Absolutely loving this @vanityset adaptation of Brigador into a K-Shoot Mania challenge. Can’t stop watching. https://t.co/i9QIOgblxQ https://t.co/eIvizpeRa5

It's been a good year for Little Bandit. If you haven't heard his debut album Breakfast Alone, take some time to dive in and drown your sorrows in his sorrows. After that, steer over to his recently released EP entitled Christmas Alone. It's a trio of Christmas classics performed in the style that Little Bandit does well - dripping with heartache. The holidays aren't always upbeat and fun times. So, if you're feeling a bit melancholy, let Little Bandit be your musical backdrop. This version of (Have Yourself) A Merry Christmas has been hitting the spot for me.

Really enjoying this trailer for the forthcoming animated short film, Albatross Soup. Directed by Winnie Cheung, illustrated by Fiona Smyth and animated by Masa Nakamura, it looks to be a rather intense trip regarding one man's understandable guilt.

Aside from being a great album title, The Return of the Techno-Moral Panic is a great NY Magazine piece from John Herrman on our modern day fears of technology, specifically The Internet. These fears are not new and signal a continuing cycle of apprehension and trepidation towards the changing world around us. However, the article does a great job on explaining how this current climate is a bit different than our hesitations of the 1990's Internet. Here's a long quote from the piece that struck me:

The internet of the 1990s was a perfect canvas for alarmism: hard to define, easy to misunderstand, growing rapidly but not yet vital or even familiar to those most inclined to worry about it. But the internet of 2017 is fundamentally different: both a dominant medium and a medium dominated by a few companies. Earlier worries about the reliability of information online - anyone can publish anything! - addressed the emergence of an entire new category of networked communication, evoking anti-populist fears about the spread of television, radio and the printed word; today's concerns about, for example, state-sponsored disinformation double as criticism of the companies that have annexed our networks: primarily Facebook, Google and Twitter.

The flip side of these companies' new dominance is that, not unlike the first industrialists, they turn progress from something that manifests inevitably with the passage of time into something that is being done to us, for reasons that are out of our control but seem unnervingly and suddenly within someone else's. This is a profound reorientation, which might explain why current anxieties about the internet make for such unlikely bedfellows. Conservative parents with moral complaints about inappropriate videos surfacing in YouTube kids' channels find themselves inadvertently agreeing with leftist critiques of corporate power. Facebook's inability to deal in any meaningful way with misinformation on the platform has loosely aligned an elitist critique of democratized news with populist anger at a company led by Silicon Valley elites. There are right-wing anti-monopolists and left-wing anti-monopolists setting their sights on Google and Facebook, claiming dangerous censorship or lack of responsible moderation or, sometimes, both at once - people who want different things, and who have incompatible goals, but who have intuited the same core premise. In these instances, the only people left telling us not to worry - rhyming their responses with the vindicated defenders of the nascent internet - have suspiciously much to lose.

It's a long read and probably best not immersed in first thing in the morning, your brain cells should all be firing to fully consume its message. I found myself disagreeing with the apprehensions described as I read through the first half but certainly came around towards the end, sharing a concern that our current landscape seems to be happening to us and we need to find a way to wrangle it into a more beneficial place.

Scrubbies!

This is the only Golden Globe that matters. https://t.co/ODmXQcln7y

WILL WATCH (Jan 11th)

rad animated video

if you like shoegaze, you will love this. Highly recommend you pre-order.

Um this...https://t.co/bm1LsqidwJ

Thanks to this collaboration with Danny Jones (aka YASLY), I'm diving into the works of NY designer / artist Marleigh Alexandra. I'm not quite sure where to start but I do recommend checking out abstracts, illustrations, Tumblr inspiration and, of course, her official site.

I look forward to more YASLY collabs but, quite frankly, there's already so much goodness here to take in that it'd just be icing on the cake.

This may seem like a bit of an odd one but longtime friend of the blog Jessica Olsen recently launched a line of non-toxic, clean deodorant entitled Primary and it's worth a nod of recognition. Here's their philosophy:

We all want safe ingredients in our skincare products, but here's something we've learned along the way: A completely natural product isn't a guarantee of a safe product, and not all chemicals are the enemy.

Our focus is on creating the absolute best non-toxic, clean, and effective products. And while the majority of the ingredients we use are in fact natural, we don't necessarily identify as a "natural" brand. That's because rather than relying on vague, unregulated terms like "all-natural," "organic," "preservative-free," or "green," we want to be completely honest about our formulations so that you have the information you need to make an informed choice.

I'd say all of us probably need to evaluate the kind of skin and body care products we use in our lives and Primary seems like a quality alternative to whatever big box brand may be in our lives.

Lastly, and maybe this is burying the lede, but the Instagram account for the new brand is absolutely stunning. It's way more of a Mood Board of inspiring people, looks and lifestyles than an advertisement for the actual product and I find it absolutely inspiring to peruse. Hopefully you will too.

Everyone I know loves Krampus, the half-goat, half-demon creature that acts as the anti-Santa, stealing misbehaving children and punishing them for their bad deeds. It's one of those pagan rituals from Eastern Europe that has managed to persevere and found a fond place on the Internet. But with all that being said, I don't really know a lot about them.

Enter this educational post on Krampu in which the history of the creatures are fully explained and even extends into a Part 2 explaining their Celtic brethren, Perchten.

It's a lot of good info on the strange creatures and, if nothing else, serves as a fun place to see a load of creatively creepy costumes.

also featuring a cat on a synthesizer

It's a podcast, with me!

After writing about music for 20-years, Opus Zine compiles and releases new music. There's some @vanityset in there to check out.

Tfw your Lyft driver starts trying to tell you Pizzagate was real and Alex Jones is great, and you understand why having a stranger pick you up at your actual house is a bad idea.

Michael Eades of @records_yk returns to The Music Digest featuring candy, beer, Squad Candy, Peachtea, and @LASalami https://t.co/KRfcMIgiYx

Me and @subinev were glad to have @yewknee in for a semi-surprise visit to The Music Digest! ???????? https://t.co/hNQD8K8vcy

can we get Jurassic World 2 added to this?