https://canneddragons.net/blog/rss

I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithmn overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat in a few years, but remembered them from this fan video using footage from the best movie ever to take place in a Target big box store — Career Opportunities.

The video for “Heart Still Beats” is filled with the 80s-era skateboardings of Jaya Bonderov, shredding up the streets and occasionally being accosted by the more responsible adults from the area. The film reminds me of how fun skateboarding was in that decade. The casual tick-tacking, the tweaked out grabs, wall rides, the freedom to take your feet off the board, the low-stakes curb grinds and graphics with fancy monsters are all things I miss.

Castlebeat - Heart Still Beats (YouTube)

I recently hit my 20th anniversary (!!!) at the company where I'm employed. Instead of a gold watch, I got what amounts to about $400 in a foreign currency they call “Spotlight points.” Thought I didn’t pull the trigger right away, my immediate thought was to blow the lot on a pair of Sennheiser HD 650 headphones. I’ve been researching these cans for some time now, but even at a consistent 38% off, a price point of nearly 400 bones meant I wouldn’t just impulse buy these things.

It may be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but I feel like I’m constantly seeing references to this particular model of headphones. Just this week, there was a thread on the Qobuz Club forum about albums to listen to with the Sennheiser’s. If I read reviews of a new DAP or DAC, it seems they often test with these headphones. While writing this post, I looked for a portable DAC with a 4.4mm headphone jack, and guess what headphones the first one I came across were connected to in the supporting image?

My impressions so far are commensurate with my expectations. These things are buttery smooth and rich with detail.

High points:

• Comfort: This was a key selling point for me. I had two sets of headphones. The Sony WH-1000XM5’s, a closed-back noise-cancelling set that is plenty comfortable. I use those primarily for work calls. The other pair, my primary music listening set, was a pair of the Grado SR80x’s. These are open-back and sound immediate and spacious. However, they get uncomfortable after about 15 minutes. All the reviews I read mentioned the Sennheisers as the most comfortable headphones the reviewers have ever worn. This is a big incentive to someone like me who sometimes listens to music hours on end.
• Build Quality: Solid, stocky, without being too heavy, and well-padded, the Sennheier’s are the nice blend of durability and ergonomics. I do wish they were made with aluminum like the Apple AirPods Max, though.
• Sound: The open-back design gives you a great soundstage, with music sounding like it fills up the space. I love my Sony’s, but the closed-back architecture adds a bit of a claustrophobic feeling to the experience. The Sennheisers have even more precision without sacrificing warmth.

I’m very pleased with the purchase. One of the most exciting things about getting new audio hardware is being able to listen to our collection of music in a brand-new light. It will take me a while to get through the many listening sessions to get to the end of my stack. I’ve started with my reference album, Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See, and the results are similarly impressive with other albums that I’ve sampled.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Whether marching for a Sikh holiday, visiting a Jewish children”s center or attending Divine Liturgy, I’ve never seen a politician put so much effort into respecting the faith traditions of others as Zohran Mamdani. New York is such a diverse city and you truly get the impression that the mayor sees the strength of this. In the words of one commenter, he really knows how to make people feel seen.

Today marks 205 years of Greek independence. I was grateful to stand in solidarity with Greek Orthodox New Yorkers at the Divine Liturgy, commemorating this triumph of self-determination.

[image or embed]

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@mayor.nyc.gov) April 26, 2026 at 6:25 PM

It's exciting to keep up with what Mamdani is doing in New York. His agenda feels like a sea change in political priorities. I hope to see positive effects coming from the work his administration is engaged in.

Niko Stratis writes about the comfort of physical media and older technology.

Let us suffer no worries or troubles, we have salvation in our walkmen and their analogue batteries. Never mind the truth of these eras, the 90s and the days before and after are years often cast in imperfect light as moments in time when we were a proper society. That’s not true for all, and you only need to engage with the culture of the time with eyes open enough to see the hardships and downfalls for many. But still, I understand the desire to glamorize it, and hold the past as indelible proof of a better time.

Pockets have gotten smaller, I’ve noticed, and I imagine that’s because of the shrinking of technology. We don’t have to carry Walkmans and CD Walkmans anymore, and so the pocket industrial complex has responded in kind. Who needs all this space when we no longer own anything we’re able to hold.

After looking at many single-purpose portable music devices (DAPs to the geeks), I’m finally getting over searching for a separate device for music. I can use my DAC3 Mobile Headphone Amplifier & DAC with my iPhone or iPad and some over-the-ear headphones and get crisp, detailed, nuanced sound. I’m already carrying those devices, so getting another one for music, going through all the work to transfer local files onto a device, arrange my library and separate playlists, etc. doesn’t feel particularly efficient.

As they say about cameras, “the best one is the one you have with you.” Perhaps the same can be said of portable music players.

via Opus

The opinions on AI that you find on the internet tend to fall in the extremes of the other side. Either AI is the downfall of humanity or its savior. My thoughts on the subject, as on many others, ride in the middle of the road.

In my professional life, AI has been a great equalizer. If you know the problems you are trying to solve, absent the knowledge of how to actually go about doing that, AI can be the bridge between concept and reality. It would take me many hours to probe the depths of the Azure cloud through labyrinthine Log Analytics workspaces to find the causes of a spike in ingestion costs. With the Azure MCP and Claude Cowork/Code, it’s done in minutes.

I’m not blind to the problems with AI, though. As a simple illustration, when I’m using Claude in my personal life, it can almost never remember what day it is, even when I explicitly tell it.1 Aren’t calculations like that one of the easiest things for computers to do? It seems to defy logic.

A couple of thoughts reached my Matter inbox in the past few weeks about the Achilles’ heels of AI. One was from David French, who brings up legal culpability for problems caused by AI.

The nature of A.I. puts its creators in a bind. The point of the technology is that it will do things — at least to some degree — on its own. But under common law, humans will be liable for what A.I. does. This means the A.I. companies (and perhaps individual executives) can be legally responsible for actions they didn’t commit and for effects they did not intend.

Someone has to be held accountable for mistakes by AI models, some of which have been egregious. We can’t apply punitive judgments to a non-human entity, regardless of how human it may seem.

Jacob Noti-Victor writes for The Atlantic about another secret weapon against AI dominance: copyright law.

But the future of creative labor will more likely be decided through a different question within copyright law, one that has received far less attention: To what extent should AI-generated works receive copyright protection at all? In a 2024 case, Thaler v. Perlmutter, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that a work generated autonomously by an AI system cannot be protected by copyright, because copyright requires a human “author.” The Supreme Court declined to review that decision in March. With the lower-court decision left in place, the question now becomes how much AI content can be incorporated into a work before it becomes mostly or totally uncopyrightable; courts have not yet weighed in on this but may soon.

Works generated by AI cannot, at least at this point, be legally copyrighted. Mickey Mouse may be in the public domain now, but how would Disney have built their brand if he had not been protected by intellectual property laws early on?

Many times, AI triumphalism is taken for granted. History is not written in stone, though, and there are still some weighty considerations that could disrupt the inevitability of AI dominance.

1. Claude, with its vast capabilities and empathetic tone, can be ideal for managing chronic illness. ↩︎

404 Media cites a study claiming a third of new websites are IA-Generated. The study measured sites created since 2022. This is one of those findings that strikes me as hard to believe at first, and then pretty plausible.

What does one do to ensure that visitors know your personal site is powered by a human? Jason Morehead is using a human.json file. The file is added to your website’s head. The file can also vouch for the humanity of other sites, and I’m proud to say that his includes Canned Dragons. Chrome and Firefox have extensions that validate if your site has a human.json file.

As Morehead points out, it’s not foolproof and any site could add the file, AI-powered or not. At least it is a statement, though, that in such a case would be making a false claim.

Here's mine.

A few weeks ago, I saw Mark Robinson from Unrest/Air Miami/Flin Flon open for the Wedding Present at the Motorco Music Hall in Durham. Although the bill clearly stated that Robinson would be playing Unrest songs, imagining him doing those songs without the two other band members, Phil Krauth and Bridget Cross was challenging. Whatever images I could conjure didn’t match the actual show.

Robinson brought a lot of punch alone with his guitar, and was able to do the songs justice, but with a catch. He played only about a verse and the chorus of each song. He breezed through some truncated Air Miami tunes first, and by the time he addressed the audience, he had already fit in 11 songs. When he announced he was going to be playing 50 songs total, I wasn’t sure what to believe. At the pace he was going, it was possible, but it had to be a joke, right? Wrong. I wasn’t counting, but he was, in-between batches of songs that would make Bob Pollard sound long-winded.

After the show, I commended Robinson on his ability to figure out a way to make sure almost no one missed hearing their favorite song. “Exactly,” he enthused.

One of the songs I was most glad to hear was Air Miami’s “Airplane Rider,” a 7” single released shortly after Unrest broke up. The single, which could very well be the perfect indie pop song, showed the band’s promise.1 Because they were unhappy with the first pressing of the single, the 7” had to be remastered and repressed, leaving the band without any music to take on their first nationwide tour. The final product, though, shows the instincts must have been correct, as it has a pristine jangle pop sound.

1. Alas, they only released one full-length album, Me. Me. Me., in 1995. ↩︎

Shelly Ridenour penned an article for Qobuz on the stellar alternative albums from 1991. One observation that I found particularly poignant from having grown up during this period was around the change that Nirvana’s Nevermind brought to mainstream music with regard to gender dynamics.

Within a couple of months, the album was a hit, people were dressing in “grunge” flannel and, soon, hair metal was dropping off the charts. (The band’s feminist attitude was also a welcome change from the blatant sexism of hair metal.) Cobain’s aesthetic was very much a Gen X product of what was then known as college rock and would soon be categorized as alt rock, with an entire radio station format dedicated to the movement that Nirvana pushed into the mainstream. It seems perverse now to lump Nirvana with, say, the metal and classic rock leanings of other bands that were considered grunge—Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden.

The rapid embrace of Nirvana certainly had a lot to do with their rebuke of the excesses of hair metal, including the rampant sexism and misogyny. By that time, the shock value had worn off, and those excesses were more sad than exciting.1 There is evidence, though, that this shift in attitude didn’t keep itself confined to popular music.

My wife and I are constantly amazed at some of the content of mainstream movies and other entertainment from the 80s and what the makers of those movies could get away with (on the big screen, at least). It’s even more surprising to my oldest son, who didn’t live through it. Revenge of the Nerds, with its testosterone-driven plot lines, simply couldn’t be made as a mainstream movie today. The change in attitudes seemed to very closely coincide with the public change in musical tastes.

Though I would struggle to think of any Nirvana songs that were particularly overtly feminist, Kurt Cobain certainly had the cred from his circle of friends. The title for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes from Kathleen Hannah of the riot grrrl band Bikini Kill.

How much was Nirvana simply riding a wave of what was mostly known in the early nineties as “political correctness,” and how much did their popularity shape public perception? The significance of Nevermind can sometimes feel overstated by music journalists, but it may have represented a sea change in not just the music industry (who rushed to sign similar bands to lucrative recording contracts) but also broader cultural thinking.

Unfortunately, the Qobuz article is behind a membership subscription. However, I would strongly recommend the service to anyone interested in hi-res music.

1. See The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years for solid evidence. ↩︎

Olly, the developer of the Pagecord blogging software, just published a post on something I was thinking about with regards to music. I’m not buying a lot of physical media these days, but when I do, it’s usually CDs. I just went to a new record store called Hunky Dory that just opened downtown near me, but they weren’t celebrating Record Store Day. I wasn’t sure about going because I didn’t think I would buy anything. So I can relate to Olly.

Indie record stores are so great, especially my local, but there’s no reason for me to go in and bother them because I won’t be buying anything. I feel like a fraud! I’d love to be able browse the music physically like everyone else, chatting to the staff, listening to stuff and getting recommendations, but rather than bagging the vinyl I’d like to pay them for a FLAC download that gets delivered to my inbox. To make it more of an event and add a physical dimension, maybe they could offer me a postcard version of the cover art too? That would be a nice keepsake.

Olly feels, as I do, that we have enough physical stuff and there isn’t necessarily a need to buy media for music anymore.1 At the same time, it’s a worthy cause to keep the independent record stores afloat. I had the same thoughts when I was in Asheville earlier this year. I bought a book at a cool indie bookstore where I could admire all the amazing covers.2 In all honesty, though, I prefer to purchase e-books for my Kindle. I just could hardly bear the thought of not contributing to the cause of having small bookstores in walkable downtowns.

We need a physical digital music experience - OllyI love the idea of Record Store Day but I no longer have a turntable, cassette deck or CD player despite the hundreds of vinyl records going mouldy in my…OllyOlly

1. I ordered Slowdive’s Everything Is Alive on CD last year. Now there is a high-res version that sounds better on Qobuz and that CD is essentially obsolete. ↩︎
2. Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome ↩︎

One of my greatest joys in 2026 has been the release of new material by British riot twee band Heavenly. I’ll admit I approached the release of this year’s brilliantly named Highway to Heavenly LP with a certain amount of skepticism. After decades of radio silence, it’s hard to know what to expect from a long-time favorite and easy to be disappointed.

Fortunately, disappointment was not what I felt when I listened to the new record. It’s easily on par with any previous Heavenly material and I’ve had it in heavy rotation for the last few weeks. There are quite a few bands making jangly twee indie pop, but Heavenly always stands out. Vocals from Amelia Fletcher are distinct and emotive. You’re along for the ride with her. In the case of the first single from Highway to Heavenly, “Portland Town,” you can relate to Fletcher’s desire to be among her own kind of people. I’m guessing Portland is a place where she feels she blends in with the crowd. Portland, with all its eccentricities worthy of parody, remains one of the first cities in alternative culture.

Heavenly - Portland Town (YouTube)

I just signed up for access to Attie, a new AI-based app from Bluesky, which allows you to shape your feed on the social network using plain language. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about the app when it was first announced. It can be hard these days to sift through the AI hype to locate the value in some of these propositions.

Then I came across an old quote I had saved about blogging. Henrik Karlsson wrote in 2022 that a blog post “is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.” Karlsson was sparked to this realization after writing an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, and being introduced to it by many who wanted to discuss the topic.

The conclusion Karlsson eventually came to is that you shouldn’t necessarily write for the masses, but with specificity to people who might find the appeal in your most unique fascinations. He uses an anecdote to illustrate his point.

It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.

Write for Jackson Pollock.

In this way, you will hopefully connect with people with whom you would want to engage in deep conversation.

But the internet is vast. It takes skill or dumb luck to find your people and foster mutual interests. A tool like Attie can potentially help with that search. Despite the current skepticism about the proliferation of AI apps, it seems this one may be valuable in actually fostering human relationships.

Every time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some even after entering a new story.

After I wrapped up reading Demon Copperhead last weekend, I had these feelings. I almost shed tears at the end of the book. There are no novels piling up in a stack for me to read, so I was bereft. I was almost present in Lee County, that little corner of Appalachia where most of the book takes place, for some period. My own trip to Appalachia recently only reinforced that feeling.

I won’t deny that Barbara Kingsolver’s latest was a tough read. When the drug use started getting heavy, I had to put it down for a bit. My mom showed interest in reading it, and I steered her away. The extended time it took me to get through the proceedings somehow only integrated it more into my mind’s eye.

I’ve never lived in Appalachia, and certainly never had the foster care experience, but I do know someone in both those categories. My dad grew up in rural Eastern, NC, and would remind me of how he had to pick tobacco or shovel chicken sh*t if he ever thought I was trying to get out of doing work. In my lifetime, I saw a degradation in the neighborhood where my grandparents used to live. The last time we visited the area (after their passing), it was scary to walk down the street. This past week, 3 people were shot on that same street.

I’m not entirely unfamiliar with youth drug culture, either. The high school I went to has a crazy story about an LSD ring you can read about on Wikipedia. I talked with the guy who, while high on LSD and dancing naked in a field, shot a police officer with his own gun just a week before the incident while skateboarding at an outdoor mall.

Kingsolver was masterful in crafting the voice of the protagonist of Demon Copperhead, Damon. Even if I had no experience with the challenges represented in the book, I still would have felt myself traveling in that world, painted so effortlessly as it was by the narrative voice of Damon.

If you can stomach a tough read, I strongly recommend Demon Copperhead. What’s next?

With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed, was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.1 Bridgy Fed has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration (which allows longform) working. I was either getting errors that I was missing the domain parameter when using my ActivityPub account or a 404 when I was using my domain account. Damned if you do…

My failures to integrate Ghost raised the question of the return on investment I was getting from the exercise. The benefit would have been that my posts would be syndicated to the feed with other standard.site documents. Bluesky itself is not part of that feed. Long-form platforms Leaflet, pckt, and Offprint are, but their reach so far is fairly limited. I was curious, though.

I set up an account with pckt, which was exceptionally easy due to the fact that authentication is built from the Atmosphere, and I could just use my Bluesky account (which is also my domain name — neat). The service is well thought out, and I think for a lot of people, it has the right mix of features. I was able to make some quick color scheme/typography customizations, although I’ll always wish there were more options. It’s a very bubbly selection that kind of screams fun. The flip side of that is that it doesn’t seem fit for serious blogging. Perhaps more disappointingly, other than the auth and appearing on the global feed of blogs with standard.site integration, the only sign of Bluesky here is your handle linked in your profile. It would be cool if you could syndicate posts to Bluesky or show comments from that network.

Next, I tried the new beta of Offprint. I was immediately struck by how similar the default theme looked to Substack. Offprint is going more for publications than basic blogs. Its options reflect that approach, with a lot more there to customize. Offprint also has better integration with Bluesky, allowing you to syndicate your post upon publish and even tag Bluesky/Atmosphere accounts in your post (that’s a nice touch). Offprint still feels very unfinished, though. Tagging isn’t even there yet, though it is coming. The interface also seems a bit corporate.

I haven’t yet dipped into the world of Leaflet, though Jay Graber (CIO of Bluesky) is apparently using that service. It appears to have a bit of the whimsy of pckt with better integration with Bluesky (recommends, mentions, and comments).

These are early days, and at the moment, I’m not completely sold on any of these services. The Atmosphere seems to be gaining momentum, though. Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider recently attended the AtmosphereConf 2026 to keep up with what people are doing with AT Proto. This is certainly a space to keep an eye on for anyone interested in online publishing.

1. AT Proto is the protocol that runs Bluesky and a competitor to ActivityPub, which runs Mastodon. The Atmosphere is the AT Proto version of the Fediverse. ↩︎

Charlotte Cornfield is the latest musician to put out something via Durham, NC’s Merge Records. Hurts Like Hell is also the first long player by the Canadian singer/songwriter since becoming a mother. The title track, “Hurts Like Hell,” wallows in a remembered sentimentality with the advantage of looking at difficulty in the rearview mirror. We all know what it’s like to try to gain perspective when in the midst of a tough situation.

The video immediately endeared itself to me because its protagonist is wearing a sweater just like one I purchased a couple of weeks ago. The guy looks like he’s kin to Ben Gibbard and plays a sympathetic character who appears to ingest some psychoactive substance along with a confection delivered from an anonymous sender. His enthusiasm for playing the video’s song at high volumes (with bass boost!) outside is a nuisance to his neighbors.

Charlotte Cornfield - Hurts Like Hell (YouTube)

The commitment to Christianity as it was originally conceived and to guarding that tradition is something that I’ve always valued as a member of the Orthodox Church. However, one thing I’ve found within this particular expression of Christianity is a lack of ecumenical charity. This is especially true on YouTube. If you watch a couple of videos related to Orthodoxy, your algorithmic recommendations will quickly fill up with videos purporting to have a priest or some commentator “destroying” this or that version of Christianity. It’s almost a cottage industry within Orthodox Christianity.

Did Jesus indicate that Christians should spend their time making rivals out of those in different groups who revere him as Lord?