Jason Koelber tells the story of how he moved from streaming music to buying cassettes for 404 Media. “When I came to Tokyo, a friend took me to a store...

The subject of Christian masculinity has been hot these last few years and the NYT piece on Orthodoxy and the influx of young men to the faith have reignited interest in the Orthodox world. Religion p...

Inspired by Derek Sivers, this page includes a sample of what I’m thinking about and working on right now. Last updated December 21, 2025. • • • My family is all...

Cyrus Farivar writes for _Ars Technica_ about a startup company that wants to reclaim the Twitter brand from the clutches of Elon Musk. Called Operation Bluebird, the company has filed a formal petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office on the premise that X Corporation has abandoned it. > Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion. He eventually changed the company name and brand identity from Twitter to X. That decision, Operation Bluebird says, created an opening for the Twitter name to be formally abandoned. In July 2023, Musk himself tweeted that “we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand, and gradually, all the birds.” As eager as Musk was to shed the old branding, you would think X Corporation would be happy to have it picked up. Not so. X filed suit against Operation Bluebird for trademark infringement. Of course, experts say that X could have just defended the trademark against cancellation, but that wouldn’t be nearly as on-brand as a lawsuit. At this point, I feel like we should all let Twitter go. It was bought and destroyed. There’s no point in resurrecting its decomposed carcas. What disappoints me most is that it seems many who abandoned X at the height of Elon Musk’s folly have now gone back. Just a year ago, I wrote about the exodus of some prominent names, such as Russell Moore of _Christianty Today_. At the time, he was delighted with the atmosphere on Bluesky, so I was surprised to see his recent rebuttal of the president’s reaction to Rob Reiner’s death on X. It seems Moore is not the only one to denounce the service and then go back. I still can’t understand the appeal of X over Bluesky, though, which has reached a level of near feature parity.

Isolation / Liminality by Good Weather for an Airstrike + Izzy Johnson on AlbumWhale

Liquorice by Hatchie on AlbumWhale

The Heartfelt by Figurine on AlbumWhale

Damon Krukowski from Galaxie 500 writes about the vitality of live music — not just music experienced in person, but also live albums. > I started collecting live albums— bootlegs in particular — because they helped me hear how musicians actually play their instruments. Growing up in the heyday of 1960s and ’70s studio wizardry — Revolver, Pet Sounds, Dark Side of the Moon — records seemed particularly far removed from performance. No one can play guitar backwards. And few live shows will ever feature the sheer number of instruments and voices routinely stacked together by multitrack recording. > > In the 1980s, bootleg LPs were everywhere, followed in the ’90s by bootleg CDs. All used record stores seemed to have at least a few. I first encountered bootleg live recordings when I moved to Albuquerque, NM, in 11th grade and befriended some guys who spent too much time reading _Goldmine_ magazine.1 Shops that sold these recordings called them “imports,” and in truth they were usually shipped in from other countries. The label, of course, hid the (likely) illicit nature of the albums. That year, I asked for a Dinosaur Jr. live album called _Slop —_ that I had seen behind the counter at a local record store — for Christmas. You won’t find this album in any official discography (_wink, wink_). It cost $46, enough to be my main gift that year, and roughly the price of three standard CDs. It was a big gamble, and ultimately a disappointing one. The sound quality was terrible, and the production values were extremely low. The cover, as you can see in the header images, offers no track listings. The CD itself claims the tracks are listed on the back, but the back simply repeats the same message as the front. I still have the CD, but I never listen to it. The _Slop_ fiasco and other poorly recorded shows turned me off live albums for a long time. Many “official” live albums don’t fare much better. Sticking with Dinosaur Jr., the _Chocomel Daze_ live release from Merge Records (recorded around the same time) doesn’t really sound superior to _Slop_. I came to believe it didn’t make sense to pay for the same songs recorded at lower quality than the studio versions. Over time, though, a few recordings have changed my mind, and I still hold on to some classics. The Cure’s _Entreat_ , for example, is one I frequently revisit, as a reminder of the raw beauty of a true live experience. Via @benjamin@social.lol * * * 1. Goldmine meticulously documented bootleg live recordings. ↩︎