I wrote about the sci-fi successor to the fantasy tabletop RPG Ironsworn in the Week on the Web newsletter a few months ago. Starforged has now been officially releases in digital form, with pre-orders for the hard copy being taken as well. …

Grace Ives’ new album, Janky Star, caught me a bit by surprise. I became immediately attached to the title of the album and recognized it’s almost complete disregard for musical conventions. It’s difficult to put this one neatly into a musical genre. …

I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with Apple lately. Apple is a giant company now, as compared to the scrappy upstart they were when I started using their computers in 2005 upon my return to college. A lot has changed. Their workforce and market cap are massive. …

https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/track=2852414929/size=large/bgcol=333333/linkcol=0f91ff/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/ Lumenette is a new musical project from Christine Byrd (Hammock contributor and wife of musician Mark Byrd). “I’m a Sensory Explosion” is the first Hammock single to credit Lumenette as a cowriter. The song is a beautiful, elegiac exploration of opening your senses to the sometimes overwhelming weight of the natural world. The textures of the song are soothingly familiar to long-time Hammock devotees and Christine’s vocals add a traditional 4AD/shoegaze sound. Perhaps the track is best listened to on a cloudy, rainy day.

Settling on an app to actively consume web content on an ereader. — I have a Kobo Libra 2 ereader, and it’s one of my favorite devices. Of course, it is used for reading books, but I spend just as much time reading articles saved from the internet. I find I have a much greater capacity for reading long materials passed from the…

Brandy Schillace writes for Wired Magazine about how pregnancy should be untethered from motherhood. Her piece reads like someone who has either never encountered Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or, if she has, thought it was proscriptive. …

A lot of times, when I watch movies that pit good vs. evil in easily distinguishable sides, I wonder about someone actually choosing a path that is clearly evil. Take Star Wars, for example. Why would someone choose to be on the dark side, with all the available evidence that…

👉 This post was originally published on Medium — December 13, 2015. Unfortunately, due to the incapacity of U.S. politicians to tackle the issue of gun violence, it remains an evergreen post. A couple of weeks ago, the NY Daily News, after yet another mass shooting in the US, posted…

A new book entitled Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia examines how more conservative and even far-right Christians are flocking to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). …