Off the record
A big welcome to Austin and Brandon, who signed up yesterday! 👋
Back to the music!
Back in the undergrad hostel, in 2008, we had a not-so-secret illegal LAN network. It involved meters of cable tossed out of windows and discreet holes made in the wire mesh to accommodate their entry.
The warden objected at first when he saw the cables, but the geniuses on the third floor convinced him that we were all computer science students and we needed this for sharing code and doing assignments.
The warden had this look of suspicion about him, so a few of us went to the library the next day, borrowed a couple of coding books, and started walking around the halls, in our shorts, the books under our arms. We were such studious bastards. 😏
The 2 am sessions of Counterstrike: Condition Zero aside, a lot of stuff was shared on the LAN: assignments, textbooks, anime, and of course, music. A few of the geniuses were Christians and so we had a healthy selection of gospel on the folders.
I’m an atheist, but curiosity got the better of me. And that’s how I discovered Fireflight, a Christian rock band out of Florida. Unbreakable is off their third studio album. The lyrics aren’t preachy: they have an aura of positivity and grit.
From a heavy rock perspective, reviewers have compared Fireflight to other female-fronted bands like Evanescence and Paramore, but I think that’s an apples-to-oranges argument. Fireflight also has more mellow and intimate tracks such as You Gave Me a Promise.
If there’s anything you should have known by now is that I discover music through unconventional sources. There’s a thrill when you find a track that isn’t pushed in front of you by an algorithm. And the memory of the thrill lasts for 14 years. Trust me.
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Nikhil. 💖
Wow! That one was a surprise. Nice!
Great song. Your story reminds me of an eBook I read on my Palm V many years ago about people who created a WiFi grid network that grew into an entire neighborhood and shortchanged the ISP of hundreds of subscribers.