When I was in high school, I had a cassette copy of The Jimi Hendrix Concerts. I borrowed it from a friend of mine and never returned it (if you’re out there somewhere, sorry Pat), and it soon became one of my most listened-to tapes. The 10-minute version of “Stone Free” in particular kind of blew my mind.

It moved from car to car over the years, until I finally dumped my whole milk crate of cassettes into the trash in the mid-2000s. While I don’t generally regret that decision—despite hipster-driven attempts to bring them back, audio cassettes remain an objectively terrible medium—I do occasionally miss having that album.

The reason I bring it up is that we watched a bunch of WandaVision last night, and “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” playing over the closing credits of the fourth episode got me in a Hendrix mood. While I do have the CD version of that old tape somewhere, I didn’t feel like digging it out, and the album is not on any of the streaming services. I ended up listening to Winterland (Live). It’s pretty good and mostly fit the bill, but sadly, it doesn’t have “Stone Free.”

John M. Ford’s Aspects is a novel that really put my “Give it until at least page 100” fiction-reading rule to the test, but I am very glad I stuck with it.

I feel like a lot of sci-fi and fantasy writers have over-learned the lesson that world-building is good and that therefore more world-building must be better.

Yes, I’m sure you spent a lot of time and effort on your maps and histories and languages, but telling me all about it on every single page of your books gets tedious really quickly.

While I am glad to hear people talking about Neal Postman lately, I wish more of them were reading Technopoly instead of Amusing Ourselves To Death.

As befits my age, I have been simultaneously amused and confused by this Dark Brandon business.

Fortunately, Paul Musgrave provides
an excellent explanation and analysis of the meme:

Dark Brandon is the winking inverse not of Let’s Go, Brandon, but of the Trump-era Q memes. Instead of sincerely seeing Trump as some sort of crusader against adenochrome harvesting pedophiles on behalf of John Kennedy, Jr., (and, yes, that’s a real set of Q beliefs), Dark Brandon is a way of comically explaining the continually frustrating setbacks of ordinary governing by Middle-Class Joe as the distraction from the real, effective Darth Biden. It’s a joke that, until last week’s shocking string of successes, was born out of dismay at how little progress seemed to have been made on the major promises of the 2020 campaign—something especially frustrating given the seemingly enormous power that Democratic control of Congress should have conferred to enact Biden’s agenda.

Read the whole thing. It’s good!

“I thought ServiceNow was supposed to do that for us” is a statement I have heard many times over the course of my career in technology.

“They were completely deceitful,” says Richard Drutman, 50, a New York City filmmaker who has purchased more than 50 of MoFi’s albums over the years. “I never would have ordered a single Mobile Fidelity product if I had known it was sourced from a digital master.”

DUDE. You bought fifty of their records and you couldn’t tell the difference. What you’re actually mad about is that the whole thing is made-up.