake & Palmer were “as stupid as their most pretentious fans,” then you miss out on Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. And that would be a shame.

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment

“Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence—true friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo & withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.”

George Washington, in a letter to his nephew Bushrod Washington, January 15, 1783

posted by: Aaron Bragg  |  category: random thoughts  |  make a comment