Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify?
The answer involves a remarkable — and lucrative, and ridiculous — scheme to game the way we find music today.
Saved (Public Feed)
Cong Burn Strokes
iOS and desktop music synthesizer, drum machine, etc.
'American Fiction' And The Wet Eyes Of The Sentimentalist | Defector
We tell ourselves stories to feed our delusions. It’s an ugly world out there, and so many Americans prefer the easy way out. We genuflect to the guru and the influencer; we admire the charlatans who can captivate a crowd and turn a quick buck. We prefer the CliffsNotes to the book, and all the […]
Any real art finds its level by meeting humans and life on their own terms. In place of that sort of probing, American Fiction gives you a movie about angst and love, a fantasy of good negro life so mired in sentiment it has no politic but the simplest judgment of the most obvious racism we can all agree is bad, and no depth outside of what we all need is more love in our lives. Implicit in a film like this—as with so much of the cinema, literature, and non-fiction by and about black people that has emerged post-George Floyd—is a participation trophy for the white, liberal audience: Kudos to you for watching; go tell a friend. Assuage your guilt for the price of a ticket; you're the good guys, after all.
Cycling Fallacies
Puncturing common misconceptions about cycling and infrastructure
Moo Card Player - Hicks.design
A journal post about my MOO card music player setup, using square business cards and NFC tags to play digital music with more physicality (quicker too!)
Freebies | Indieground.net
Free fonts, a lot of 70s- and 80s-inspired retro here.
Pitchfork’s Importance Shouldn’t Be Underrated - The Atlantic
archived 19 Jan 2024 01:45:41 UTC
Saying you’re a Pitchfork person can be mistaken for saying you take its opinions as your own, when ideally it just means that you want a discerning companion for making your own discoveries and judgments.
Pitchfork’s absorption into GQ is a travesty for music media – and musicians | Laura Snapes
Perfect summary.
It is bleak on so many levels, first and foremost the job losses during a straitened time for media. Pitchfork was one of the last stable music outlets going – where else are the former staff, and the site’s hundreds of freelancers, meant to work now?
Incorporating Pitchfork into a men’s magazine also cements perceptions that music is a male leisure pursuit, and undermines the fact that it was women and non-binary writers – Lindsay Zoladz, Jenn Pelly, Carrie Battan, Amanda Petrusich, Sasha Geffen, Jill Mapes, Doreen St Félix, Hazel Cills; the fearless editing of Jessica Hopper and then the most recent editor-in-chief Puja Patel, to name but a handful – who transformed the website in the 2010s. It also suggests that music is just another facet of a consumer lifestyle, not a distinct art form that connects niche communities worthy of close reading, documentation and, when warranted, investigation.
The World’s Most Popular Painter Sent His Followers After Me Because He Didn’t Like a Review of His Work. Here’s What I Learned | Artnet News
Ben Davis on the fallout from his critical review of Devon Rodriguez's "Underground," and what it says about "parasocial aesthetics."
But it seems to me that the majority of Rodriguez’s fans are most engaged by his appealing social-media persona, not his actual artworks. If this is the case, then it’s logical to think that it changes how criticism is perceived. His followers feel like I am attacking a person they like, not judging artworks or analyzing a media phenomenon. I think that explains the character of the reaction, which has a level of raw personal anger completely out of joint with what I wrote in my article.
It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks.
Exploring the reasons why we no longer have web designers.
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development
Is Bandcamp as We Know It Over?
Following its acquisition by the music licensing company Songtradr, layoffs spell trouble at the beloved online music platform.
The Lemon Of Pink Turns 20
The Lemon Of Pink Turns 20 https://bit.ly/48JZU7q
The Last Refuge
Regarding Rosemary Kirstein's 'Steerswoman' books.
The Body (Often) Tells the Truth
When your frustrated gestures and missteps and bodily distress signals are read as a sign of your incompetence, not a problem with the world, you’re often being done an injustice
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Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community is shattering
How Discogs built — and broke — a community of diehard music fans and sellers.
You Think You're Not That Ambitious. Are You Dead Wrong About That?
The surest sign that you’re incredibly ambitious is a complete and total lack of ambition on all fronts.
Being an overachieving perfectionist becomes worse and worse over the years, in other words, because it turns every source of joy into a source of self-hatred and failure. Aiming for perfect, aiming to be the best, sorting through data to see who’s better, setting impossible goals for yourself: These are poisonous habits that destroy your relationship to your own body, block you from the small pleasures of your day, and leach the natural optimism from your cells.
Every time you check in with yourself, you help yourself. Every time you ignore an old, warped story about what your sensations and feelings mean, you improve your connection to your body. It sounds obvious, of course! But it’s exactly what the perfectionist overachiever — even the one hiding inside that aging stoner on the couch playing Assassin’s Creed for the third hour in a row — doesn’t remember to do. PERFECTIONISTS IGNORE THEIR BODIES, EMOTIONS, AND SENSATIONS. SECRETLY AMBITIOUS SLACKERS IGNORE THEIR TRUEST DESIRES AND PASSIONS.
Leaving the keyboard that plays itself down by the river between 2:30 and 3:30 AM August 3rd 2017, by id m theft able
1 track album
I found a keyboard at the dump that when turned on plays itself. The occasional faux piano notes sound at seemingly random pitches and dynamics, usually with a fair amount of space in between. It seems to be struggling to stay on, the LED blinks and flashes the whole time and notes often abruptly cut out as it resets itself. It's been my favorite thing to listen to this week.
So, naturally, between about 2:30 and 3:30 that morning I took this keyboard down back of my place by the river, turned it on and left it to play along with the frogs, mosquitoes, mysterious mammals, insects and passing cars.
Airline Close Calls Happen Far More Often Than Previously Known
Near misses involving U.S. commercial airlines happen on average multiple times a week, a New York Times investigation found.
But the most acute challenge, The Times found, is that the nation’s air traffic control facilities are chronically understaffed. While the lack of controllers is no secret — the Biden administration is seeking funding to hire and train more — the shortages are more severe and are leading to more dangerous situations than previously known.
As of May, only three of the 313 air traffic facilities nationwide had enough controllers to meet targets set by the F.A.A. and the union representing controllers, The Times found. Many controllers are required to work six-day weeks and a schedule so fatiguing that multiple federal agencies have warned that it can impede controllers’ abilities to do their jobs properly.
The roots of the current staffing shortage date to the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration replaced thousands of controllers who were on strike. Since then, there have been waves of departures as controllers become eligible for retirement. The F.A.A. has struggled to keep pace.During the pandemic, many controllers left, and the F.A.A. slowed the pace of training new ones because of health restrictions. The staffing shortage became a crisis.
Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui? | Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat
Big corporations, golf courses and hotels have been taking water from locals for years. Now the fire may result in even more devastating water theft
Hawaii is indeed in an emergency, but it needs emergency proclamations that operationalize aloha ʻāina, not ones that push it aside by opportunistically suspending inalienable water laws and dismissing diligent public servants. What this governor does next will determine if Maui Komohana will remain a space for Indigenous and other local families like the Palakikos, or if companies like WML and its affluent customers are empowered to complete their takeover of land and water in west Maui.
The 2023 Audubon Photography Awards: The Top 100
Revel in the staggering beauty and surprising behaviors featured in this gallery of our favorite images. Also check out the story behind each shot.
✨pop🎈idol✨ on cohost
Reflecting on it, the reason I think the OceanGate situation has become such a flashpoint for anger is because it's such a perfect microcosm of the problem with everything right now. Decisions are not made based on safety, reasonable caution, or concern for human life. Every decision is instead made from a default assumption of 'what if the bad thing just DIDN'T happen?' We are given pie-in-the-sky promises and sizzle reels and an endless PR hype-cycle for every new innovation and inevitably it fails to work, harms people, and then is maybe barely apologized for before the next bad idea comes down the pike. OceanGate's underengineered, undercooked, doomed submarine isn't merely a metaphor for the hubris of the wealthy, it is a scale model of the way the wealthy dictate our reality. All consequences can be ignored, all blowback can be forestalled, let the end-user eat the cost.
I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.
I am not angry because the submarine was badly-made. I am angry because I live in a vastly larger pressure vessel being managed and maintained by the exact same people.
Egregore
Great short story/creepypasta on a meme literally taking on a life of its own.
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Across the Spider-Verse’s greatest feat is the way it takes Spider-Man’s fandom to task
Across the Spider-Verse gets surprisingly frank about Spider-Man’s fandom.
‘The Things’ by Peter Watts
A short story written from the perspective of the alien in the film ‘The Thing.’
Concert Review: Sunset Rubdown - Spectrum Culture
Krug played and sang as if he would never have the chance to visit these songs again. He spent part of the show at the keyboard, precariously perched on a stool with one foot under him and another balanced on the monitor. Other times, he played the guitar. By the show’s midpoint he was drenched with sweat, hair hanging over his face.
mmm.page — Dead Simple, Drag & Drop Websites
Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter.
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AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google
Google has to make some big decisions about fair use, YouTube, and building AI tools of its own.
YouTube only continues to exist because of a delicate dance that keeps rightsholders happy and the music industry paid, but the future of Google itself is a bet on an expansive interpretation of copyright law that every creative industry from music to movies to news hates and will fight to the death. Because it is death: generative AI tools promise to completely upend the market for almost all commodity creative work, and these companies are not required to sit back and let it happen.
John Holdun: Iterative Disciplines
I think specialization is detrimental to building websites.
Eraser-off
One of the most awesome things about pencils is the ability to erase what you’ve written or drawn and change it. But which eraser works best?
My expectation, when I tested these, was that one eraser would be a clear winner, and if I had to pick one, then I would choose the Staedtler Mars Plastic. But each of these erasers performed better with some pencils than others.
There’s one other aspect of erasers that I really like. Its the feel of it in my hand. One of the gentlemen on Erasable (I think it was Andy but I can’t remember at the moment) mentioned the Black Pearl as a “worry stone” — an object to hold in your hand while thinking and that is why I love the Black Pearl. I often find that I press it into the palm of my hand like a little river stone while I’m writing. Its strangely soothing.