Plans for the Blog

Christ is Risen! Indeed He is risen!

Now that I'm trying to write again and Holy Week is past, you may be wondering, dear reader, what I'm planning to do here after the 7-year hiatus. Obviously the things I write won't be exactly the same as they were before, since I and the world have changed so much. Most of my more fruitful thinking and reading recently has clustered around three main topics:

First, I hope to explore the relation between (and, ultimately, the complementarity of) faith and science. For the most part, modern Orthodoxy is not so much anti-science as it is not much in conversation with science at all. I'd like to do my small part to change that. In particular, I've done a good deal of thinking about how to bring the theory of evolution into conversation with my faith and worldview since my last post on the subject 11 years ago.

Second, I would be dishonest if I said that watching the Evangelical world I left behind largely rally behind the endless lies and cruelty of a would-be dictator over the past ten years didn't push me to do a lot of thinking about Christianity and the worldly powers, or that this thinking wasn't one of the things that drove me to revive the blog. Neither are Orthodox Christians immune to the temptation to an overly cozy relationship with worldly powers, to seek to build the Kingdom of God through worldly means deemed more "effective"—or else to withdraw from the social implications of the faith and focus on a purely otherworldly salvation. My meditations on this topic will be as much for my own benefit as anyone else's.

Third, I'd like to explore the ramifications of our increasingly rapidly evolving use of technology for our lives, our habits, and our spirituality. Increasingly large swaths of our lives are lived, or at least mediated, through screens, apps, digital technologies; the vast network that Luciano Floridi calls the "infosphere", and subject to the influence and surveillance of the multinational corporations that run them. As we use these devices, how are they 'using' us? What are they doing to us? How are they shaping our understanding of the 'good life', of what it means to be fully human—or whether being 'fully human' is even desirable anymore? In particular, I recently read Are We All Cyborgs Now? by Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, which has been very instructive in how to ask and think critically about these questions.

A technological subject that has developed drastically since before my hiatus, and on which I feel somewhat more qualified to speak than the average person, is artificial intelligence, specifically the generative AI that is disrupting industries, loosening peoples' grasp on reality, ostensibly replacing human labor, and insatiably devouring ever-increasing amounts of water, electricity, silicon, and cash as it pulls the whole global economy into its orbit. You can probably guess some of my thoughts on the subject already, but I hope to develop them more in the near future.

Related to technology and public life is a book I read last year that made a powerful impression on me and has influenced much of my reading and thinking ever since: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. It's not an easy book to summarize succinctly, but if I might attempt to do so, it's a manifesto against the dehumanizing global industrial-economic-techno-political anti-culture Kingsnorth and others call "the Machine" that uproots traditional communities and cultures, exploits people, and pollutes the environment, turning them all into fuel for the idol we've made of endless growth and "Progress". The result is alienation, moral confusion, and spiritual blindness as the Machine remakes us in its own image as its willing servants. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you're in luck: I've taken extensive notes and am hoping to blog through the book in detail.

Ten Years

As some of you may have noticed, my previous post was my first in over seven years. I'm not sure who was more surprised: the sixty people who saw it, or me that there were sixty of them!

This extended hiatus was not just due to laziness or neglect (though there has been plenty of that, too). It was a reflection of my growing awareness that my adopted Orthodox faith is not just (or even primarily) a matter of intellect and ratio that can be expressed in words, especially disembodied blog posts. I'm sure I expressed this truth many times in my old posts during and after my conversion, but as long as I kept writing and posting like I had been, I had to question whether I was really, consistently living it. Consistency, harmony both within my faith and between faith and life, was one of the main things I was seeking in my conversion, after all.

If the life in Christ is a ladder, as St. John Climacus (whom we just commemorated a week ago on the fourth Sunday of Great Lent) depicted it, words and blog posts alone will only get you to its foot. Actually climbing it takes practice, discipline, prayer, obedience, watchfulness, and so much more (including the persistence to get up and back onto it as many times as you fall, which will be a lot). The older I get, the more I realize how insignificant, how insufficient merely reasoning about things is to the Christian life. But this only adds to my joy, because it means I am seeing more and more just how much more there is to the faith I grew up in than I once imagined.

In Orthodox spirituality there is a concept called phronema, a Greek word that originally meant something like "mind", "understanding", or "thinking", but like many other Orthodox terms has taken on a wealth of meaning that is difficult to encompass in a precise definition. Its full meaning isn't just intellectual, but involves values and an entire way of life, a way of life we don't choose or invent for ourselves but receive through our participation in Holy Tradition, the deposit of faith given by the apostles and nurtured by the Church through the age. The Orthodox phronema is a mindset that sinks down "into your bones", and acquiring it is not simply a matter of learning facts, but of discipline, of practice, of formation, of organic growth, of habit-building. It takes time and dedication, and after my conversion I began to sense that continuing to approach my faith in the intellectual, often polemical way I had been on this blog, among other places, was hindering me. This is why I stopped posting for so long.

You may ask: Why, then, are you back? Have you finished acquiring the Orthodox phronema? Of course not, though perhaps my phronema has at least caught up with my thoughts. Having come to understand just what all being a 'theologian' in the Orthodox sense of the word entails, I understand now that the kind of 'theologizing' I used to do so blithely on this blog needs to be done in proportion to one's growth in faith, in prayer, in the virtues, in Christ, to avoid being a mere intellectual exercise. As St Paul wrote, "though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." (1 Cor 13:2)

Today, St Mary of Egypt Sunday, marks the tenth anniversary of my chrismation (in church years), my reception into the Orthodox Church. I've been Orthodox for longer than I was evangelical and it feels even more like home than it did at first. As I've begun acquiring something of the Orthodox phronema, the parable of the talents (or, in Luke, the minas) has been weighing on my mind. I don't want to misuse my gifts, but I also don't want to sit idle on them. When does it become more perilous to continue keeping silence than to speak?

For much has changed in the world in the past ten years, at a seemingly ever-increasing pace. Technological 'innovation', or at least proliferation, aims to 'disrupt' every part of our lives and mediate more and more aspects of our lives through the web, through screens, through algorithms. The concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer continues, a self-reinforcing cycle aided by innovations in speculation like cryptocurrency, the short-lived fad of the 'Metaverse', and the increasing popularity of betting on everything from sporting events to deadly airstrikes. A global pandemic forced us into isolation, strained the fabric of society, and brought out a wave of science and public health denialism in response. More recently, generative AI has invaded everything from children's toys to refrigerators to news, insatiably consuming electricity, water, silicon, and money while further undermining our shared sense of reality, even as some of its proponents express worry that it might maybe possibly sort of be an existential threat to humanity (but that it's very important to keep feeding it to avoid being beaten to whatever future it's leading to). And the rising tide of secularization from the ashes of Christendom, once seemingly unstoppable, has met fierce opposition from a toxic white 'Christian' nationalism with a thoroughly anti-Christian ethos, leaving us caught in the crossfire of an escalating culture war with new frontlines in empirical reality and once-uncontroversial virtues like empathy and mercy.

How do we as Orthodox Christians in the world live in times such as these? How do we resist the gravity of modernity and remain centered in the faith, in the gospel, in Christ? Saints and spiritual fathers both ancient and modern have much more wisdom than I do, but the gap between the often older, often monastic context they are writing from and our rapidly-evolving situation as moderns creates room for us to fool ourselves into believing that we are living faithfully even as the counterformative forces of modernity work on us in ways we're unaware of. The words the Lord spoke to His disciples are certainly applicable to those of us in the world: "I am sending you out like sheep surrounded by wolves, so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16) We must be watchful and discerning, as sojourners in a foreign country. (cf. Hebrews 11:13, 1 Peter 2:11) This is a good and (in my view) necessary application of the intellect for those who live in the world.

These are the questions and issues that I have spent a lot of time thinking about recently. Like when I first started this blog, my brain seems to be overflowing, and I hope that what comes out might be relevant and helpful to more than just me. Like the period from 2011 to 2014 that began my trajectory to Orthodoxy, there is a sense of tension that drives me onward--only this time it isn't a tension within my with, but between faith and life, or faith and world. I've been doing a lot of reading lately surrounding these subjects, particularly technological ones that as a (now senior) software engineer I'm at least a little more qualified than the average person to speak to. I hope to share the fruits of this reading and thinking here, as well as a separate project on church history I'm doing for my church. Please stay tuned, and thank you for reading!

Going on hiatus

Public service announcement: my posts on this blog (or, at least, the ones on the gospel) will be going on hiatus for a while. This is because of two things:

1. I will be leaving in a week for a long-awaited three-week trip to Europe with friends. I don't expect to finish anything more before then, so that means at least a month-long break.
2. When I wrote my introductory post to the gospel series, I thought I was at something of a junction in my faith journey: done tearing down, not yet started building up. The plan was to write the series as a way of both establishing my footing and sharing with others where I was at, then beginning the process of building a new vision of the gospel. Well, it turns out God had other plans, and in the midst of the post series He has begun taking my journey in a new direction that can't but affect my writing. Currently my beliefs are in a new and more promising state of flux, so I will continue again after things (relatively) settle down.

Not the post I intended to write

I've been working for weeks on a massive post. It originally began as two posts—one on "worldview" thinking in the church and overly intellectualized spirituality, and one about "divine restlessness" as a way of maintaining an appropriate level of certainty and epistemological humility in our beliefs—that I decided were similar enough to merge together. Though it covered fairly well-traded ground, it was going to be excellent, brilliant, insightful, and convicting; the usual.

That post will probably never see the light of day.

I still agree with most of the things I said in it, and I may try to work some of them into future posts. But as I was finishing up, it became harder and harder to right. God was convicting me not about what I was writing, but about how and why I was writing it, using the words I was writing. He was pulling a Romans 2:1 on me.

Yesterday I realized that since its renaissance in February through June, I have been taking this blog in the wrong direction, and my output has suffered as a result. A strong theme in my posts this year has been that the Bible is not simply a source of information to make us smarter and should not be read as such, but rather it's supposed to transform us. Once I realized this, I started seeing the misuse of scripture in this way—people simply drawing conclusions they wanted from it to back up their own arguments—everywhere. Everywhere except in my own writing.

The truth is, I've still been mining conclusions I've already drawn out of scripture instead of being informed by it. Too often I've written with my voice instead of seeking to let God speak through my own words. This question of who's really talking is independent of whether I study the Bible with my old logical view or my new Christ-as-Word view. Either can be a high or a low view of scripture. I've changed how I read the Bible, but not how I use it. I still treat it like an object of study to be held up to the light and analyzed for talking points in order to speak to and act on others rather than the Word of God that primarily speaks to and acts on me.

The result of this is that instead of this blog representing a conversation with God and with others, often it has just been the outflow of my train of thought on my solitary quest for truth—a noble delusion! I write about whatever I'm worked up about, annoyed at, or catches my fancy instead of what God is doing in me and saying to me right now. Though my thinking about doubt was this six months ago, He's calling me to move on now, but I keep posting about the same things as a way of staying in my comfort zone and avoiding letting God continue to lead me through my writing. The more I linger, the emptier and more forced my posts feel.

My conclusion (and it's one I still can't hear enough): the Bible is not merely a "text" to be studied, it is the Word of God to be lived. If we do study it, we should do so with the earnestness and immediacy of a man on a sinking ship studying the instructions for a life raft.

On reading Kierkegaard: Information vs. Transformation

I've been reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love for the last few weeks. It's a slow read, but only because it is incredibly dense in the best possible way--a great book to bring on a backpacking expedition and read before sunrise by a mountain lake (speaking from experience). The blurb on the back says it is "the kind of book that will change your life", and so far I agree. Kierkegaard's meditations on the Biblical teaching about love and the distinctness of Christian love are equal parts beautiful, enlightening, and convicting. Dozens of quotes I've underlined could spark their own subsequent posts. Maybe they will.

What most impresses me about Kierkegaard is how he is able to take a short Bible passage--like Jesus' command to love your neighbor--and expound on it for dozens of pages, examining it from every angle and laying out its manifold meanings in a way that prevents any possibility of escape. It's a vivid proof-by-demonstration of how the word of God is "living and active" (Hebrews 4:12), its meaning and applicability never confined to a few terse words on a page.

I think I'm unhealthily obsessed on this blog with thinking things that no one has thought before, or saying things that no one has ever said before. I take X common question or Y discussion in the Christian blogosphere and try to take a step or two back from everyone else, trying to nail that one crucial insight that no one thought of so the conversation will be transformed and everyone will fall silent and think I'm brilliant (or something like that). I'm never content to just "pick a side" on virtually anything, not without at least tweaking it first. At best this response-oriented approach is interesting and eye-opening; at worst, it is smug, denigrating, and utterly lacking in Christian love.

But Kierkegaard has been a poignant reminder that we really need is not new information at all, but inward transformation through the 2000-year-old message of Christianity. The words of the Bible don't help us if we keep them confined to neat theological systems out of a need for control via certainty and complete understanding; they must take root in us and grow into fruit we bear in our lives (Galatians 5:22-23). Kierkegaard's meditations are like watching this growing process in action as he takes the simple words of Jesus and Paul pertaining to love and powerfully demonstrates how they are to pervade every corner of our lives. Excessively focusing on Christian truths merely as information can lead us to forget that they are supposed to be arrows that pierce our very souls. When that happens, I'm thankful for authors like Kierkegaard to remind me of the truth.

April Fool! Or, how to spot bad exegesis

My Monday (April Fools' Day) post got some interesting responses. I was expecting general amusement at my series on Hell ending so unceremoniously with universalism, but a surprising number of people either were fooled or played along in case my change of mind was real. I don't mean to shame you, dear readers, but if you are taken in by a completely insincere post full of false teaching and Biblical mishandling and slapped together with no forethought in an hour and a half, that worries me. I haven't even read Love Wins and don't know any of the arguments Rob Bell used! In light of these responses, I thought I'd dissect my post as a case study in how to spot bad exegesis, since I understand its argument fairly well and can bad-mouth the author as freely as I like.

This is actually surprisingly simple. As I explained last time, the Greek word that is translated to "Hell" in the New Testament is "Gehenna", referring to a place of paganistic fiery child sacrifice outside Jerusalem. So Jesus warns in Luke 12:5: "But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him." What are some other characteristics of this Hell?

• Fiery (Matthew 5:22, 18:9, James 3:6)

• A place of destruction of both body and soul (Matthew 10:28)

• A place of darkness (Matthew 6:23)

Well, here we have a contradiction. Hell can't literally be a place of both fire and darkness. What is Jesus getting at? I think these speak to theological, not literal truths--darkness as the absence of God's light, and fire as the destruction of the soul as the body decays.

Like any convincing lie, my post started with truth. I built off my word study of Gehenna in the second post of the series, looking for what Jesus and other New Testament voices have to say about Hell. The first problem was that I was being deliberately selective here about what I stated about Hell. As my friend Mitchell pointed out, I ignored any verses that mention Hell as eternal (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 or Jude 13) or a place of punishment (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 again, Matthew 23:33).

I also make an (I would say) unfounded leap from verses that speak of Hell as a place of destruction to Hell being a place of destruction (as in annihilation) of the soul. The view that the Christian soul dies along with the body and is subsequently raised with it is called Christian mortalism and is interesting to look into, but I seriously mishandled it here. This becomes obvious in the following paragraphs.

Here's the crazy part. God isn't just destroying the soul--He's destroying it so He can give us new life. 1 Corinthians 15:50 says, "I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable." And in v53: "For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality."
In fact, earlier in v42-44, Paul says: "So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body." What he is saying applies just as much to the soul. It must be destroyed in order to live forever--to be "saved through the flames" (1 Corinthians 3:15). It isn't pleasant, but it's worth it in the end.
But what about their sin? Paul covers that too! Romans 7:1 says that "the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives". Dying frees us from the power of sin, and we can't die again. Christians have already died to their sin by being identified with Christ's death, but everyone else still dies in both body and soul, as Jesus says--so that they can be freed from sin. Psalm 32:8 reads, "I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you." This verse clearly isn't David speaking like the rest of the Psalm; it's a promise from God.

Here is where the nature of the post as a joke should become obvious. My assertion, "God isn't just destroying the soul--He's destroying it so He can give us new life" is completely unfounded. This was not a conclusion drawn inductively from scripture, it was me pre-emptively deciding the conclusion I wanted to draw about Hell, before turning to scripture to "justify" it. This "justification" then consists of turning to verses that sound like they could speak to my point and quoting them completely out of context. Paul is talking in 1 Corinthians 15 about the (bodily) resurrection of Christians, not of nonbelievers. In 3:15 he is not talking about salvation at all but about peoples' work building up the church.

It's interesting to note here that the New Testament writers themselves, especially Paul, are quite guilty of this kind of out-of-context quoting, which New Testament scholar Peter Enns notes extensively in his books. Some examples:

• Matthew 2:15 says Jesus fulfilled Hosea 11:1, which is talking about disobedient Israel.
• John 19:36 says Jesus "fulfilled" an obscure Passover regulation that originally had nothing to do with Him.
• Paul actually misquotes Isaiah 59:20, changing "The redeemer will come to Zion" to "The redeemer will come from Zion".
• The author of Hebrews similarly alters the text of Psalm 95:7-11 in 3:7-11, changing forty years from the duration of God's anger to the duration of His showing the Israelites His deeds, only to reference the Psalm as originally written a few verses later.

So we can't simply dismiss the kind of fast-and-loose handling of scripture I displayed as "unbiblical"; clearly it is, in fact, biblical to quote verses out of context to support your point and even alter them to suit your rhetorical ends, which I didn't even stoop to do in my post. So why are the Biblical authors right to do this while I am wrong? Because I think the apostles were inspired both by the Holy Spirit and by the realization of how Jesus Christ completely changes the meaning of God's history with His people. In addition to the original, Biblical-literal meaning of these verses, the apostles saw how they fit into the new "big picture" of Christ as lord, savior, and head of the church. Jesus breathes new life, new context, and new meaning into old words. In contrast, my hermeneutic was not based on my conception of Christ (as I usually hope it is) but on a deceptive, preconceived view of Hell.

The second part of the post used some similar tactics of deception as the first--starting with something true and agreeable and easing into a lie. Again, the rehabilitation-retribution divide is something I'm still wrestling with, and my conclusion might seem plausible even to me if I hadn't knowingly fabricated it.  My idea of how God progressively reveals Himself in new ways to His people is not without Biblical precedent (see the deeper view of the law presented in the New Testament, the increased focus on an eternal afterlife, the changing nature of the Old Covenant after the Babylonian exile, and of course Christ Himself), but clinging to the belief that "God and His word never change" is much simpler, so it's easy to miss this concept of progressive revelation and impose a greater unity on scripture than it really displays.

But, of course, it's also easy to take progressive revelation too far, as I did. The building of a structure or painting of a picture is a better metaphor for it than metamorphosis. Though we can expect to interpret and apply the Bible in new ways as culture and circumstances change, those new ways should expand on or illuminate what the Bible actually says, never contradict it. Like it or not, there is zero scriptural evidence for the Bible being like the Norwegian prison system, progressive though it may seem to us.

So, a few points for application (namely spotting bogus theology that people genuinely believe):

• Read critically. Be wary of trains of thought that seem good and correct but slide into untruth. This takes practice but is incredibly important, especially on the internet.
• When people quote scripture, think about how they're handling it. Look up the references and their context yourself. If something doesn't seem right, consult a friend or a commentary (I happily volunteer my own services for this).
• You've probably heard the anecdote of how bank tellers are trained to spot counterfeit bills by studying real ones intensively. While I'm pretty sure this isn't actually true, the metaphor still applies to theology. The best way to detect bad theology is to know what you believe and why, not just on the level of individual verses but in the story of the whole Bible. This is the focus on Biblical theology classes like at my church. It's a lifelong labor, but one that is supremely worthwhile--believe me.

Why I Write This Blog: From Understanding to Worship

As a rule, whenever one of my friends has a blog, I'll follow it. I feel better telling everyone to read my blog if I return the favor. But the thing about most of my friends' blogs is...they're inactive. The last post was several months or even years ago. Somehow my blog has bucked this trend and has managed to be more prolific than many of the big-shot bloggers I follow, even with a full-time job on the side, if not in post frequency then in raw word count. (Quantity, not quality) What is the reason for this? What, besides the fact that my thoughts have to end up somewhere, keeps me posting on this blog as if I were getting paid per word? Two things:

1. Helping God, the Bible, and the gospel make more sense to me so I can appreciate them more.
2. Helping God, the Bible, and the gospel make more sense to others so I can appreciate them more.

So often teaching and preaching draw a distinction between genuine spirituality and dry "intellectual exercise", a distinction I think is wholly unwarranted. Coming of age in a genuinely Biblical, God-and-gospel-centered church like Hope Community, I quickly internalized its message of the centrality of the gospel. But "the gospel" was, in my mind, still something of an abstraction. It seemed to me, at least partly, based on the teaching I got in college, that the point of the gospel was to share and spread the gospel--which is circular and ridiculous! Because my understanding of Christianity was shallow, I was living it weakly.

Maybe it's just part of my nature as a deep thinker, but I need to know very clearly and deeply what I believe and why for it to have an effect on my life. I believe it's not wrong to question God, at least with the right motives, because the more we understand of Him, the more we'll want to worship Him in our lives. This blog is my attempt to build that greater understanding, one post at a time, for myself and for others. I hope it helps you.

Recategorization

If you bother to look at the list of tags on this blog, you may notice some changes. After realizing I've been using "Faith" and "Theology" as catchall bins for every tangentially related post, I've gone through my archive of posts and retagged them with some more descriptive ones. My old posts may not be much to read, but they're easier to access now!

PSA 1

I was going to just tack this on to my previous post, but I so liked how it ended that it didn't feel right not to leave it where it stood. My journey through Romans is part of my larger revisiting of predestination, God's sovereignty, free will, and diverse other topics for a more thorough treatment. I almost feel like I could write a book about this subject if I could trick anyone into publishing it. While this work is going on, you can probably expect sparser (but hopefully still regular) updates on this and my other blog.

Request for Comments

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Even if I am somehow able to write 4000 words about predestination in a matter of hours, blogging is tough. Picking worthwhile subjects to blog about is a constant challenge, and even when I do, I am haunted by the fear that I'm merely posting them for my own gratification and not to edify others. (The desire of 1 Corinthians 13:1-2, 14:4, Ephesians 4:29, &c.) It was enough for me back when I started this blog over two years ago as a kind of pressure-relief valve for my brain, but not anymore. The challenges of 1 Corinthians 13:2 continues to haunt me.

What lies behind both these challenges, I think, is a lack of feedback. Looking over my list of posts, none of them have any comments. I'm not angry or trying to blame anyone for this, just earnestly wondering why this is. I sometimes feel like I'm posting in an echo chamber, making it easy to get carried away and yet have no impact. I could write a huge, convincing, well-worded, heavily researched (maybe) treatise expounding on my thoughts about free will and really enjoy it, but accomplish nothing of value. This sense of nonaccomplishment is even more acute for posts on subjects other than faith, which is part of why I do fewer of them.

I'd like to do something about this. I've lately been quite inspired by a blog run by one of my pastors, justcor, which is heavily focused on fostering and sharing conversation about faith, culture, the church, and leadership--a dialogue to my blog's monologue. I don't want my blog to be a lone voice, but a place for this kind of conversation. So now I open things up to you, the reader. What do you like about my blog? What would you like to see change? What would you like to read more of? What would you like to hear about and talk about? Am I just a glutton for the affirmation of my peers? Please, comment away!

New Name

Behold, the blag known as Fractal's Great Big Internet Book of Thoughts is no more! As I've been getting more and more serious about my blog as an output buffer for my brain, I've found that the old name's lack of seriousness increasingly clashed with my intentions. (Thank goodness I didn't go with my original idea: 'Thoughts, Ruminations, Ponderings, and Maunderings") No, I'm not going to go into a detailed explanation of the meanings of the new name (I count at least three), but some should be fairly obvious. Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, or otherwise thought about my blog! I'll try and get something more substantive up later...eventually...when I have time.

On my Other Blog

Yes, blogogrid, apparently I need two blogs even though I can barely maintain one. I've made a side blog for posts on music to avoid cluttering this one; it can be found here. I'll leave the posts on music that are already here as well as bring them over to the other one; any new posts on bands, albums, songs, etc. will go there. General ruminations on music or musings about high-end audio will remain here. Enjoy!

On the Redesign

Greetings, questionably existent audience! Just a quick update: I actually spent some time today and messed with the HTML to change the layout a bit. Everything is now wider, and the header has been updated. This is mostly so the formatting of my last post would match what I saw as I was writing it, but it's nice to have some space. Also, I changed a few colors to reinforce the greyscale aesthetic I have going and changed my blogo-name to a the more fitting 'Fractal'. Peace out, tell your friends!