Prime Cuts #6
Prime Cuts #6
Idiosyncrasy masquerading as a newsletter.
Welcome to Prime Cuts, a curated weekly collection of the most interesting content for your Reading, Watching, or Listening playlists.
Blizzard is one of the most important (PC) gaming developers of all time, and Diablo one of the most important games. Both studio and game have been beleaguered for more than a decade under a hellish cacophony of sexism, misogyny, and overall shittiness, but they’re back with Diablo IV which looks, frankly, amazing. I’ll be jumping into it with my standard clan in the coming week.
Piety, Technology, and Tradition
I can’t say that I’ve spent much time in the more conservative corners of scholarship, and certainly not as they may provide thoughtful critiques (both positive and negative) of typically left-leaning technological development. So this piece was quite refreshing! I found this to be particularly poignant: “I can hand down my love of reading and some of my favorite books, but I can’t hand down to him an American society of broad literacy”
When Brain Signals Travel the Wrong Way
The fMRI is both the gold standard of neural activity, and the bluntest of tools that we should hope to view as the Model T in the coming decades. Nevertheless, finding a (potential) mechanical correlate if not cause of severe depression is exciting!
The Bear is back! My favorite (surprise) show of last summer just dropped its entire second season, and although I continue to believe that full season drops for the buzziest shows is a mistake, it’s nonetheless great to have this back in our lives. I’m only about three-quarters through thus far, and I’m quite happy to say that it has maintained its distinct style and edge while giving its characters (especially those pushed out to the edges in season 1) a LOT more room to breathe and evolve. Highly highly recommend.
I’ll just come out and say that Extraction 2 - the sequel that no one asked for - is not a good film. But my god is it entertaining, with some of the best choreographed one-shot sequences I’ve ever seen that literally left me giddy once I was able to breathe again.
I’ve written about Ichika Nito before, and this is another of his way-too-short (under 1 minute) guitar virtuoso performances, using a completely bizarre Casio Digital Guitar.
Freakonomics is not typically the podcast to bring a tear to my eye, but an episode focused on leveraging economics to solve the kidney transplant market? Yes please.
I just found out that Rick Rubin launched his own podcast, Tetragrammaton, and this long discussion with his friend and collaborator Trent Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails fame, is expectedly raw and profound. From addiction to creating expressions of our being to the challenges of accepting success, this is one of those conversations that can only happen when two people have both known each other for a very long time and are willing to be completely vulnerable.