Author: Jason

Static

The 5 y.o.’s latest favorite song is Josh Ritter’s cover of Frightened Rabbit’s “Old Old Fashioned.”

One line created a conversation:

🎵So give me soft, soft static🎵
🎵With a human voice underneath🎵

He asked “what’s static?” which is a good question this day and age with everything digital and streaming.

So I also got to introduce him to AM radio.

Now he’ll randomly ask to listen to “static” — not the “static song” which he’s now figured out the name of, but actual static with a voice in the background.

Kids are weird and awesome, y’all.

Conversational Narcissism

Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency to insert oneself into a conversation as “conversational narcissism.” It’s the desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself. It is often subtle and unconscious. Derber writes that conversational narcissism “is the key manifestation of the dominant attention-getting psychology in America. It occurs in informal conversations among friends, family and co-workers. The profusion of popular literature about listening and the etiquette of managing those who talk constantly about themselves suggests its pervasiveness in everyday life.” Derber describes two kinds of responses in conversations: a shift response and a support response. The first shifts attention back to yourself, and the second supports the other person’s comment.

Celeste Headlee “The Mistake I Made With My Grieving Friend”

Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.

Martin Luther King’s Last Christmas Sermon

Even as it shrinks, the national media is reorganizing around a social media–to–cable news pipeline of daily outrage. It is shedding the skin of its once-sacred “view from nowhere” objectivity and embracing the benefits of cruder ideologies. It wants eyeballs, but it doesn’t want to pay for material. Why do that when a generation of strivers will do it for free, or close to it? No, it’s not so hard not to see Andy Ngo as one vision of the journalist of the future, self-employed in an Uberized model that gobbles up inflammatory content and takes no responsibility for how it’s gathered. These media workers will be ambitious, ideological, incurious, self-promoting, social media native, willing to force the story, and very, very vulnerable.

Joseph Bernstein “Andy Ngo Has The Newest New Media Career. It’s Made Him A Victim And A Star.”

Because I Never Throw Anything Away I Can Share With You The Crappy Card Game I Made 24 Years Ago

I found a game I made back in 1995. And as awful and embarrassingly bad as it is, it’s not so embarrassing that I’m not going to chronicle it forever on the Internets.

Being a colossal nerd I’ve been into colossally nerdy things, often well before being a nerd about said things was cool (See: comic books, role playing games, wearing glasses). Among those nerdy things I got into was gaming. And not video games, oh no, that’s too cool for Young Jason.

No, Young Jason was into tabletop gaming involving chits and hexmaps (Avalon Hill games), robot figures dueling a millennium into the future (Battletech), and, once the genre existed, trading card games like Magic: The Gathering (which pushed out my other nerdy pursuit at the time – baseball cards).

Of course, my nerdery didn’t end with playing these games. No, see, I was going to be the guy that invented the Next Great Thing in gaming. There are scraps of assorted ideas and games lying all over the place, but one I still happen to have in a dusty box on a shelf with a bunch of other games is my aborted attempt at creating my very own trading card game based on the comic book universe based on the heroic adventures of the incredibly originally named Jason Tenney and his amazing friend…s. Friends.

Read more at Blusterhouse.

“American Girl,” the final track on the Heartbreaker’s first record and the last song he’ll ever sing in public, is as perfect a rock song as there is. “Raised on promises” could be the national motto. It should adorn our currency, the contemporary American English for “In God We Trust.” Not that the phrases are synonymous. A promise is probably a poor substitute for a god, but it’s what we’ve got if we’re lucky and realistic — promises and hope.

Michael Washburn “Tom Petty’s Problematic Album Southern Accents”