2014 US Air Guitar National Finals

I’m always grateful for an opportunity to see artful indie animated shorts on a big screen within biking distance from my home, and in recent years the Philadelphia Film Festival’s program has been reliably good. This year’s, though it included some strong entries, was unfortunately sorely lacking in thematic variety: Six of the eight films were about parenting or marriage. I won’t say they didn’t honor those experiences, but few felt especially insightful. Unlike their… See more →

I waited almost 30 years for this and it was basically perfect. Shudder to Think sounded amazing and was clearly having a blast, including Clint Walsh and Jherek Bischoff, the energetic new additions on rhythm guitar and bass. There were a few flubs here and there since this was the band’s first show of the year, all handled with grace and good humor. A 19-song set list drawn largely from Pony Express Record, as is… See more →

Fire Museum Presents started putting on events for adventurous arts lovers in Philly in 2007, but between my departure the following year and my return during Covid, I only just discovered them earlier this year, and I finally made it out to a show tonight. It was also my first visit to the Maas Building, a former brewery, which has carved out a charming upstairs event space among its artist studios. It was a perfect… See more →

My first Tortoise show since I very belatedly learned that Doug McCombs’s distinctive secret weapon is the unassumingly mighty Fender Bass VI.

A Grateful Dead cover band wouldn’t ordinarily get me out of the house, but a friend invited me, and the list of shows I’ve been to this year is depressingly short, so off I went. And I’m glad I did! I enjoy seeing something requiring a high level of skill done with a high level of competence, and so much the better if it’s in a passion-project capacity and an intimate environment like Ukie Club.… See more →

My unexcused absence from social media kept me from finding out about the first-ever Philly Animation Festival until just a few days before it started, but luckily that was enough time for me to get a festival pass and make plans to attend every screening except the one for kids. In keeping with my Ottawa tradition, I rated and wrote at least a sentence or two about every single film I saw. Watching and reviewing… See more →

I was once again unable to make it to the animation festival in Ottawa this year, and the Philadelphia Film Festival once again filled some of that gap with a well-curated program of shorts. I’m feeling pretty raw lately about a variety of big things both personal and global, and several of these films collectively poked at all those things, so while I don’t regret attending, I did come away from the screening more emotionally… See more →

Two and a half years ago, I came away from Kinference 2023 disappointed that more of my peers weren’t as put off as I was by the current state of tech’s dominant preoccupations. My experience wasn’t much different this time, except that in the intervening years, Web3 enthusiasm has fashionably given way to AI enthusiasm. This isn’t to say all the speakers were doing PR for LLMs, and among those intermittently expressing guarded misgivings, Frank… See more →