MCR and Modest Mouse: The Black Parade 2026 Tour

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

This past week, I had the amazing opportunity to fulfill a childhood dream and see My Chemical Romance live in concert at Washington’s National’s Park. If that by itself wasn’t enough, opening the show was Modest Mouse, another favorite of my more youthful years. Both portions of the show were amazing and absolutely every second of heartache and gnashing of teeth it took to travel from my home in Vermont all the way to DC.

The opening set from Modest Mouse was excellent and a total throwback. Of course, they ended with Float On, easily their most recognizable number, but most of the rest of their performance was devoted to their more indie-rock tracks, including (I believe) two off their new album. Easily, my favorite at this show would have to be Dramamine, one of my favorite of their songs, closely followed by

And now, the feature presentation…

I shudder to use the term, ‘normie,’ but considering the kind of fan My Chemical Romance has managed to attract and keep over the years, I find myself largely unfamiliar with the fandom and the lore. Waiting for the opening set, I frantically read a Wikipedia page outlining a fantastical fictional story and circumstances for the band’s return, none of which I had been previously aware of. But where I was expecting a half-baked satirical plot, I instead found a rich setting and complex philosophical foundation atop which a previous album had been rebased upon.

A Fresh Start and Rumination on Frameworks

Thursday, August 13, 2026

In spite of the last three years, here I am, once again -- the internet at my fingertips, and the debt of my development decisions out of sight and out of mind. My brief stint with React has come to an end, and not a moment too soon.

My previous blog, known hereon as datastream.page, was, to put it lightly, a fucking mess. A solid chunk of it was written before I had even graduated from high school, and absolutely none of it was any good. My ever-present naïvety led to some... interesting choices architecturally that led to my creation of one of the worst things I would ever make. For starters, it was meant to run without a database; ironic for a website literally named 'Datastream.' Oops. Besides that, my infrastructure-averseness drove me to focus on web frameworks that were easily hosted without needing to maintain the actual underlying server. Turns out, that's not a thing. Oh well.

Either way, I was, at that point, getting into web development admidst a crossroads for web technologies; in one camp, the server-side rendering frameworks, and in the other, client-side rendering libraries. There was a sense across the field that the old way of building websites, the server-side systems, was effectively dead, and client-side rendering had gotten good enough that it made more sense to serve static files and let the browser do the real work. In the fullness of time, I have now come to realize that this is stupid and has its place, but blogs and other interactive pieces of the World Wide Web are absolutely not it.

More than anything, my bigger concern was one of technical mobility. I had already managed to port most of the website to Next.js, but the system as a whole was dependent exclusively on an unmaintained and unstable NPM package responsible for rendering Markdown as HTML. While I initially had underutilized the full feature-set offered by Markdown, by the time I was considering rewriting the blog components, I had written many posts fully utilizing all available features, and the thought of building my own, or maintaining the existing Markdown-to-HTML package was daunting and undesirable at the time. This was the first major problem, and one I continue to experience with every Node.js project I undertake. The second, however, is less easily ignored.

React likely needs no introduction. It’s the culmination of a decade of work, and counting, by technologies teams at Facebook. Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s a fantastic piece of software for what it does, but I am not content to have my web projects held up by a project that continues to be spearheaded by Meta. The license debacle about 10 years ago did not instill confidence in the direction of the project, and even though it’s now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation, I’m far more inclined to avoid Facebook’s JavaScript frameworks in favor of a longer-running, more stable language and framework. All that said, PHP is not immune from license flip-flops and framework instability. The reason I finally made the jump came down to PHP finally being relicensed under a BSD-3 clause license that is compatible with the GPL.