An old friend of mine sent me a text out of the blue today. We grew up together and have stayed close for almost 30 years. Over time I realized that he has a very particular brand of humor which can be visualized as an inverse bell curve. He takes a little joke, which is … Continue reading The absurdity of our reality broke my friend
Dark as a Dungeon – Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 4
A Wild West-Virginia Shootout, train warfare and dropping bombs on American soil
Mini-Post – Roots of Punk
Last week I happened across 3 tracks while I was working which I believe do a great job laying out the roots of the first wave Punk rock movement of the late 70's. It is absolutely nowhere close to all encompassing, but it's a quick look...
Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 3
Kentucky is a strange place to outsiders. It’s a southern state which didn’t secede. It's a red state which maintained a democratic governor despite the Reagan renaissance in the 80’s up through 2015. The state famous for horse racing and bourbon is filled with counties where putting money towards either is illegal...
Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 2
Tenement housing and poverty in major cities around the turn of the 20th century gets the lion's share of attention in history because of the plethora of available images showing the cramped and inhuman conditions. Poverty in coal camps was probably just as or more intense but it's considerably less documented...
Dark as a Dungeon- Mining in Appalachian Kentucky: Part 1
It’s a modern day luxury to not have your work define your life. From antiquity up through some point in the 20th century this was essentially the case for everyone. Many surnames exist as a shortening of how people used to be defined- Miller, Smith, Baker, Potter, Cooper, Farmer, Hunt, Page, Thatcher, Woodman, Turner- people’s names were tied to their occupations just as their very lives. It’s hard to imagine those ties in modernity...
Lessons from Retrofuturism
Biases define the limits our imaginations when thinking of the future, and it's difficult to move past biases when they're made up of all one could possibly know. Black Swan Events and Falsifiability speak to the phenomenon that predicting what will unexpectedly and completely change is very difficult. A person in 1999 couldn't possibly predict … Continue reading Lessons from Retrofuturism
Superstar Systems – Batman, sports and everything else
Batman is a fantasy in more ways than as simple criminal revenge porn. Vigilante justice can’t be what they system leans on for legitimacy because it will result in a complete upheaval of that very system, just like is shown in the Dark Knight Trilogy...
Eating your Vegetables
Everyone is entitled to an opinion. The trouble is nobody takes the time to form one. Truly forming an opinion takes time. Gathering facts, considering cause and effect, considering causes from all angles without judgement and coming to a conclusion is exceedingly difficult. But it doesn’t stop people from trying. Most people end up trying by taking a quick look and offering a hot take. These bad habits which keep us from forming strong opinions are kicked back to us in a feedback loop by leaders who stoop to our attention levels. We're left talking about big things with little knowledge in the form of stolen hot takes that sound like they're from bumper stickers.
The New Protest Song
I started off this post from a single thought which was quickly proven wrong, “Why aren’t protest songs as good as they used to be?”. Almost immediately after looking into this idea I was pushed to reconsider how I approach modern music almost entirely. During this process I got to correct my assumptions and learned to appreciate music in a whole new way.
