Canned Dragons

@robert.www.canneddragons.net.ap.brid.gy

A personal weblog by Robert. Mostly faith, noise, culture and tech. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://www.canneddragons.net/, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Longform Stories

I Set My Face to the Hillside

A veteran post-rock band turns in a fresh performance of a decades-old classic.

Jun 27·2 min read·290 words

Fade To Blue

Zigging with your weblog when others are zagging.

Jun 26·1 min read·150 words

A Room You Can't See

What did we lose when music on physical media declined?

Jun 26·1 min read·151 words

Forgotten Favorite

1989-1992 by Velocity Girl Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it's a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slum…

Jun 21·2 min read·221 words

Future Shock

What does a panel of "experts" think about the future of work?

Jun 14·1 min read·116 words

We Might As Well Be Strangers

Weezer comes back with a strong collaboration.

Jun 13·1 min read·187 words

With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project's creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album's description on its Bandcamp page has further det…

Jun 7·2 min read·274 words

Chemicals Make You Small

The Second Coming Was a Moonrise by Hammock When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are…

Jun 6·3 min read·433 words

Six Flags White House

Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about the spectacle of setting up a UFC match on the White House lawn. It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or some…

May 30·2 min read·384 words

Star Wars The Product

The debt Star Wars owes to its fans and commercial interests.

May 24·4 min read·602 words

Don’t Panic

English Breakfast by Hoops Despite seemingly being designed by a corporation to be mostly inoffensive, sometimes to the point of banality or worse, Coldplay launched into the world consciousness …

May 23·2 min read·306 words

Heart Still Beats

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 overlor…

May 16·2 min read·260 words

New Cans

Trying out some headphones I've been keeping an eye on.

May 15·3 min read·482 words

Memory Tape

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…

May 10·1 min read·94 words

The Intelligence Is Still Artificial

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, rid…

May 9·1 min read·103 words

Your Website Is Human Made

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 t…

May 2·1 min read·97 words

The Perfect Indie Pop Song

Airplane Rider / Stop Sign by Air Miami 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 clearl…

May 2·3 min read·413 words

You Could Do Anything

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 chang…

Apr 26·1 min read·85 words

Olly Thoughts

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, …

Apr 24·1 min read·93 words

Portland Town

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 wit…

Apr 11·1 min read·89 words

Attie

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…

Apr 4·1 min read·97 words

The Novel Cure

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…

Apr 3·1 min read·103 words

A Change In The Atmosphere

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 Br…

Mar 30·1 min read·89 words

Hurts Like Hell

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.…

Mar 28·1 min read·86 words

If You Change

Widowspeak has a new record coming this June and produced a video for the lead single, “If You Change.” I first heard the band when they covered Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet,” a song that never lan…

Mar 21·1 min read·90 words

The Shape of Paris

This week’s Saturday Night Video is a bit different than the usual fare. It’s technically more of a skate video than a music video (but it does feature music). Powell Peralta-sponsored skateboard pro …

Mar 14·1 min read·86 words

A Side Hustle As The Doors

We all know by now that it’s getting tougher to make a living as a musician. While tools for producing music have gotten cheaper and more accessible, the ways to make decent money as a professional in…

Mar 14·3 min read·460 words

Clandestine Noise Operations

Bill Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins, Zwan) recently pondered the decline in popularity of rock music on his podcast The Magnificent Others. “Rock was the greatest single social-changing force of the 20th…

Mar 13·1 min read·87 words

Treasure Hoard - March 2026

It takes religion to make Star Trek, Anthropic vs. the Department of War, James Talarico's Christianity, the iPod comeback, retreating to the woods, etc.

Mar 7·1 min read·29 words

Going To Pot

Last weekend, my wife and I took a much-needed short vacation to Asheville, NC, in the Great Smoky Mountains. The mountains weren't all that was smoky, though. Marijuana dispensaries were to be found …

Mar 1·1 min read·90 words

No One Is Lost

No One Is Lost by Stars My wife and I have long been devoted to music from the band Stars. It’s hard to pick a favorite album, but I especially treasure a few of the songs on No One Is Lost. The 2014…

Feb 27·1 min read·101 words

Moondrop Displacement

If you live in a first-world country with a sizable knowledge work sector, you might find it hard to escape the subject of AI. That’s probably an understatement. We are saturated with talk of artifici…

Feb 16·3 min read·422 words

Way You Walk

I saw Papas Fritas play during their run in the nineties at a club called Go Studios that straddled the border between Chapel Hill and Carrboro. They were an energetic live band and most impressively,…

Feb 14·2 min read·265 words

A Visual Sound

When the Stereo Skateboards video A Visual Sound came out in 1994, many skateboarders were confused by it. With its 8mm film aesthetic, arty interludes, and post-bop jazz tunes, it didn’t look or soun…

Feb 8·1 min read·90 words

Stop Me If You Think That You’ve Heard This One Before

One testament to my affection for the Smiths is the fact that I desperately wanted to hate them. My girlfriend in high school sung their praises, but we weren’t totally in sync in the music department…

Jan 31·1 min read·103 words

Magnum Mars

The subject of Christian masculinity has been hot these last few years and the NYT piece on Orthodoxy and the influx of young men to the faith have reignited interest in the Orthodox world. Relig…

Dec 21·1 min read·81 words