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At its best, social media is like jazz — there’s an improvisational, multi-player quality to it. Following threads, riffing, and quipping creates a collaborative rhythm all its own. I love that! Then, add in the “threaded style” of social media writing and thinking. There’s a give-and-take, a call-and-response. Ideas build on each other, it’s even more like jazz. Sometimes, riffs are refined via “collaborating with the network” to the point …

by Zahid Fayyaz Based on the 1963 album by Charles Mingus, this production transferred from Shoreditch Town Hall after a run last year. The dance/theatre production set entirely on the Barbican stage – the audience join both the Clod Ensemble and the Nu Civilisation Orchestra on stage for the show. With the space done up as a jazz club, the audience sits and stands around the dancers and the musicians …

The DX-286 now comes with TWO 18650 Li-ion batteries and is available from Amazon for US buyers and Ali Express for those outside the US. See it at Amazon: See it at Ali Express: Jay Allen

Pnårp suffered expensive disasters, queued up some Q-Tips, then took that as his cue to tiptoe off.

Yet another gloriously sunny September weekend, I spent most of it stacking firewood in preparation for winter. The high point came early Saturday morning when I found myself in Ottawa's ByWard Market with an hour to kill. It was so early, that Patrick McGahern Books hadn't yet opened, and so I made for Parliament Hill to see how the restoration of the Centre Block is progressing.Quite well, it seems.Despite the …

Happy Sunday everyone! I’ve got a little bit of a different format for the newsletter today— In light of iOS 18’s release earlier this week, I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite indie iOS apps that are already taking advantage of the features the new OS provides for developers. That said, I couldn’t leave my fellow gear heads hanging with just apps in this issue, so I’m …

The year was 1908. The shock waves of the 1905 Revolution still reverberated throughout the Russian Empire when two letters from an Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das reached Leo Tolstoy at home in Iasnaia Poliana. Das wrote to the ailing Tolstoy, then a world-renowned author, pacifist and anarchist, asking for his...

The advance publicity described Manu Chao’s show at Brixton Academy last night as an acoustic set, but if that suggests some kind of gentle fireside recital, forget it. The energy was peaking from the moment the 63-year-old Franco-Spanish singer-guitarist appeared — with Lucky Salvadori from Argentina playing what I think was a Colombian tiple and Miguel Rumbao from Havana playing bongos and activating a little black box that triggered the …

Earlier this year, I was captivated by this brightly coloured wall outside Düsseldorf Kunstsammlung K20. The artist? Sarah Morris. How beautifully circuitous.

The sports drama follows the Chuska Warriors, a Native American high school basketball team from Chuska, New Mexico, that must band together after losing their star player if they want to keep their quest for a state championship alive.

Session 256 was played on 6/2/24Nick, Fighter 7 (Me)Borumar, ½ Orc Thief (Josh)Blotto, Goblin Fighter (Lanse)Morgana, wizard (Rob)Koltic, Cleric 7 (NPC)Aroon, Fighter 5 (NPC)Jameth, Fighter 5 (NPC)Lor’Koth, Dwarf 5 (NPC)After the ringing in their ears stopped from the exploding blast spores, the party continued deeper into the sea caves, finding another dry branch. Borumar scouted ahead, and found a small cave full of mushrooms… including shreikers. Rather than mess with …

I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 1 Standard license ($89 value) for Screen Studio. I’ve long used ScreenFlow to create screencasts, and then discovered Screen Studio (thanks Mike Schmitz). If you just need to create a beautiful screencast with adjustable background, window zooming, and cursor enhancing/smoothing, Screen Studio does it all automatically. You just hit record and it does the rest. Brilliant. From the developer: Screen Studio is an …

Vampire Weekend (2008) Probably the best of the five, the debut stands out as what I’m going to call a “performed band album.” The arrangements, the instrumentation, the shifts and turns and gaps and idiosyncracies, they all display the collaborative intelligence and locked-room logic of a foursome discovering and inventing their way through a playlist of evolving first-evers. The rhythm section, drummer Chris Tomson and bassist Chris Baio, is as …

Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Matthew Estrade via phone call on September 20th, 2024. Some of the questions have been rearranged and edited to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given. What inspired you to start Catholic Aging, and how does your faith inform your approach to dementia care? Before I started Catholic Aging, it was really my family that got me into gerontology. …

After four installments with thrillerish elements, the Miss Silver series really came into its own as a true detective series in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl. Just as the author would give English mystery fans some paradigmatic village mysteries in the 1940s and 1950s, in 1943 with The Chinese Shawl she gave her readers a classic country house party mystery, just as the mystery subgenre's heyday was passing during the …